The sound that he made at the misunderstanding told Avery he was just as on edge as her. Whether that was a comforting piece of information she had yet to discover. She scooted her chair closer to the table, however tilted it at an angle. She didn’t like feeling her back exposed like this. She picked up her gloves to have something to fiddle with, and examined them as he continued.

That his brother didn’t want anything to do with her wasn’t a surprise. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen it happen and it wasn’t the last. She supposed she should have felt relieved that the father wasn’t going to march into the room all of a sudden and demand that his bastard be raised in a proper home. Still, Avery squeezed the glove in her hand; aside from her nails digging into the soft leather, there was little change in her expression despite the intense wave of fury that washed over her. Coward. And then a small part of her, a part that she hadn’t known was there, seemed to shatter. Marigold had asked questions in the past. Avery had leaned on the fact that they would never meet to spin small stories for the sake of her daughter. But now…

Had little interest in this conversation. Little interest in the mother of his child. Little interest in the child. The insinuation wasn’t hard to make. Telling Marigold, however…

She smiled tightly at him. “No need to beat about the bush, then. If he wants nothin’ to do with me or with his daughter —” Her lip curled, the word foreign on her tongue. Marigold was hers. And yet he needed to know exactly what — who — he was abandoning here. A person. A child. “— then I’m failing to see what exactly you’d like to achieve here, Harry.”

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