AURELIA MARLOWE

I sat where he had left me long after the front door closed, the eggs going cold and the tea cooling between my palms.

Mrs Hale cleared his place without comment. Someone refilled my cup. I thanked them and tried to remember how to swallow, the humiliation from the night before still sharp enough that I set the cup down carefully so it would not rattle.

I was not going to sit in his dining room feeling small.

“Mrs Hale?”

“Yes, Mrs Blackwell?”

“Would you mind showing me the rest of the ground floor properly? I only had a brief walk-through yesterday.”

“Of course.”

She was patient without being pitying, which I liked. She named each doorway as we reached it, described the layout of the sitting room, the study he kept locked, and the conservatory at the back of the house where the morning light came through glass and the air smelled faintly of damp earth and citrus leaves. I mapped it with the cane and the sound of her voice, counting steps and noting the change from stone to rug until the shape of the floor began to settle.

“Mr Blackwell is at the office most days,” she said when we returned to the hall. “If you need anything, Maisie or I will sort it.”

“Thank you.”

I went upstairs alone. My room still smelled of the previous night’s bath and the candle Seraphina gave me. Bubbles was asleep on the windowsill. Aura was nowhere obvious, which usually meant she was plotting something evil, I'm sure.

I sat on the edge of the bed and rang Ivy. She answered on the second ring.

“So how did it gooooo, the new married wife?”

I could picture her perfectly—eyebrows arched, that wicked little smile already in place—and if I had been in the same room I would have flung a cushion straight at her head. As it was, I only had words.

“You little menace.”

She laughed, unrepentant. “I’m guessing we didn’t get that temple breached.”

I rolled my eyes and let myself fall back against the pillows. “Ivy.”

“What? Legitimate question.”

I told her everything and finished with an annoyed sigh, as even remembering it put me on edge.

“That’s properly wild,” she said when I finished. “Maybe he’ll warm up once he realises you’re not plotting his downfall between breakfast and elevenses.”

“I keep hoping,” I admitted. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a miserable arrangement. I’m still enough of a romantic for that, even if my idea of a relationship so far has mostly involved Father hovering three feet away and a security detail pretending not to listen.”

“Remember what I told you,” Ivy said, softer now. “You leave if you’re not happy.”

I sighed. “It isn’t that simple. Divorce would destroy everything Father has worked for.”

We steered the conversation elsewhere after that. Seraphina joined the call, and for a little while the three of us talked the way we always had—easy, overlapping, full of the sort of nonsense that made the distance feel smaller. Homesickness still sat under my ribs by the time we rang off, but it was gentler than it had been that morning. Change was supposed to feel like this, I told myself. They could visit. I could visit them and the house did not have to become a cage.

I had barely set the phone down when the twin chorus started.

“Mrrraaow—mrrraaaow—mrrrow!”

Bubbles’s deeper, insistent demand rolled straight into Aura’s higher, more piercing complaint. They were not requesting anything. They were issuing a formal grievance.

Bubbles head-butted my shin hard enough to rock me, then did it again, louder. Aura leapt onto the bed, walked deliberately across my stomach, and sat on my chest with the air of a queen who had been kept waiting far too long. When I tried to sit up she dug her claws in just enough to make her point, then hopped down and began weaving figure-eights around my ankles, yowling the entire time as though I had personally offended her ancestors.

“All right, all right, you absolute tyrants.”

I found my cane and followed the racket downstairs, the two of them escorting me like particularly noisy bodyguards. Every few steps one of them would stop dead in front of my feet so I had to freeze or risk stepping on them, then resume the protest the moment I moved again. By the time we reached the kitchen Mrs Hale was already there, unfazed.

“Someone’s decided it’s lunchtime,” she said.

I smiled. “Someone has decided it’s always lunchtime.”

She set down two ceramic bowls. The soft clink of wet food hitting the dish was immediately drowned by renewed, triumphant meowing. I crouched, ran my fingers once over each ridiculously soft head, then left them to it.

The moment I turned toward the conservatory the volume doubled.

“Mrrraaow! Mrrraaaaow!”

Bubbles abandoned his bowl mid-mouthful and trotted after me, complaining at full volume. Aura simply sat in the doorway and screamed, a long, rising yowl that made it perfectly clear I was committing an unforgivable act of abandonment.

I sighed and stopped. “You do this every single time.”

The second I tried to leave a room while food still existed in the world, the theatrics began. I turned back, sank onto the nearest kitchen chair, and waited. Bubbles returned to his bowl with a final grumble. Aura stalked over, ate three precise mouthfuls, then came and rubbed the entire length of her body against my calves as though the previous five minutes of vocal abuse had never happened. Bubbles followed suit, rubbing himself thoroughly against my legs until both of them were satisfied that I had been sufficiently claimed.

Only then did they allow me to stand.

I stepped out into the small paved garden at the back of the house. The air was warmer than I expected. I tipped my face up and let the sun find me, heat settling across my cheeks and the bridge of my nose. A light breeze moved through the leaves of whatever climbed the wall behind me, carrying the clean green scent of cut grass and the faint citrus from the conservatory. For a moment the house and the locked study and the man who lived in both of them felt further away.

I stayed there until the warmth began to fade and the cats, having decided outdoor time was now also unacceptable, started up again from the doorway.

By the time I climbed the stairs again, the sleepless night had caught up with me. I lay down on top of the covers, meaning only to rest my eyes for a few minutes, with Bubbles a warm weight against my hip and the late-afternoon quiet settling over the house.

I did not know what woke me. The room was as dark to me as it always was, but the air had changed, and the cooler hush told me the afternoon had slipped towards evening while I slept. Cedar and clean musk and that faint spice that seemed to live in his skin had filled the room. I lay still, listening, and felt the weight of him standing at the edge of the bed.

I had no idea how long he had been there.

"Get dressed," he said.

The low, deep timbre of his voice washed over me, quiet enough that it might have been meant only for the room. "There's a charity gala this evening. We leave in two hours."

I pushed myself up on one elbow. "A gala?"

But he was already moving. The door clicked softly behind him before I could ask anything else.

I sat in the silence he left, heart beating a little too fast, and wondered how long he had stood there watching me sleep. The thought should have unsettled me more than it did. Instead a small, unexpected thread of excitement wound through the confusion. I was leaving the house. We were going somewhere that was not these quiet rooms and the careful distance he kept.

Maisie's knock came only minutes later.

"Mrs Blackwell? Mr Blackwell asked me to help you prepare."

I swung my legs off the bed, already reaching for my cane, and found myself smiling.