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He paused, lowered his hand. Forced a laugh he didn’t feel. “What do you mean?”

“I have no gift, no special sight. There is none of my grandparents’ ability in me. It was all an act.”

He huffed and shook his head. “Another attempt to scare me off. I understand⁠—”

“You don’t!” She pointed at the journal in his valise, beside the paper with Lord Dalton’s signature scrawled across the bottom. “That letter is about the legislation in Parliament, isn’t it? The one that will jail mediums?”

He nodded dumbly. He wouldn’t be dishonest, not now.

She swiped at her cheek roughly. “I’m happy for you. With my journal, you won the wager. My deepest congratulations.”

His chest was cracking open, his ribs splitting through his skin. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t pretend to be a fool,” she drawled. “It’s beneath you. You saw the schematics and designs, drawn by my hand. Instructions on how to fake a haunting. The perfect proof.” She shook her head with a broken laugh. “And I left it here for you before taking you to bed. How clever you were to lure me back here⁠—”

He spun and grabbed the journal from his belongings, shoved it towards her. “I would never betray you that way. That wasn’t my intention, and you know it. How can you doubt my word?”

“Because we’ve been lying to each other from the start!” Her words echoed through the room, through his heart, and he pressed his eyes shut for a long moment.

He turned the accusation over in his mind, searching for evidence to contradict it. He’d fallen in love with a woman who’d devoted her entire life to lying to others, and now she’d admitted to it, handed him the rope to hang her at the gallows. What if this was just another performance, another charade, and he was the fool who had fallen for it?

He couldn’t believe that was true, but he couldn’t prove it either. And if the last three days had taught him nothing else, it was that appearances couldn’t be trusted.

“Tell me the truth now,” he managed, the words scraped from the inside of his chest where his heart still ached for her. “Do you truly want me to go?”

He knew what she was going to say; perhaps he had absorbed some of her prescient ability. “You have everything you need, Lord Valebrook. There’s no reason for you to stay.”

CHAPTER 24

Bridget stormed into the turret, dragging her ungainly carpetbag behind her. She’d unearthed the bag from beneath her bed, dislodging the decades of dust that had gathered in the time since she’d arrived at the manor as a lonely and grief-stricken child. Then, the bag had been stuffed with the measly belongings someone had collected from the wreckage. She hadn’t needed a traveling bag since, as she’d never left the manor.

She wasn’t leaving now. Merely reorganizing and protecting her grandfather’s legacy.

Glass crunched beneath her boots as she entered; the aftermath of her disastrous summoning was evident in the overturned candles and scattered papers on the floor. The vase she’d given her grandfather years ago lay sideways on his desk, desiccated flower petals surrounding it in a ghostly halo.

“Hello, Pop.” She dropped the bag on the carpet, obscuring the length of velvet. “I’ve come to collect some things. Mr. Keenan has been at me to clean your study, and now is the time!” She chased the statement with a forced laugh and gathered a stack of his journals from the desk, dropping them inside the open bag with a thud.

“You could always see the good in people,” she continued, “but that was difficult for me. I didn’t want to trust. I still don’t.” Another book went into the bag, and several pens with his fingerprints smudged on the lacquer.

She heaved a sigh. A confession wasn’t truly necessary, as he’d likely seen every mistake she’d made over the past three days.

“I trusted someone, Pop.” The words were choked, thick. “And he knows what I’ve been doing. Faking everything. But I can’t blame him. I’m the one who lied.”

You’re not a liar.

At first, she thought it was her grandfather’s voice she heard, but it was Valebrook’s. The invisible fist around her throat tightened. She grabbed blindly at objects on a bookshelf—the skull of a fox, an empty brown glass bottle, a crystal pendant on a leather cord—and tossed them into the bag.

“I am a liar, but I don’t feel like one. I thought I was doing something good for others. But what good has it done for me?”

Don’t be selfish, dear girl.

“I’m not selfish,” she argued to the voice that only existed in her head. “I’m lonely.” That loneliness had held her together like a pernicious weed. But its tendrils dug into the mortar of her, weakening her foundations. If she pulled it out, she’d break apart.

Or she could rebuild.

She flipped through a notebook at random before throwing it on the pile. “Why do we need to obsess over what we’ve lost?”

She pulled each desk drawer open and removed its contents—old correspondence and letter openers, a watch without its gears; everything unceremoniously dropped into the bag. Before long, it would be too heavy for her to carry on her own.