She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and looked at the courtyard and heard the room behind her.
James demonstrating the walk again for Anthony, Fox's claws on the stone. The servants' voices dropping to something warmer and more private, Mairi's bright chatter starting up.
Catriona stood very still and let the cold fact of it sit in her chest where it had been sitting, she realized, for days. She'd known it was coming. She'd simply not looked directly at it until now. She felt a sudden, sharp ache of loneliness, even in the crowded room.
She turned.
Anthony was looking at her.
Not at James. Not at Fox. Not at the servants filing out with their careful joy.
At her. Across the room. His gaze was dark and focused, as if he were trying to read the very thoughts she was hiding.
Through the noise and the movement, directly at her face, and she understood from the stillness of him that he had just arrived at the same place by a different road and at the same moment.
He's better.
She watched that thought cross Anthony's face in real time. His expression flickered, a momentary loosening before the mask slammed back into place.
Neither of them spoke.
James, between them, demonstrated the walk a third time for Fox, who had resumed his circuit with the air of a creature that took professional pride in his work.
She looked at Anthony.
He looked at her.
The room moved around them, and they stood in the middle of it and did not say a word.
He's better.
The thought was not new.
She had known it clinically for days. Had measured it in his breathing, in his color, in the way he now chased Fox across the floor without stopping to catch his breath. She had known it the way she knew all her patients' progress. Precisely. Professionally. At a careful distance.
This was not that.
This was the thought landing in her body rather than her mind, and what came with it, arriving in the same breath, quiet and unavoidable:
I will leave soon.
She had not let herself think it until now. Had kept busy enough, kept her hands in the herbs and her mind in the work, and had not looked directly at the shape of what came after. She looked at it now. Felt the cold edge of it.
The winter light came through the window pale and thin, and James laughed again somewhere behind her.
She could not breathe as easily as the child now could.
The thought moved through her slowly, and she did not look away from Anthony's face as it did.
His expression had done the same thing hers had, she could see it, the flicker of the same realization crossing him before the mask came back down and covered it.
The room moved. James demonstrated the walk again. Fox resumed his circuit.
Neither of them spoke.
Neither of them moved.
The distance between them, which had never once felt like enough, felt suddenly, acutely, like something she was about to lose the right to complain about.
