She walked to the door, then paused with her hand on the frame.
“You came early,” she said, without turning around.
“You stayed longer and you joined their lessons and took them to the beach and let them bury you in sand.” A pause.
“It’s not enough. But it’s more than before.”
She left before he could respond.
Rhys sat alone in the study, listening to her footsteps fade down the corridor, and thought about ghost smiles and direct gazes and the particular quality of a woman who saw him clearly and stayed anyway.
Tomorrow, he would watch Thistle attempt to teach a toad to swim. He would help Anna with her probability charts and listen to Viola whisper about her drawings and try, again, to earn more of Mel Grace’s devastating honesty.
It wasn’t enough, and he was fully aware of that, and she was too.
But it was more. And more, he was beginning to understand, was how change happened.
One week at a time. One conversation at a time. One almost-smile at a time.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Miss Grace, what does Papa eat for breakfast?”
The question came from Anna, who was seated at her desk with her attendance register open and her quill poised, clearly preparing to record important data. It was the sixth day of Mr. Langford’s extended visit, and the household had begun to adjust to his presence in ways both obvious and subtle.
“Your father eats whatever is served to him,” Mel replied, not looking up from the arithmetic problems she was preparing for the morning’s lesson.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because yesterday he looked at his eggs as though he had never seen eggs before. And this morning he asked Mrs. Kemp if breakfast was always so early.”
“Adults who are not accustomed to children often forget that children wake at dawn regardless of how late the adults stayed up the night before.”
“That seems like poor planning on their part.”
“It is. But adults are not always as logical as they believe themselves to be.”
Anna made a note in her register, presumably under a category labelled something like “Parental Deficiencies” or“Areas Requiring Improvement.” Mel had learned not to ask about Anna’s organisational systems; the explanations tended to be exhaustive.
From her position at the window, Viola was sketching the garden below, her pencil moving in the quick, confident strokes that characterised her artistic work. Thistle had been banished to the corner to practice her letters after an incident involving Brutus and the inkwell, and was currently engaged in the slow, methodical work of forming the alphabet while shooting resentful glances at her toad’s empty terrarium.
Mr. Langford appeared in the doorway, looking only slightly more rumpled than he had the day before. He was learning the rhythms of the household, Mel observed, but he was learning them clumsily, like a man who had been given a map to a country he had only ever seen from a great distance.
“Good morning,” he said. “Am I late for lessons?”
“Lessons begin at nine precisely.” Anna informed him without looking up. “It is currently eight forty-seven. You are thirteen minutes early. I have noted this in the register as ‘improved punctuality.’”
“I’m honoured to have improved.”
“Continued improvement will be expected.”
He caught Mel’s eye across the schoolroom, and something passed between them, a shared amusement at Anna’s relentless documentation. Mel did not smile, but warmth loosened hercarefully held composure, muscles relaxing in response to his easy amusement.
She had been watching him all week. Watching him stumble through the rituals of childhood that were second nature to her after years of governessing. He did not know that five-year-olds ate everything placed before them with indiscriminate enthusiasm, that breakfast was not a meal to be lingered over but a fueling station before the serious business of the day began. He did not know that bedtime involved three stories, not one, and that the stories must be selected in a specific order: first an adventure for Thistle, then something quieter for Viola, then whatever Anna had chosen from her approved reading list.
He did not know that Viola needed the curtains arranged in a precise configuration before she could sleep, the left panel overlapping the right by exactly three inches, creating a gap that let in just enough moonlight without being too bright. He did not know that Thistle could not settle without Brutus on her pillow, the toad’s gentle croaking serving as a lullaby that no human voice could replicate.
He was learning. Mel was teaching him, though she would not have described it that way.
