Arnaud shifted from foot to foot.
Father shook his head. “For two years Winter and I have watched, waiting to see if the fissure would be healed or grow into a chasm. Frankly, I am amazed you have gone this long without having it out about Peggy.”
Without moving his gaze from Father, Arnaud reached over to punch Thad in the arm. “We spoke of her often enough, but if ever I tried to draw him out on my feelings over him marrying her, he would ignore me.”
Rather than hit him back, Thad slid a step away. “Draw me out? Bait me, you mean. And I did not want to fight with you over her.”
“Maybe I needed you to. Has that never occurred to you? You, who can always tell what everyone else needs?”
“Did it help?” Thad took another step away, his mind screaming that it was time to leave. Time to escape this conversation before he lost his brother yet again—forever this time. “Do you feel better now for having accused me of seducing her, for insinuating I was wrong for marrying her, and then wrong for not loving her as you did?”
Arnaud didn’t budge. “You did not avoid the topic because you thought it best for me. You avoided it because you did not want to face what you did. Because deep down you felt you betrayed me by marrying her.”
He took another step toward the door. “I did not.”
“Face it, Thad. You could as easily have sent her and Jacques to your parents, to Amelia, to Philly. Any one of them would have taken them in. But it had to be you. It always has to be you who swoops in to save the day.”
He could only shake his head.
“And now you are doing the same thing with Miss Fairchild.”
Enough. “You, of all people, should understand that I love her. You, who still love Peggy to the depths of your soul.” He ate up the distance to the door and paused at the threshold to face Arnaud again. “The problem is that you don’t trust me. You haven’t trusted me since you came home.”
Not waiting for a response, he ducked his way out of the room and strode down the hall. He grabbed his hat as he charged out into the warm twilight.
His head hurt. His chest ached. And he hadn’t even the satisfaction of slamming the door behind him, as Father’s foot stopped it. Thad opened his legs to their full length to put space between him and the man who always saw far too much.
“I will run to keep up if I must, son, but it would be the kind thing to spare my aging joints and wait for me.”
“If you intend to lecture me, Professor, stay home.” But he held up at the gate.
Father approached with that infuriating, knowing smirk that had plagued the family for decades. “Where are we going?”
Thad shrugged and led the way to the street. “Are you going to take his side?”
Father chuckled. “Probably, to you. And then when I talk with him later, I will take yours.”
“Ever the devil’s advocate.”
“Ever the father who wants his children, even the one not born of his flesh, to have no rifts between them.”
“’Tisn’t a rift.” It couldn’t be. Rifts were permanent. “’Tis only a…strain.”
Father’s silence deafened him. And it stretched on and on until they turned the corner and headed, as Thad’s feet always did, toward the bay. At which point the elder man finally spoke, so softly that Thad could scarcely hear him over a wagon rattling by. “You may have chosen the sea above the classroom, but I taught you how to examine an argument. Have you done so here? Have you paused to entertain the notion that Alain may be right about your motives with Peggy?”
Thad shouldn’t have waited for his father to catch up. “I could not have sent her to Amelia. She had just had the twins and her hands were full. Philly had lost her babe, and Grandmama Caro had just moved to Maryland. You were having troubles at the college—”
“But family has always come first, and Peggy and Jack were family. You know any one of us would have helped.”
“Yes, but…” He could hear Arnaud’s accusation ringing in his ears, that it must always be him that saved the day. But it wasn’t that. “I had nothing to put aside. Nothing to juggle. I was the one Lane with no obligations, no family of his own…and I had already been helping so much. Jack…I was his father. The only one he had.”
Father sighed and followed him when he turned down a random, shadowed alley. “Your grandfather Hampton once gave your mother an ultimatum. Do you remember the story? She must marry by July or be tossed to the streets. I had been courting her for six months and had yet to break through her wall, and I had no idea she was in such dire straits. She stood there, the night when she had run out of time, and kept that terrible secret to herself. Because she thought if she told me, I would marry her in an instant.”