said desperately. “I’m just me, Sol, and you’re ready to let me go because you think I’ll be all right, but I need you.”
“You did all right without me in France,” he said, still struggling to accept this new vision of the world.
“You did all right, too.”
And as awful as the last year and a half had been, Solomon realized abruptly that Elijah was right. Even if his brother had never come back—life would have gone on, somehow. He could even have been happy. Serena had shown him that it was possible.
Elijah was still speaking. “In books they always say, ‘Without you it was as if someone had cut off my arm.’ Sol, without you I felt like someone had sawed open my skull and ripped out half my brain. But I had to get the hell out of here. I had to stop being afraid all the time. I had to be alone. Paris was so different from Shropshire—there were clubs full of people like me, and I was helping England, and I was good at it. All that careful acting, all those years, had just been practice. I felt right, suddenly. But I missed you.”
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I should have told you I was alive. I told myself you would know so I wouldn’t have to admit I was taking the coward’s way out.”
“We failed each other,” Solomon said, and it felt like absolution. He smiled. “So we’re all right now?”
Elijah smiled back. “We’re all right now.”
After a moment, Solomon asked, “When are you leaving for France?”
Elijah looked up guiltily. “As soon as I can. And—I never thanked you—”
“You don’t have to.”
“I think I do. You shouldn’t have done it, but if I had walked into that room and seen his brains all over the wall—” Elijah swallowed.
“I know.”
“I may be back very soon. He may not want me anymore.”
Solomon snorted. “Doing it a little too brown, Li. When a man’s final thought before he blows his brains out is to say what will make you feel best about driving him to it, he wants you.”
Elijah looked up quickly. “It wasn’t really his final thought, was it?”
Solomon assumed a romantic attitude. “‘Please, tell him I’”—he sniffled and wiped away an imaginary tear with a dramatic forefinger—“‘tell him I never loved him. Tell him I knew all along. Tell him I was a blackhearted rogue. Oh, Elijah, Elijah!’”
Elijah reached over and punched him in the shoulder, but he was beaming. “So—you think he’ll take me back?”
“He’d better, or I’ll be facing him at twenty paces for trifling with my brother.”
“I thought you didn’t approve of dueling.”
“Well, no sense being slavish about it,” Solomon replied airily.
Elijah laughed. “Thanks, Sol.” He flashed a wicked grin. “So, you and Serena?”
Solomon swallowed hard and looked away, his relief fading. “I don’t know.” And finally, he began to tell his brother the whole story.
“I’m glad Solomon brought you,” Mrs. Hathaway told Serena as they were in the kitchen preparing for dinner on Saturday.
Serena set down the spoons with a clatter. “How can you be? He oughtn’t to have done it.”
Mrs. Hathaway’s eyebrows rose. “Well, perhaps it was a little thoughtless of him. It hasn’t been a very comfortable visit for you, has it?” She sighed. “I hope we haven’t given you a disgust of us.”
No, it hadn’t been a comfortable visit. True to his word, in the day and a half since their arrival Solomon had—not ignored her, never that, but there had been no more intimate conversations. He hadn’t flirted. He’d watched her, that was all. His private communications and whispered asides had been saved for Elijah, and while she was glad matters were mended between them, she missed him dreadfully already. And even the new distance between them didn’t spare her from Mr. Hathaway’s evident skepticism or his attempts to keep Susannah from spending too much time in her company.
The worst of it was that she couldn’t even long for the visit to be over, because when it was, they would go back to London and Solomon would leave—unless she asked him to stay. And how could she do that?
“Of course you haven’t,” she said. “That wasn’t what I meant at all. Solomon loves you and I don’t want—he’ll quarrel with his father and I told him he couldn’t bring me here even if you’re all being very kind ignoring my awful reputation—” Her voice was rising alarmingly; she snapped her mouth shut and stood