But she thought of Thistle fighting sleep because she didn’t want him to leave. She thought of Viola’s hand reaching for his with such confident trust. She thought of Anna, bossy, difficult Anna, softening around him like a flower opening toward light.
And she thought,someone needs to say the things he doesn’t want to hear. Someone needs to hold up a mirror and show him what he’s doing to them.
It might as well be me.
She extinguished her candle and lay in the darkness, listening to the old house settle around her. Somewhere in the nursery, three girls were sleeping, and somewhere in the guest room, their father was probably not sleeping at all.
Tomorrow he would leave. Tomorrow she would watch the children count the days until his return, marking them on their calendar with careful marks.
And tomorrow, she would begin the work of keeping them whole until he came back to break their hearts again.
***
“I would like to speak with you before you leave, Mr. Langford.”
Mel delivered the request over breakfast, her voice calm and her expression composed in a way that gave no hintof the conversation she intended to have. The children were eating their toast with the particular intensity of small people who knew that breakfast meant their father’s departure was approaching, and she saw no reason to add to their distress by signaling anything unusual.
Mr. Langford looked up from his own breakfast, his eyes meeting hers across the table.
His expression betrayed him for but a second. It was the look of a man who had heard the approaching footsteps of this conversation ever since their encounter in the passage-way, and knew he could not avoid the confrontation any longer.
“Of course, Miss Grace. In the study, after breakfast?”
“That would be acceptable.”
She returned her attention to ensuring that Thistle did not smuggle toast to Brutus, who was watching the proceedings from his terrarium with the patient interest of a toad who had learned that breakfast often resulted in crumbs.
***
The study, when she entered it thirty minutes later, was arranged exactly as she had expected. Mr. Langford sat behind the desk, his hands folded on the leather blotter, his posture suggesting a man preparing to conduct formal business. Mel took the straight-backed chair across from him without waiting to be invited, smoothing her skirts and folding her own hands in her lap.
They sat for a moment in silence, both pretending this was a normal employer-employee conversation both knowing it was nothing of the sort.
“The children are yours.”
She did not phrase it as a question and she did not soften it with uncertainty or cushion it with caveats. She simply stated the fact, as she might have stated that Tuesday followed Monday or that Cornwall was in the southwest of England.
Mr. Langford did not insult her by denying it.
“Yes.”
“All three.”
“Triplets.” He paused, and she saw him weighing his words, deciding how much to reveal. “Their mother was…”
“I don’t require her history.” Mel cut him off with the same calm precision she used to redirect Thistle’s more chaotic impulses.
“I need to know one thing… do you intend to be part of their lives, or is this arrangement designed to allow you to visit when it’s convenient and disappear when it isn’t?”
The bluntness wound him and she could see it in the way his hands tightened on the desk, in the brief flash of something raw behind his careful composure. He was not accustomed to being spoken to this way. She suspected few people in his life had ever dared.
“I visit every month…”
“A month is an eternity to a five-year-old.” She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. The words carried their own weight.
“They count the days, Mr. Langford. Anna keeps a calendar. Twenty-eight small marks, scratched in pencil, counting down to your arrival. She crosses them off each morning with the gravity of a general marking the progress of a campaign.”
He said nothing. His face had gone very still.
