“Do you intend to ruin this?”
“No.” The word came out fierce, unexpected.
“No, I don’t intend to ruin this. I intend to protect it. To earn it. To deserve it, somehow, even though I have done nothing to deserve any of it.”
“Then stop talking about ruining and start talking about building.” Mel’s voice carried the same firmness she used with the children when they were spiraling into unhelpful patterns.
“You have been here a week. You have eaten breakfast with your daughters and joined their lessons and let them bury you in sand. You have learned that bedtime requires three stories and that Viola needs the curtains just so. These are not small things. These are the building blocks of a life.”
“A life I can only visit.”
“For now. Circumstances change. People change. The only thing that does not change is mathematics, and even that is subject to revision if you ask the right philosophers.”
The ghost of a smile crossed his face. “I say, did you truly intend to offer a jest? Gracious, I am quite overcome!”
“I made an observation with humorous implications. It is not the same thing.”
“I do believe it was a jest!”
“Your interpretation is your own affair.”
He laughed. Not the polished laugh she had heard him deploy at dinner parties and social occasions, but the real one she had first heard during the Latin lesson. The one that came from genuine amusement rather than social performance.
She found herself wanting to hear it again.
The realisation was alarming. She should not want things from this man. She should not notice the way his laugh transformed his face, making him look younger and less burdened. She should not feel the warmth spreading through her chest when he looked at her with something like hope in his eyes.
She should not be calling him Rhys.
But she was and the name felt right in her mouth, even though it should have felt wrong. Even though it crossed lines she had spent six years carefully maintaining.
“It’s late,” she said, rising from her chair before the moment could stretch into something more dangerous.
“The children will be awake early. Thistle has announced plans to teach Brutus to build sandcastles.”
“That seems unlikely to succeed.”
“Most of Thistle’s plans are unlikely to succeed. That has never stopped her from attempting them.”
“She possesses that particular disposition from her mother.”
The words left his mouth before he could stop them, and she saw him freeze, realising what he had revealed.
Mel paused at the door. She knew, now, that the children’s mother had been someone he had cherished deeply. Someone who had passed that fearlessness to Thistle, that observational intensity to Viola, that fierce certainty to Anna. Someone whose absence still hurt him, years later.
“Tell me about her,” she said quietly.
“Someday, when you are ready.”
He looked at her in the quiet that followed, surprise and something deeper, a certain wavering of expression flitted across his countenance.
“Someday,” he agreed. “When I’m ready.”
She left him sitting by the fire with the shell from Viola resting on the mantelpiece where she had placed it earlier, a small spiral of pearl that meant more than either of them could safely acknowledge.
In her room that night, Mel sat at her desk and did not write a report.
She thought about names and the shift that happened when a person stopped being
