“I’ll see you later,” she said as she split off toward the maids’ quarters.
Caspian nodded toward her and headed for the front of the manor house. He waved as he strode away and Sophia waved back, before hurrying to freshen up for dinner.
When she arrived in the dining room used by the servants and guards, Caspian wasn’t there.
She ate her dinner in silence, surrounded by housemaids who didn’t want to talk to her because she worked in the barn, stable hands who joked amongst themselves but ignored her because she was a woman, and kitchen staff who were perfectly polite when she worked among them but never really included her.
She hadn’t realized how nice it was to feel included until Caspian.
Where had he gone? Was he avoiding her?
Had she turned someone else away from being her friend?
She’d always spent a fair amount of time alone, whether she was at Lady Manning’s in Riyel or here in the Northlands. Rosaleen was the only person who’d ever loved her.
Was there something wrong with her? Was she that difficult to work with? Did she make people uncomfortable? She’d thought that leaving Lady Manning behind would change that, but even now, she was still surrounded by strangers.
Loneliness stabbed through her as she ate a few more bites of mashed potatoes and smushed the rest around her plate to look like she’d eaten more than she had.
Maybe she was just broken.
But her friends at the café didn’t seem to think she was broken. Or if they did, they did a really good job of hiding it. Maybe she wasn’t broken. Maybe it was just the people at the manor…and at Lady Manning’s…and now Caspian was also avoiding her.
The evidence seemed to be piling up to suggest she wasn’t someone worthy of love.
Sophia sighed and brought her plate to the kitchen, scraped it off, and washed it before heading back to the room she shared with the housemaids. She sat down on her bed and began to unlace her boots before realization slammed into her.
The goats.
She hadn’t checked on them since she left for town with Caspian.
She sighed and relaced her boots. At least her goats loved her.
She made her way out to the goat pen and Mollie immediately ran to her. Sophia crouched on the ground and pulled Mollie into her arms, picking her up and scratching under her chin. “I’m so glad I have you,” she whispered to the baby goat, squishing her in a tight hug. “You make everything better.”
Mollie accepted the hug for a moment, but then began to wiggle while simultaneously trying to eat Sophia’s hair. “Now, now,” Sophia said. “I don’t need my hair to be all sticky until my next bath.”
She’d forgotten to tie it up before coming in, which was her own mistake, and she immediately put Mollie down so she could rectify that. She pulled a strip of fabric from her dress pocket and tied back her long hair.
“I don’t suppose you want to talk to me,” she said to Mollie, rubbing the top of her head. “Apparently nobody else here does. I’m sure Liliana would talk to me if I asked, but for some reason, I think she might be the only one who would. As much as I love listening to Liliana tell her stories and talk to you, I would prefer to talk to some adults. But since none of them seem to be interested, I’ll have to settle for you,” she said to the baby goat, leaning over to rub her nose against Mollie’s.
Mollie pushed against her face before pulling back and attempting to head-butt her. Sophia had no interest in attempting a head-butting competition with a goat, whose skull seemed to be much harder than hers, and pulled back as the other goats swarmed around them, attracted to her leaning down.
The adults nosed around her pockets, hoping that she’d brought food with her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t bring anything,” she told the goats. “I should have known better than to get your hopes up, but really, I had to come check on you. If you wouldn’t knock over your water all the time, I’d check on you less and you wouldn’t get your hopes up nearly as often. I’ll go get you something before I go to bed. Or maybe I’ll be mean and make you wait until breakfast. You shouldn’t be eating so much anyway.”
The goats grumbled but gave up when they realized she didn’t have food and went back to browsing outside while the baby goats tried to climb all over Sophia.
“I don’t suppose any of you want to tell me that you love me and you think I’m amazing,” she asked the goats with a wry smile. “No? I didn’t think so.”
At least she knew, whether they said it or not, that they loved her.
It would have been nice to hear somebody say it, though.
There was a lump in her throat and her eyes hurt as she thought about the fact that she was twenty-something years old and she didn’t have anyone to love her.
She didn’t even know how old she was exactly—there had never been anyone in her life who cared to remember that fact or tell her about it. Lady Manning had taken even the dignity of having a birthday from her.
Sophia sighed. It was easy to blame Lady Manning, even if it wasn’t necessarily true—it was less painful if it wasn’t her fault or the fault of the parents she’d never known.
