Would You Like a Rose

Chapter 05 - Nicholas Knows

Nicholas Harland had been Victoria's husband for fourteen years, which was long enough to understand several things about his wife, including the specific quality of silence she produced when she was thinking about something she hadn't yet decided how to share with him.

He'd noticed it at dinner the previous evening, the silence beneath her ordinary dinner table conversation, the precise way she'd held her fork and said correct things about his day and poured a second glass of wine without the usual questioning glance that asked if he wanted one too.

He noticed it again at breakfast, and said nothing, because Nicholas Harland had also learned, across fourteen years, the specific cost of asking the wrong question at the wrong moment.

It was his assistant who finally brought him information he'd been hoping not to receive.

"Mrs. Harland had an unscheduled meeting yesterday afternoon," the assistant told him. "In the library, with two people. A woman and a child. They arrived through the service entrance."

Nicholas set his coffee down.

"Do you have a description of the woman," he asked.

His assistant described her, and Nicholas felt the specific, cold sensation of something he'd spent a considerable amount of effort avoiding coming finally, completely into focus.

He waited until Victoria had left for her morning appointment before going to the library. It was a habit he disliked in himself, the searching, the checking, but he'd maintained it for eleven years because the alternative, the specific thing he'd been preventing, was considerably worse for everyone.

He opened the center desk drawer.

The birth certificate was there, exactly as he'd known it would be eventually. He'd known it would be there someday because he'd known Clara Alcott existed for eleven years, and he'd known for eleven years that the kind of patience she'd displayed would eventually, against all reasonable probability, produce exactly this result.

He'd told himself, for eleven years, that he was protecting Victoria. Protecting the marriage. Protecting the estate from the kind of contested inheritance claim that would have tied up the Rosewood family's considerable assets in litigation for years and cost Victoria, who was the rightful heir to everything through entirely legitimate succession, enormous quantities of both money and peace.

He'd told himself that the $40,000 annual payment he'd been quietly routing to an attorney in Pittsburgh, in exchange for a set of legal complications that had made it substantially harder for Clara Alcott to pursue any formal claim, was simply pragmatic protection.

He'd told himself this every year for eleven years, and on some years he'd believed it more than others.

He was not currently believing it very much.

He sat down at Victoria's desk and looked at the birth certificate and thought about his options, which had narrowed considerably from what they'd been this time yesterday.

He could tell Victoria the truth, which would mean explaining eleven years of quiet, systematic interference in her sister's ability to reach her. He could continue saying nothing, which was no longer viable since Victoria clearly already had the document. He could attempt some version of the narrative he'd been maintaining for eleven years, the one in which the Rosewood family's legal arrangements had simply made the adoption record complicated to trace, without mentioning his own rather active role in maintaining those complications.

He put the birth certificate back exactly where he'd found it, closed the drawer, and went to pour himself another cup of coffee, because what he was primarily trying to do right now was delay, by approximately twenty minutes, the moment when he had to choose which of these options he was actually going to live with.

Victoria came home three hours later and found him in the library, which was not where he usually was in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, and the specific quality of his presence in that room told her everything she needed to know.

She stood in the doorway.

"You already knew," she said. It was not a question.

Nicholas looked at his hands. "Victoria—"

"How long," she said.

He looked up at her face, and saw in it the specific, dangerous stillness that he recognized as her most careful, most controlled form of fury, the one that didn't shout or throw things but simply went very, very quiet in a way that suggested the person it was directed at should choose their next words with the kind of precision usually reserved for document negotiation.

"Eleven years," he said.