Page 32 of Obsession: The Unspoken Sin
Alice’s heart scissored.
“Why do you think I’m sad, Poppet?” Alice asked softly. Even as she asked that question, Alice silently railed at herself for having failed to shield her daughter from Alice’s own sorrow. She tweaked Laurel’s pert nose. “I haven’t cried, have I?”
Instead of giggling as she usually did, Laurel’s too-serious expression remained.
“You don’t smile. You aren’t laughing. Y-You don’t finish your a-art.” Of all the warning signs mentioned, the latter appeared to trouble Laurel the most. Her fuller lower lip trembled. “You miss him.”
Alice didn’t move. “Miss who?” she asked carefully. Surely her daughter couldn’t have noticed—
“Laurence,” Laurel said. “He is your friend, and now he is gone. I miss him too. I only played with him once. You played with him a lot. I want more time with him too.” A pout lined Laurel’s lilting voice.
“Yes, I do miss him,” Alice confessed. Her daughter, at the very least, deserved that.
“Did he go away?” Laurel asked. The worry creasing her high little brow deepened. “Can’t we see him again?”
If only Alice could…
But you can, a voice of reason echoed in her head.
Not for the first time since the note had arrived two days earlier, Alice looked at the last letter he’d sent. She only knew it was the last letter because the guard who’d returned with it had done so under instructions from the Earl of Denbigh, informing Alice there’d be no further. But that if she could just hold onto this one and open it, open it when the time felt right, or if she wished to burn it, she was free to do so. He just asked that she not return it, and she considered reading it at her own time.
“Did you quarrel, Mama?”
Again, Alice’s heart squeezed. Would she refer to her last exchange with Laurence as a fight? Could it be truly considered so when he’d asked, naypleaded, for her to hear him out, and she’d allowed Lord Dynevor to—
I will not feel guilty. I will not feel guilty. I will—
Except it wasn’t about feeling guilty. She just felt…Bloodyawful. It was as though, when he’d left, she pricked her heart with the tip of a blade and continued to turn the hilt, inflicting greater pain and suffering upon herself.
“Mama?”
Alice found her voice. “We didn’t raise our voices or shout.”
It was important that her daughter understood that. Laurence had come here with the most well-meaning of intentions. Did she truly believe his feelings and declarations had been feigned, a product of his sacrificing himself to bring her back home? When in so doing, it would have brought shame to him and his family if she were linked to him in any way?
“I’ve wanted you forever,”he’d insisted.
All this time, he’d felt the same way she had?
“I want a future with you.”
Alice’s brother had asked Laurence to bring her back home; but that did not mean a man of Laurence’s convictions would commit to a future with her because ofWynn.
Alice set her brush down and sank to the floor, where she sat with her knees in a triangle and her ankles crossed. She patted the floor, and Laurel followed suit.
Her daughter stared with wide, expectant eyes, waiting the way she might for her bedtime tale.
“Laurence came here because he wants me to go—”Home.
It seemed wrong to refer to a place where Laurel had never been and where she’d never resided with Alice as a home.
“Where does he want you to go?” Laurel asked.
“To see family whom, I haven’t seen in a long time—family you’ve never yet met.”
Laurel’s eyes flared. “Oh, are we? Are we?” She proceeded to jump up and down, clapping exuberantly. “Please,say yes.”
As soon as her unvarnished child’s enthusiasm peeked out, a frown was there to steal its place.
