Alex's jaw tightened. Her eyes were bright but she didn't cry. "And if she is involved? If my own mother orchestrated the kidnapping of my child? What do I do with that?"
"We deal with it. Together. The same way we've dealt with everything else she's thrown at us."
"I feel like I'm going mad." The words came out quiet, raw. "How am I supposed to be a Queen and a mother and a daughter to a woman who might be responsible for the worst thing that has ever happened to me? How do I hold all of that at the same time?"
"You don't have to hold it alone. That's the bit you keep forgetting."
Alex held her gaze. The evening light caught the gold in her hair and made her blue eyes luminous and tired and beautiful, and Erin wanted to take her somewhere far from castles and security rooms and mothers who destroyed their children with fake kindness. Somewhere with a locked door and no phones and nothing to do but hold each other until the world righted itself.
"Cecilia is dangerous," Erin said. The words were quiet but they carried weight. "I've always thought so. Not because she's powerful. She is. But power alone doesn't make someone dangerous. She's dangerous because she's patient and calculated. She doesn’t think any rules apply to her. She'll wait years to make a move. She'll smile through decades of planning. And she'll use your love against you because she knows it's the one weapon you can't defend against."
Alex exhaled. A long, shaking breath that took some of the tension out of her shoulders. "I don't think I love her anymore. I think I love the idea of a mother. The mother she should have been."
Erin pulled her close and pressed her lips to Alex's temple. "That's not mad. That's human."
They stood like that for a while, in the golden light, with the dogs around them and the scent of lavender in the air and the castle behind them and Florence somewhere out there in the darkening world. One of the golden retrievers pushed its nose against Erin's thigh, seeking attention, and she dropped a hand to scratch behind its ears without letting go of Alex. Audrey had settled onto the grass with a sigh that conveyed her opinion of humans who stood still when they could be sitting.
The sun was dropping behind the tree line now, painting the sky in layers of amber and rose, and the air was cooling. A blackbird sang its evening song from the garden wall, a high, liquid phrase that looped and repeated with the unhurried confidence of a creature that had no idea the world was broken.
"Come on," Erin said. "Let's go see the kids."
Alex nodded against her shoulder. She pulled back, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand in a gesture that was nothing like the Queen and everything like the woman Erin had fallen in love with years ago, direct, unselfconscious, real, and they walked back inside together.
The triplets' bedroom was on the second floor of the east wing, a large, bright room with blue curtains and a window seat that overlooked the south lawn. It had been divided into three zones with the careful diplomacy of a peace negotiator. Frank's section was chaos, clothes draped over his bedpost and a half-built Lego spaceship on his nightstand. Matilda's was orderly, her books arranged by colour, her shoes lined up beneath the bed frame. And Florence's was neat in a way that made Erin's throat close when she looked at it. Florence's bed was made with the precision that Florence insisted on. Her stuffed rabbit sat against the pillow, ears flopped sideways, button eyes staring at the ceiling. Her slippers were paired beneath the bed, toes pointing outward, waiting.
Frank and Matilda were in their pyjamas. Frank was in bed with a torch and a book about dinosaurs that he appeared to be reading upside down. Matilda was sitting cross-legged on her duvet, brushing her hair with the systematic thoroughness of someone who took personal grooming seriously even at eight years old.
"Mummies!" Frank sat up so fast the torch bounced off his pillow and onto the floor. "Mummy Erin, did you find Flo?"
"Not yet, mate. But we're getting closer." It wasn't a lie. The two threads pointing to Surrey were real. They were getting closer. She had to believe that.
"Can I help? I'm good at finding things. I found Matilda's earring that time when it fell behind the radiator."
"You did. That was brilliant detective work. But this one's a bit bigger than an earring. The grown-ups need a bit more time."
Frank's face cycled through frustration, determination, and reluctant acceptance, all in the space of three seconds. "Fine. But if you need me, I'm available." He crossed his arms over the dinosaur book with an expression of such fierce earnestness that Erin had to swallow hard against the sudden thickness in her throat. He was so like her. The same need to act, the same inability to sit still when someone he loved was in trouble.
"Noted. First on my list."
Matilda, from her bed, spoke without looking up from her hair-brushing. "I said a prayer for Florence tonight. Before you came in."
The quiet certainty of it broke something in Erin that she'd been holding together all day. Not a collapse, she was too well-trained for that, at least in front of the children, but a fracture that she'd have to deal with later, in private, in the dark.
"That was a really lovely thing to do, Tilly."
"Do you think she can feel it? Even if she's far away?"
"I think she absolutely can."
Erin sat on the edge of Frank's bed and Alex sat on Matilda's, and they read stories and answered questions and smoothed hair and straightened duvets and did all the ordinary, sacred things that parents did at bedtime. Frank wanted to know about dinosaurs, specifically, whether a T-Rex could beat a great dane in a fight, which led to a spirited defence of Audrey's combat capabilities that Erin genuinely enjoyed. Matilda wanted to know about the stars and whether astronauts could see castles from space and whether Florence could see the same stars wherever she was. That last question sat between them for a moment before Alex answered, gently, that yes, Florence could see the same stars, and maybe they could all look at the same one tonight and think of each other. Matilda accepted this with a nod that was both solemn and comforted.
Neither of them mentioned Florence again after that, but her absence filled the room the way her presence usually did: the empty bed, the untouched rabbit, the slippers waiting for feet that weren't there.
When the children were asleep, Erin stood in the doorway and looked at the room. Three beds. Two children. The maths of it was wrong. It would be wrong until Florence was home.
Alex slipped her hand into Erin's and they stood together in the half-dark, listening to their children breathe, and they did not speak because there was nothing to say that could fix the arithmetic of an empty bed. But Alex's hand was warm in hers, and these two children were safe, and somewhere in Surrey there were two phone numbers that pointed to the same corner of the map, and tomorrow Erin would be back in the control room chasing them down.
She would find Florence. The threads were there: Surrey, Latimer, the Jersey mobile, the two-mile radius. She just had to follow them, and she would not stop until they led her to her daughter.
