It didn’t come.
Just the fire. Just the silence. Just the distant sounds of a household settling into night, footsteps in corridors, the muffled closing of doors, the ordinary sounds of people who went to bed without fear.
She hadn’t heard sounds like that in years. She hadn’t known she’d missed them.
A maid had bobbed a curtsy at her in the corridor earlier, eyes down, cheeks pink with the effort of proper deference. Megan had stood completely still and had to stop herself from looking behind her to find whoever the girl was actually curtseying to.
The housekeeper had called hermy ladytwice before Megan remembered she was supposed to respond.
My lady.
She was nobody’s lady. She was a woman who couldn’t read her own name if it were written in front of her. She was a woman who’d spent a week sleeping in shepherd’s huts and eating half-cooked hare by firelight. She was a woman with scars on her back and gaps in her memory where her childhood should have been and fourteen years of a life she couldn’t speak about in polite company.
She most certainly was not amy lady.
And yet here she sat. In a room the size of the entire upper floor of the hunting lodge. In a castle that she’d get lost in. With a fire that didn’t require her to be grateful for it. Wrapped in silk, laid out for her by a girl who curtsied.
Where did she fit?
The question pressed against her chest, familiar and unwelcome. She’d thought it in the lodge. She’d thought it in the mountains. She’d thought it riding through the gates of this enormous castle as the grooms came running and the butler appeared on the steps and everyone moved with the particular efficiency of a well-run great house, and she’d saton Oliver’s horse and thoughtI do not belong anywhere in this picture.
But then she hadn’t belonged at the hunting lodge either. She hadn’t belonged anywhere for so long.
Megan pressed her fingers against her lips.
She’d kissed Oliver this morning. Her choice, freely made, the first choice she could remember making for reasons that had nothing to do with survival or compliance or the avoidance of punishment. She’d kissed him because she’d wanted to, because he’d talked about his falcon and she’d felt something in her chest crack open like a window thrown wide after a long winter.
And he’d kissed her back. Carefully at first, then not carefully at all, and she’d understood in that moment what it was supposed to feel like. What it was supposed to be when it was chosen rather than endured.
She closed her eyes.
She could not want Oliver Sommerset. The wanting was a luxury she absolutely could not afford. He was heir to a dukedom. He had an uncle in the next wing who even now was probably telling him exactly what sort of inconvenience she represented. She had no name, no family, no dowry, no history that could be spoken of without ruining every room she entered. She was precisely the wrong kind of woman in precisely the wrong place.
She’d known that before they’d ridden through those gates. She’d known it when she sat on his horse and felt the solidness of him behind her and thought,this is what it would feel like to be protected by someone who chose to protect you, and she’d been ashamed of the thought because she was twenty-one years old and ought to have better sense than to mistake a week of shared danger for something it could never be.
She would leave. Once she’d given her testimony, once Oliver had what he needed to pursue justice for James, shewould go. North, perhaps, as she’d thought in the mountains. Scotland. Somewhere far enough that Penharrow’s reach didn’t extend and close enough to ordinary life that she might eventually learn to live one.
She would find her family. That was something real. Something to walk toward rather than simply running away from everything behind her. She had a face. She had green eyes that apparently weren’t common. She had a memory of a village fair, ribbons and honey cakes, a woman’s hand she’d held tightly. Somewhere in England there were people who had lost a child fourteen years ago and never stopped wondering.
Or they had stopped wondering. That possibility sat in her chest like a stone.
She’d been gone so long. She’d been so thoroughly remade into Megan, into Penharrow’s Megan, that she barely knew what remained of whoever she’d been as a child. What if there was no family left to find? What if they’d looked and given up, and built their lives around the grief of losing her, and the last thing they needed was a ghost walking back through the door after such a long time, ruined and strange and unable to read a simple letter?
The fire crackled and shifted. A log settled with a soft collapse of ash.
Megan pressed her palm flat against her sternum and made herself breathe.
She was out.
Whatever else was uncertain, her future, her past, her name, her place in any world she might try to inhabit—she was, for now, safe. The walls of this room had no bars on the windows. She could see that from where she sat. The door was not locked from the outside. The fire was not Penharrow’s fire. The silk she wore was not Penharrow’s silk.
She was out.
It was the most enormous truth she’d ever held, and shecouldn’t quite make it feel real. Fourteen years of captivity had trained her to distrust good things, to find the catch, to understand that kindness was currency and someone always presented the bill. She kept waiting for this to resolve into something she recognized. Something with a cost.
The maid would come back with terms. The housekeeper’s deference would curdle into contempt once the novelty of her presence wore off. Oliver would come to her door and explain that naturally there were expectations, that protection of this kind required.
She stopped that thought hard.
