The Duke Sent Back Every Letter She Wrote from Home—Until the Day He Read Them All at Once

She had written every week. Without fail, without complaint, without any indication that she expected a reply. The first letter arrived three weeks after he left for London. Then another. Then another. Theodosia Carrow, Duchess of Wrentham, wrote about the estate, the tenants, the first frost, the library books she had worked through, a particular sunset she thought he might have found interesting had he been there to see it. He put them in a drawer. Unopened. Not out of cruelty — he told himself this regularly. Simply because opening them felt like a conversation he was not ready to have. Because answering them felt like a commitment he did not know how to make. The drawer filled slowly, over months, over years, the way a debt accumulates when you keep choosing not to look at it. The night the desk was packed in a hurry, the drawer caught. Everything spilled. He sat down at two in the morning with the earliest letter in his hands. By dawn he had read every one. By the first light he understood exactly what he had been refusing to receive — and exactly what it was going to cost him to deserve it now.