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“Gregory….”

“Ronan.” He gave a short laugh, without much humor in it. “You need not look at me like that. I promise you there is nothing to be alarmed about, I am simply doing what I should have done years ago.”

“And what is that?”

He did not answer. He turned away and went to the window, and stood with his back to the room.

Ronan watched him. Gregory could feel it between his shoulder blades. In all their acquaintance Ronan had never once pushed for answers.

It was the way that their friendship worked.

They didn’t ask each other about what the other wasn’t comfortable talking about. Call it respect, or a form of brotherhood that worked for them.

But he was beginning to sense that Ronan was about to take a different strategy with him.

“Can you sit down with me for a moment?”

“I’m not used to you being this serious,” Gregory replied but then did as was told. The tiredness was already taking over his body, all it needed was a moment where his defenses were down.

Ronan took a moment to speak, and Gregory knew that he was contemplating on what the right words to say were.

“I am worried about you.”

Gregory tried to crack a smile but it seemed like an impossible task.

“You need not be.”

“I thought when you married her, you had begun to mend but now you’ve gone back to your familiar ways. I don’t think that this is right.”

Gregory let out a sigh, and clenched his jaw. “It is not what you think.”

“She must be worried sick, Gregory. Have you thought of that? She sits in that house with a baby and a great deal of grief that is not her own, and her husband will not so much as eat dinner with her.”

“I know.”

“Then why...”

“Because it is necessary.” It came out more sharply than he had intended. Gregory turned, and Ronan went quiet. There was nothing careless in it, nothing arch. It was raw and set and very tired. “There is something I must do, and I must do it alone. If she is near me while I do it, it will touch her. I will not have that. Space and distance, that is what she needs, from me, from all of it, until it is done. It is best for her.”

“Even if it is killing me….” he added after a moment.

Ronan opened his mouth. But Gregory was not looking at him at all. He was staring at nothing, at the floor, at the space between them, with his lips slightly parted.

He had said it without thinking.

It was not guilt that kept him awake, nor the fear of failing her. Those were only the outer walls. Under them, in the deep place, there was something else. He had wanted her to be safe, to be happy, and he had wanted, above all, to keep her from the shadow he carried. He had called it but it was…

It was love. He was in love with his wife.

He must have loved her for weeks, might have loved her from the night she stood in his library with a stranger’s child in her arms, refusing to hand him back.

“Gregory?” said Ronan. “You have gone rather white.”

“I have simply...” He drew a long breath, and let it go. He picked up his foil from the bench, and for a moment he stood turning it slowly in his fingers, looking at the way the light ran down the blade.

Because if it was true, then it was worse. It was so much worse. It meant everything he did now mattered a hundred times more, and everything he could lose was in that house, waiting for him behind a door.

“I have simply remembered what I am about,” he said, quite gently. “Take up your foil, Ronan. Please. Guard.”