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He stopped.

He turned.

They stood six feet apart in the entrance hall with the housemaids and the governess still around them, and Juliet held the coat and kept her chin level. He crossed to her. He stopped close, closer than he had permitted himself in days, and she could see what it cost him to hold himself steady at that proximity.

“No,” he said.

“Two people covering more ground⁠—”

“Juliet.” It came out rough, lower in register, different in texture, and she stilled, her eyes flying to hold his gaze without her meaning to. “If she comes home,” he said, “she needs at least one of us to be here.” He held out his hand.

She stood with the coat in her hands a breath longer than she needed to. His hand was open, waiting, and he was close enough that she could see the effort behind the steadiness of his face. She gave him the coat.

His fingers closed over hers against the wool, and she released it. He shrugged into it, then paused at the door. He looked back at her once, and his gaze held hers for longer than required.

“Send for me the moment you hear anything,” he said. “Anything at all.”

“Go,” she said. “Quickly, Adam.”

He went.

The morning room was where Eloise had been, and so that was where Juliet went.

The chair cushion had slid halfway to the floor. The frog book lay open and face-down on the side table, spine pressed flat to hold the page. On the window seat sat the small wooden horse Eloise had not taken out of her pocket in three weeks.

Juliet picked it up. Turned it over in her fingers. Set it back.

Eloise had called her mama in Adam’s study three days ago.

She had been on the landing listening, and had pressed her hand to her mouth, and then gone through that study door and said: she is my daughter too in a voice that had carried across a room in which Eloise was standing. She had then carried the child out of the study and up the staircase.

And Eloise had kept her arms locked around her neck the full length of the corridor. She had said, So you are fighting with Papa at the top of the stairs, and Juliet had said it was only a momentary spat.

Eloise had not loosened her hold, because Eloise was seven years old and had spent three days at a breakfast table watching two adults exchange sentences with all the warmth of bank correspondence.

Had she slipped out during hide-and-seek, thinking she would return before anyone worried? Had some child’s logic told her that making herself absent might resolve the trouble she could feel in the house but could not understand?

The wooden horse was cold against Juliet’s palm.

Thomas had not been at his post since breakfast, and Adam had asked which footmen were accounted for, his gloves already going on. He had understood something before she had. A footman did not vanish on the same morning as a child.

Even she was not foolish enough to think that a coincidence.

No, this was an arrangement made ahead of time, by someone who had known exactly when and where to find her.

Daniel arrived at twenty past eleven, rain on the shoulders of his coat, and came straight through the door. He looked at Juliet and said, “Tell me what you know.”

She told him. He listened from start to finish without cutting in, which she had not seen him do before.

He asked one question: “Has Adam informed Bow Street?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said, and he was out the door and heading to the park before she thought to say anything more.

The Runners arrived at noon. Juliet sat with them at the library table and gave them Thomas’s full name, his tenure at Ravenlocke, and the name of the agency that had supplied his character reference.

One of them recorded it with neat economy. The other kept his eyes on her throughout the exchange, steady and unhurried, and his steady scrutiny helped her keep her own spine straight.