There he was.
A good summer. As if the house had not been shrinking by winters and summers alike. As if survival still depended onweather more than structure. Cassian did not need miracles. He needed one decent season to arrive carrying the work of five years.
Mirelle set down the teapot. “What did you find in the ledgers, Sabine.”
“The loan matures within the year. Parcel Eleven is effectively gone. Marsh End is barely covering its own arrears. The east wing will remain closed because we cannot repair the roof. There is no reserve.”
The last sentence landed hardest.
Cassian turned from the hearth. “No liquid reserve.”
“No reserve.”
“There are heirlooms.”
“Which buy us months, not safety.”
“There are marriage prospects.”
“For whom.”
He looked at her and did not answer quickly enough.
Mirelle’s voice came in smooth and cool. “Do not speak of yourself as though you were livestock.”
Sabine shifted her gaze to her mother. “That has never prevented anyone else from doing it.”
Mirelle’s expression did not change, which meant the line had struck cleanly. “Coarseness does not improve truth.”
“Neither does lace.”
Cassian muttered a curse and raked a hand through his hair. “Can we speak like human beings.”
“We are,” Sabine said. “You simply prefer gentler ones.”
Mirelle adjusted the angle of the sugar spoon by a fraction. “Practicality is not a masculine virtue merely because it is unpleasant. But there is a manner in which a woman may speak of family survival without making herself sound unpresentable.”
There it was.
Not raised voice. Not reproach in open form. Worse. Mirelle could still make clarity feel indecorous, as if Sabine had failed a social test by naming the terms of her own sale too directly.
Sabine met her mother’s eyes. “If the choice before us is between presentability and solvency, I recommend solvency.”
A pause.
Mirelle took up her cup, then set it down again without drinking. “You recommend many things that would sound admirable in a steward and costly in a daughter.”
Cassian went still.
The words did exactly what Mirelle had intended. They reduced Sabine’s usefulness and her sex to a single wound. Efficient. Refined. Cruel enough to pass for manners.
Sabine let the silence sit a moment, then said, “A daughter is already what the house spends when the walls start failing. Let us not pretend delicacy enters into it.”
Cassian looked from one woman to the other as though he had stepped into a duel without warning. “Stop this.”
Neither of them did.
Sabine picked up the roof estimate and laid it beside the notice. “This is the east wing. We cannot reopen it. We cannot meet the loan. We cannot cover another failed quarter. Father was wrong.”
