“Come…to my senses?” Nick choked. “We’re talking about my senses here?” He started to wipe at his eyes with his T-shirt sleeve. “You let us think you were dying. I can’t believe this.”

He turned to hide his face from them and started tugging at his hair. “We came back because you were fucking dying,” he repeated.

“Language,” Richard snapped. Eleanor might have been fine, but Richard looked like he was about to have a rage aneurysm.

“I cannot believe you faked a heart attack to call us to heel,” Nick spat over his shoulder.

“I did no such thing,” Eleanor said. “There was…a flutter. Fortunately, the doctors believe it’s not significant. They’ll sort out my pharmaceutical cocktail and I’ll be back to work.” She shrugged. “Perhaps my condition may have been exaggerated to you, but I cannot control that.”

“That’s bollocks and you know it,” Nick said, turning back to face them.

“What’s ‘bollocks’ is you two running off like petulant children,” Richard snarled.

“This entire exercise was unnecessary,” Eleanor said. “Honestly, Nicholas. Wigtown?” She said the word as if it hurt the inside of her mouth.

“And to think, we were about to come back of our own accord,” Nick said. “Now I can’t fathom why.”

Eleanor raised one penciled brow. “I know Richard didn’t raise you to think abdication of duty was acceptable,” she said. “Frederick has been doing yeoman’s work in your absence.”

Her eyes went to another corner of the room. It was only when I followed her gaze that I noticed another person had been sitting there the whole time, tucked in a tufted leather wing chair as if he wished to disappear into it.

Freddie.

I had missed him, but precisely how much didn’t hit me until I saw his face. His thicket of red-brown hair was still barely this side of unkempt, and he had the rosy cheeks of a very pale person who’d been spending more time than usual outside. His roguish handsomeness was still potent—doubly impressive because he was dressed in an outfit that matched Richard’s exactly: green hunting jacket, sturdy loafers, socks over trousers. I wanted to run over and hug him, but if he had any urge to approach us, he was suppressing it, so I did, too.

Nick turned and they looked at each other for a beat longer than seemed natural. “You could’ve warned us,” Nick finally said.

“I assumed you’d chucked your phone, since you never used it,” Freddie said airily.

“This was beneath you all,” Nick said, to Richard this time, as if it were easier to blame the person he already disliked the most.

“You can hardly get on your high horse about false pretenses when you’ve been living under them for the past two months,” Richard said. “This farce ends today. Start acting like a man and do your duty by the rest of this family.”

“You cannot expect us to snap back to business as usual after all this,” Nick said.