He had not been prepared for what it felt like to be seen like that.
He stood and moved to the window. The grounds below were gray in early morning, the gardens still, the path where they had walked with his sisters disappearing into the hedgerow.
He had ridden that path a hundred times. He knew every inch of it. He had shown Cecily where the ground was soft, and she had remembered. For the next time they went out, she had skirted the same spot without being told.
It was a small thing, but he kept thinking about it.
He pressed two fingers against the cold glass pane and looked at the grey grounds, and was honest with himself in a way he was only honest with himself when there was no alternative.
It felt like something.
The evenings in the nursery, the way the room shrank when it was only the two of them, the hand over the basin and the cloth and the twenty seconds in which neither of them moved… It felt like something, and he knew what it felt like, and that was precisely the problem.
He had watched his parents from the stairs at seven years old and understood, with the blunt perception of children who had not yet learned to look away, what love looked like when it soured. Not at the end—he had been nineteen at the end, old enough to understand it clearly—but in the middle. The middle was what he remembered.
The way the house had felt. The silence before the angry voices rose. The way his mother had looked at his father sometimes, wanting something that was no longer there to be given, and the way his father had looked at her. Not with cruelty, which would have been simpler, but with exhaustion. With the hopeless fatigue of a man who had wanted to be better than he was and had run out of the will to keep trying.
He had promised himself at nineteen, standing in the solicitor’s office with the title and the debt and two little sisters at homewho didn’t yet know the carriage wasn’t coming back, that he would not build that. Would not start something that could become that. Would not let anyone close enough to be damaged by him or to damage him in return.
He had been comfortable with that promise.
He turned away from the window. The document was still on the desk and required his attention, which was where his attention was going to go, because that was what he had decided, and what he had decided generally held.
He sat and picked up the quill. He looked at the page.
The distance would hold. It had to hold, because the alternative was a house that had started with hope and become something that damaged everyone inside it, and he would not do that to his sisters. Would not do it to Cecily, would not do it to a baby who had already had enough of the world’s carelessness.
He began to read the document, frowning in concentration. He retained none of it.
The distance, he thought, would hold. He was almost certain.
* * *
Cecily was in the nursery when he found her that afternoon.
The baby was awake and playing with the soft toy Letitia had left beside her before going for her lessons. Cecily was talking to her in a low tone about the garden, about the roses that would bloom in spring, about the color of the wallpaper, which she had decided privately was the wrong shade of yellow and intended to change.
She didn’t think the baby cared about it all, but she felt comfort talking to her.
She heard William in the doorway before she saw him.
“She’s much better,” she said, without turning. “Doris thinks two more days, and she’ll be strong enough.”
A pause.
“Strong enough to go back,” he said.
Cecily looked at the baby, who chewed on the toy. She had been thinking about this moment for three days, preparing the words for it with the careful attention she gave to conversations that mattered.
She turned away from the crib to face him.
“I don’t want to send her back,” she declared.
William stepped further into the room. He looked at the baby for a moment, then at Cecily. “She belongs to the orphanage, Cecily.”
“She belongs to no one,” Cecily retorted. “That is precisely the point.”
He was quiet.
