“Do you think she could have gotten on a ship?” Cassie interrupted again. “Maybe she could sail far away.”
“I am certain that would have been possible,” Augusta said with a smile.
“I wonder if ships are peaceful. I doubt it, seeing as the sea can get so stormy,” Cassie remarked. “Have you ever been on a ship, Miss Norton?”
Augusta hesitated. “No,” she answered softly. “Never…”
Gradually, Cassie’s questions slowed. Her eyes closed, opened, closed again, her breathing deepening as the story wound toward its end.
By the time Augusta reached the chapter’s end, Cassie was deep asleep, one cheek pressed against the pillow, her face relaxed.
Augusta closed the book quietly.
Hudson was already on his feet, crossing to the bed in three strides. He bent, slid one arm beneath Cassie’s shoulders, theother beneath her knees, and lifted her with the practiced ease of long habit. She barely stirred, only turned her face against his shoulder with a small sigh that caught him somewhere beneath his ribs.
Pippin watched with one suspicious eye as he pulled the quilts to Cassie’s chin, tucking them around her shoulders with a precision that would have surprised anyone who knew him only by reputation.
He stood over her for a moment, one hand resting briefly on the coverlet, just above the place where her small fingers curled.
A movement at the edge of his vision drew his attention. Augusta had risen from the footstool and was moving quietly around the room, setting the book on the nightstand, adjusting the wick of the lamp to dim its light.
She looked up and caught his gaze. Without a word, they both turned toward the door.
Hudson paused to extinguish the bedside lamp, then followed her into the corridor, pulling the door shut behind them with a soft click that seemed to seal them into a new and dangerous intimacy.
The corridor was dim, lit by a single wall sconce that cast more shadow than illumination. Hudson’s back pressed against the door, as if he could shield his sister from the complicated world beyond her bedroom through the simple act of standing sentinel.Augusta stood an arm’s length away, her profile outlined in gold by the distant light.
Hudson spoke first.
“Thank you,” he said softly. “For today. For…” He gestured toward the closed door. “I haven’t seen her that happy in a long time.”
The words felt inadequate—a child’s translation of an adult emotion—but he could not find better ones. Happiness was too small a word for what he’d seen on Cassie’s face.
Augusta’s smile appeared, then faded all too quickly while he was still admiring the curve of her lips.
“It was my pleasure,” she replied. “And my duty, after all.”
“Your ease with children,” he said, watching her face. “Where does it come from?”
Her hands folded in front of her, fingers interlacing with a precision that suggested practice. “Well… I suppose… After my father remarried, my sister and I were sent to different households. I always wished…” She paused, her chin dipping for just a moment, a gesture so brief Hudson might have imagined it. “I always wished she had been beside me. I suppose I always imagined myself with a sister, or a child, later on…”
She said it quietly, without self-pity, without the performative sadness that Society ladies deployed so artfully. Just a simple statement of fact, more devastating for its restraint.
Hudson went still. Of course, he had known that Whitfield had sent his daughters away when they were young, uninterested in raising them himself. He had also known that Augusta had tried to search for her sister after Whitfield was arrested last month. But hearing Augusta’s greatest wish like this… some part of him ached to grant it to her.
“I understand the feeling,” he said finally, the admission dragged from a place he rarely acknowledged. “I was away at school when Cassie was born. Then managing the estate, then the title…” Each phrase emerged more clipped than the last. “She grew up in the gaps between my responsibilities. I was not there enough.”
The confession hung between them, heavier than he had intended.
He had not meant to say it. He had not, in fact, known he thought it until the words left his mouth. But something about Augusta’s presence pulled honesty from him like a splinter, painful and necessary.
She turned to face him more fully, her expression intent. “Small steps matter,” she said. “Today was a small step. Cassie will carry that memory.” Her voice softened. “The moments we’re fully present with the people we love… those are the ones that shape us, not the absences.”
Hudson looked at her for a long beat. “You are quite wise for your years,” he said, his voice cracking ever so slightly.
She brushed it off with a small shake of her head. “Hardly,” she said, but the flush that crept up her neck suggested the compliment had landed.
They were standing close now, closer than they had been a moment before, though Hudson could not have said which of them had moved. Close enough to see the softness of her lips, the glow on her skin, and the few freckles across her nose. Close enough to see the delicate curves under her bodice move with each breath and to smell her sweet scent.
