Chapter 16 16

Chapter 16 16
Chapter 16
Daphne's POV

Vera did not stay long that first morning.

She walked the perimeter of the garden slowly, the way someone does when they are reacquainting themselves with something they have been avoiding. She stopped at the rose wall and looked at it for a long moment without speaking. She touched the woody base of the main stem with two fingers, lightly, the way you touch something you are not sure still belongs to you.

"I planted this one the year Caspian was born," she said.

I filed the name away quietly. Caspian. It was the first time anyone had said it in front of me and I understood instinctively that it was not something to react to, only to receive.

"It's old enough to be worth saving," I said. "The root system will be deep by now. It just needs cutting back properly and something to train it against. The structure it was following has come away from the wall."

She looked at the rusted iron fixture that had once held the stems in place, now hanging at an angle from a single remaining anchor. "It came loose in a storm two winters ago," she said. "I kept meaning to have it fixed."

"It can be fixed," I said.

She turned and looked at me then with a directness that reminded me so completely of her son that I had to resist the urge to look away. She had his eyes, or he had hers — that same quality of attention that made you feel examined without feeling judged, which was its own particular and disarming thing.

"How are you finding it here," she said. Not a question exactly. More like an opening.

"Quiet," I said.

The corner of her mouth moved. "That's diplomatic."

"It's also true."

She considered me for a moment longer and then nodded, as though I had answered something she hadn't quite asked. "Come inside when you're ready," she said. "I'll have tea sent to my sitting room. If you'd like."

She left before I could answer, which I suspected was intentional. It removed the possibility of refusal without making it an order. A gracious kind of pressure, the sort that comes from years of understanding how to move people without appearing to.

I stayed in the garden for another half hour before going in.

Mrs. Dorothy was waiting in the corridor and walked me to a room I hadn't been to before — on the same floor but further along, past the turn in the hallway where I had not yet ventured. The sitting room was smaller than I expected, lived-in in a way the rest of the house wasn't. Books with broken spines. A blanket folded over the arm of the chair nearest the window. A small table with a plant on it that was thriving in the particular deliberate way of something that gets spoken to.

Vera was already seated. Tea was already poured.

I sat across from her and picked up the cup because it gave my hands something to do.

"Mrs. Dorothy tells me you asked for work on your second day," she said.

"Sitting still doesn't suit me."

"No," she said, studying me. "I didn't think it would." She sipped her tea. "Where did you learn about gardens?"

"The kitchen garden at my father's house," I said. "The cook let me help when I was small. Before things changed." I paused. "After that I just read about it when I could find books. There wasn't much opportunity to practise."

She received this without flinching, which told me she already knew the shape of where I had come from, even if not the specific details. Caspian would have told her something. Or she had simply understood from the cortisol levels and the way I held myself in doorways and the fact that I had arrived here with nothing.

"You have a good eye for it," she said. "The lavender especially. Most people would have pulled it."

"Most people look at what something looks like now," I said. "Not what it could be."

Something moved in her expression at that — deeper than the rose and the lavender, reaching somewhere else entirely. She set her cup down with the particular care of someone who needs a moment before they speak.

"He's not an easy person," she said.

The shift was so clean that it took me a second to follow it. We had been talking about plants and now we were not.

"I know," I said.

"He wasn't always this way." She looked at the window. "His father's death started it. Lucas finished it." She paused. "That's his brother. His twin. He died six years ago."

"I'm sorry," I said. And meant it, which was not always the case when those words came out of my mouth.

"He hasn't let anyone close since," she said. "Not properly. He functions, he leads, he does everything required of him and he does it well. But there's a difference between a person who is present and a person who is available, and for six years he has been one without being the other." She looked back at me. "I'm not telling you this to explain him. Or to ask anything of you. I'm telling you because I think you already know some version of it and I would rather you have the fuller picture than the one you've been piecing together from corridors and closed doors."

I looked at her steadily. "Why?"

She picked up her cup again. "Because you stayed seated when he came into the room," she said simply. "Everyone else stands. Has stood, for years, without thinking about it." A pause. "He noticed."

I said nothing.

"He didn't mention it to me," she added. "I noticed him noticing."

The fire in the small grate ticked and settled. Outside the window the sky had gone the flat white of a day that couldn't decide what it wanted to do with itself.

"The rose can be saved," I said eventually. "But it needs the fixing on the wall first. The training matters as much as the cutting back."

Vera looked at me for a long moment.

"Yes," she said quietly. "I expect it does."