“I am not saying anything except what is true. Trust takes time. You have been absent for most of their lives. Three days a month does not build the foundation that daily presence builds.”
She returned his look with a steadfast directness without betraying the slightest tremor of hesitation.
“But you are here now. You are learning. That is no small consideration, I assure you.”
“Is it?”
“It counts for everything. To them, to me.”
The silence that followed was charged with something neither of them was acknowledging. She recognised the moment of transition, when his gaze lingered fractionally too long and her breath caught without reason.
“Rhys,” he said.
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“My name is Rhys.” He held her gaze with an intensity that made her breath catch. “If we’re going to raise these children together, and that appears to be what’s happening, you should probably use it.”
“We are not raising them together.” The protest came automatically, the professional boundaries she had maintained for six years reasserting themselves.
“I am employed to educate them. You are…”
She trailed off, searching for the word that would define what he was. Employer. Benefactor. Father. None of them seemed adequate.
“A man who is trying very hard to be better than he has been.” He finished her sentence with devastating honesty.
“And failing. And trying again.”
Mel looked at him for a long time. She saw the exhaustion beneath his composed surface. The guilt that he carried like a second skin. The desperate desire to be worthy of children who cherished him without reservation, despite his absences, despite his failures, despite everything.
She saw a man changing, one small choice at a time, gradually and imperfectly but stubbornly forward.
“Rhys, then.”
The word felt strange in her mouth. Intimate in a way that “Mr. Langford”had never been. It was his name, the name his friends used, the name his daughters did not know to call him. And now it was the name she would use, bridging a gap that perhaps should not be bridged.
Something shifted in his expression when she said it. His rigid bearing gave way to a gentler aspect; it was the yielding of a heart that had, until that very moment, been unaware of the weight it sustained.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For staying. For teaching me how to be here. For accepting the shell when Viola offered it, even though you knew what it meant.”
“What did it mean?”
“It meant that you’ve become their person.” His voice was quiet, rough with emotion he was not quite concealing.
“The one they trust. The one they turn to. I should be jealous. I am jealous. But I’m also grateful, because at least they have someone. At least they’re not alone.”
Mel felt the words settle into her chest, pressing against the walls she had built to protect herself from exactly this. From mattering. From being someone’s person. From the devastation that would come when she eventually had to leave.
“I won’t be here forever,” she heard herself say.
“Governesses never are. Eventually they will grow up, or circumstances will change, or…”
“Or I will ruin everything.” He said it without self-pity, as a simple statement of probability. “I have a talent for ruining things. Ask anyone in London. They’ll confirm it.”
“I’m not asking anyone in London. I’m asking you.” She leaned forward slightly, holding his gaze.
