The housekeeper hesitated briefly before showing her inside.
Her mother was waiting in the drawing room. She was not sitting as she once might have, but standing near the window as though she had been expecting that moment for hours and was still uncertain whether it would actually arrive.
“Anne.”
The name landed awkwardly in the space between them.
“Mother,” Anne replied after a pause.
Neither moved for a moment. The silence was not hostile exactly, but it carried the weight of everything neither of them knew how to begin repairing.
“I received your letter,” Anne said finally.
Her mother gave a small nod. “I hoped you would come.”
That simple admission seemed to make everything more complicated.
Anne set her gloves down carefully on the nearest chair, buying herself time. “It was… certainly unexpected,” she admitted.
“I imagine it was.” Another pause followed, then her mother gestured toward the seating area. “Will you sit?”
Anne did, though the movement felt cautious, as though she were stepping into a conversation that might shift under her at any moment. The fire crackled softly, and outside, carriage wheels rolled distantly along the street.
“I did not know whether you would come,” her mother said.
“I almost did not.”
That elicited a tired sigh from her mother, reluctant understanding rather than surprise. “I would not have blamed you.”
The honesty unsettled Anne more than any defensiveness might have. She studied her mother for a moment, noticing things she had either ignored or refused to see before: the slight strain around her eyes and the absence of any attempt at elegance that once seemed effortless.
“You wrote as though nothing had changed between us,” she said carefully.
Her mother’s gaze briefly flickered away. “That was not my intention.”
“But it is what you asked for.”
Her mother lowered herself into the chair opposite, slower than Anne remembered. “I did not know how else to reach you. I thought… I thought distance would have given you some time.”
Anne let out a quiet, humorless breath. She would have been cruel if she had not noticed the weariness in her mother’s eyes. The more she looked at her, the more she wondered if she had always been that way and if she had simply missed it.
“It gave me distance and little else,” she replied.
Her mother folded her hands tightly in her lap. “When your father died,” she said after a moment, “I did not know how to function within the household anymore. I could not keep the stables, not in the way your father had. Everything began slipping faster than I could control. People were waiting for decisions I could not make quickly enough.” Her gaze dropped briefly. “I was frightened.”
The admission sounded almost odd in her voice.
“That is not an excuse,” she added quickly. “It is only the truth.” Then she exhaled heavily. “Selling Tempest broke something in me as well.”
Anne’s breath caught slightly. Her mother noticed.
“I know how much he meant to you,” she said quietly. “He meant the same to me in a different way.”
Anne’s fingers tightened faintly against her skirt. “You never said that.”
“I could not,” her mother admitted. “Not then. I told myself it was necessary, and that survival sometimes demanded choices that felt like cruelty, even when they were not meant to be.”
Anne’s voice came out quieter than she had intended. “Was it necessary?”
