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Dear Thomas,

Were you friends with Charles the winter our mother died?

It was the November I turned eighteen, so you must have been.

When she passed, there were dozens, hundreds, millions of things that I desperately wanted to tell her still.

The truth about me, who I was and who I have always been.

The fear of this title, the anxiety of being responsible for an entire estate, my brother, and all the people in it.

It was Felix’s idea that I write her letters filled with these unsaid things, and now I suppose I am doing the same for you.

I will never send these, of course. As you saw today, I am a coward where it counts.

I was, perhaps, on the cusp of admitting that in the last two months you have opened walls that I had long built around myself.

I find you intriguing, not only because you refuse to be a sycophant because of my title but also because of you. Just you.

For years, I could not understand why Charles was so insistent on your friendship.

His other school friends always spoke of you in slightly disdainful tones, as though you were a stray kitten he had found in the rain and insisted on bringing in to warm in his light.

When my father met you, he saw what Charles saw and it only made me more certain that they were both being taken in.

Imagine my surprise when I saw you, Thomas.

You were far different than what I had anticipated, truthfully.

I had expected you to be using my brother for his money or his position, and I could not believe that they were unable to see it.

But as soon as I met you, I knew that they had been right, and it angered me.

I suppose that’s why I was so awful to you that first night, why I struggled to change my perspective, but you changed it for me.

I wanted to tell you today that I would have you stay at Ashford Hall long after your summer has ended, the thought of losing you to London a terror that I cannot face.

In the last few months you have thoroughly worked your way past the wall I so carefully constructed, and yet the words died before I could admit what I felt.

I am glad, in the end, that I said nothing, because your accusation that I wanted you to stay solely to prevent you from seeing Louis Garretty cut me so sharply that had you stayed a minute longer, I would have lost my temper completely.

I thought I was showing you that my feelings had changed.

Yet you made it all too clear that you still see me as the suspicious man I was upon first meeting, and perhaps that is all my own fault.

It’s clear to me now that I was a fool to have hardened you against me from the start and an even bigger fool to believe that I could have changed that impression in a mere summer.

There were moments where I was sure I saw a softness in your eyes that I liked, that I coveted, and yet it seems clear now upon your departure that this was nothing more than the idle fantasies of a man who no longer understands what love looks like.

One fortnight and you will come back, even if I have to go to London and beg for you to return.