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She had not meant to stand there, but she couldn’t quite resist, so she hovered at the turn of the landing and listened.

Eloise’s voice was unhurried, the way it was when she had been working up to something. “Papa. Are you and Juliet fighting?”

There was a slight pause before Adam’s voice filled the room. “No,” he said. “Everything is fine.”

But Eloise was not one to be so easily deterred. “But you have a different face,” she argued.

“I have a great deal of estate work,” Adam answered her, but even Juliet could hear the child’s dissatisfaction in the ensuing silence.

“Mama is pretending to smile all the time, even when she reads me bedtime stories!” Eloise said, and Juliet gasped.

But she was certainly not the only one who was surprised. “What…” Adam’s words came out in a croak. “What did you just call…”

Eloise stubbornly repeated herself. “Mama! Is Juliet not my mama now? I’m supposed to have a younger sibling soon, too, am I not, Papa?”

Adam cleared his throat, and Juliet could practically feel the awkwardness from listening.

The study was quiet after that for long enough that Juliet pressed her hand to her mouth.

Eloise…

Eloise really had just called her…

Mama.

Hadn’t she? She most definitely didn’t hear that wrong, did she?

“Go and find Miss Green,” Adam said at last. “It’s nearly time for your lesson.”

“I finished it,” Eloise replied quickly, and Juliet’s heart ached at the child’s eager tone.

Adam just kept replying in that distracted tone of voice that was beginning to grate on her nerves as she listened. “Then find Mrs. Priscilla and tell her I said you may have a biscuit.”

There was a slight pause before Eloise’s voice came again, smaller this time. “Papa.” The child’s voice was so tentative that it literally broke her heart to hear it.

“Eloise.” This tone was quiet yet just as final and shuttered as the one he’d used with her in his study days ago.

Hearing him use it on their daughter set off a spark in her chest and, before she knew it, Juliet was marching through the study door before she had finished deciding to go through it.

Eloise was standing in the center of the room with her frog book under her arm and her chin up. She turned when Juliet came in. The tightness in her small shoulders dropped by one degree. Juliet crossed to her, put a hand on her shoulder, and looked at Adam.

He had half risen from his chair.

“You do not have to use that tone with her,” Juliet said.

His jaw tightened. “I will speak to my daughter⁠—”

“She is my daughter, too.” The words came out level and without the deliberation she might have preferred, but she did not take them back. “I am meant to be looking after her well-being. That is what I am here for, if I recall correctly.”

She said this with an edge in her voice, and she saw Adam flinch, one hand braced on the surface of his desk, the color leaving his face.

Not caring to hear any more, Juliet picked Eloise up, frog book and all, settled her on her hip, and walked out of the study without a backward glance.

She was halfway down the corridor before she noticed that her hands were shaking. She kept them occupied by holding Eloise, who had both arms locked around her neck, her chin pressed into her shoulder, and was, for once in her short but determined life, entirely quiet.

Juliet kept walking, and Eloise held on through the full length of the corridor. They were at the top of the staircase when she said, quietly, into Juliet’s shoulder, “So you are fighting with Papa.”

Juliet halted, her breath catching in her throat. She quietly pressed her cheek to the top of Eloise’s pretty head and breathed in.