But Viola was a child, and children did not understand the rules that governed adult lives. Children did not know that affection was not enough, that wanting was not the same as having and that the distance between a governess and a duchess could not be bridged no matter how much either party might wish it.
Mel set the shell back on the windowsill. Then, moving with the deliberate precision that characterised all her actions, she went to the wardrobe and pulled out her travelling trunk.
It was a small trunk, battered from years of use, large enough to hold everything she owned. She had packed it when she came to Hartfell and had not touched it since, had allowed herself to believe that she had found a place where she might stay.
She had been wrong about that too.
The packing took less time than she expected. Dresses folded and placed in careful layers. Books stacked along one side. The few personal items she possessed arranged in the spaces between. When she was finished, the room looked exactly as it had when she arrived: impersonal, temporary and ready for the next occupant.
She did not take the shell.
It belonged here, with Viola, with the children she was about to leave. She could not take it with her, could not carry that particular weight of memory and loss into whatever came next.
The trunk closed with a soft click. Mel sat on the edge of her bed and looked at it, feeling the full weight of what she was about to do settle onto her shoulders.
She was leaving. She was breaking her promise to the children, the promise she had made on her first day and had renewed every day since. She was abandoning them to a father who cherished them but could not be trusted to stay, to a house that would feel emptier without her, to a future she would not be part of.
It was the right thing to do and she could see that clearly now. Staying would only prolong the pain, would only make the eventual separation more devastating. Better to leave now, while the children were young enough to forget her, while the wound was fresh enough to heal cleanly.
It was for the best to leave before she had to face him again, knowing what he truly thought of her.
So far outside the boundaries of his world.
She would wait until morning and she would say goodbye to the children she would make up some excuse about a family emergency or a position elsewhere, would leave them with the impression that she was departing for reasons beyond her control rather than reasons that would break their hearts.
And then she would go, find another position, another household, another set of children to cherish temporarily before circumstances forced her to leave them too.
It was what she did. It was what she had always done. Surviving, adapting and moving on before the losses could accumulate into something unbearable.
She lay down on the bed without undressing, too exhausted to manage buttons and laces, and stared at the ceiling until exhaustion finally dragged her into sleep.
Her last thought, before consciousness faded, was of Rhys’s voice saying words she would never be able to unheard.
I can’t enter into a matrimony with a governess.
She had always known that, but knowing and hearing were different things and the difference was sharp enough to cut.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“You’re leaving.”
Viola’s voice was barely above a whisper, but in the silence of the early morning entrance hall, it carried with the force of an accusation. She stood at the bottom of the stairs in her nightgown, her feet bare against the cold stone floor and her dark eyes fixed on the trunk that Mel had just set down by the front door.
Mel froze with her hand still on the trunk’s handle. She had planned this carefully as she had risen before dawn, dressed in the dark and carried her belongings down the servants’ staircase to avoid detection. She had composed the letter she would leave for the children, the careful lies about a family emergency that would explain her sudden departure without breaking their hearts.
She had not planned for Viola.
“I have to go,” she said, her voice steady despite the fracturing sensation in her chest. “There’s been an emergency and my family needs me.”
“You don’t have any family.” Viola’s whisper was soft but certain.
“You told me. Your mother and father are both gone. There’s no one left.”
Of course Viola remembered. Viola remembered everything, filed away every conversation and confidence with the quiet attention that characterised all her interactions with the world. Mel had told her, one afternoon when they were cataloging leaves for Thistle’s nature collection, about the circumstances of her life and having no one in her life.
She had not thought, at the time, that the information would be used against her.
“Sometimes family means different things,” Mel said, knowing the words were weak, knowing Viola would see through them.
