Chapter 30 030

Chapter 30 030
Chapter 30
Daphne's POV

I woke in the library.

The fire was completely cold, the room grey with early light coming through the gap in the curtains, and for a moment I lay still in the unfamiliar quality of waking somewhere other than my bed, taking stock of the room and my own body and the arm that was still around me. He was awake. I could tell from his breathing, which had the particular evenness of someone who has been lying still for a while and has not wanted to disturb the thing they were lying still with.

I turned my head to look at him.

He was looking at the ceiling with the focused unhurried expression of someone thinking through something carefully, and when he felt me move he looked down and the expression changed into the quiet version of itself that I had come to understand was the closest he came to unguarded.

"How long have you been awake," I said.

"A while," he said.

"You should have moved," I said. "Your arm."

"I didn't want to wake you," he said. Simply. As though it were the most ordinary thing, to lie still in a cold room with a dead fire for however long it had been because the person beside him was sleeping and he did not want to interrupt that.

I sat up slowly and pushed my hair back and looked at the grey room around us. The botanical book was still on the table where it had been displaced. The lamp had burned out at some point. The library in early light looked different than it did in the evening — less amber, more honest, the shelves very present and the books very numerous and the two of us on the low couch looking exactly like what we were, which was two people who had fallen asleep somewhere they had not planned to fall asleep.

"I need to go upstairs," I said. "Before the house wakes up."

He nodded. He did not suggest otherwise, which I appreciated — not because I wanted distance from what the night had been but because the managing of it was a practical matter and he understood that without requiring explanation.

I stood and found my shoes and put myself back into something approximating order. He stood too and in the grey morning light of the library he looked different than he did in any other hour I had seen him in — less armoured, something in the set of his face that was softer without being diminished, the way things look when the performance has been stood down and the actual person remains.

He walked me to the library door.

In the doorway he stopped me with a hand at my arm, not holding, just present, and I looked up at him.

He didn't say anything immediately. He looked at me in the early grey light with the full quality of his attention and I held it the way I had learned to hold it — not looking away, not reducing myself to make it more comfortable, just receiving it as the thing it was.

"Today will be hard," he said. The same thing he had said last night, except this morning it carried the weight of everything between then and now.

"I know," I said.

"I'll be there," he said. "The whole time. Whatever she says."

Something moved through me at that. Warm and steady and not at all small.

"I know that too," I said.

I went upstairs.

Mrs. Dorothy was in the corridor outside my room when I reached it, which told me either that she had already been to the room and found it empty and had waited, or that she had always known where I would be coming from this morning and had positioned herself accordingly without any fuss about it either way. Her expression gave nothing away, which was its own form of grace.

"Breakfast is on the tray," she said, nodding toward the door. "The meeting is at eleven."

"Thank you," I said.

She looked at me for one brief moment with the particular look she had sometimes — not assessment exactly, more like confirmation of something she had already assessed — and then she nodded and walked away down the corridor and left me to my morning.

I washed and changed and ate sitting at the desk by the window, methodical about all of it, giving each thing its proper attention because the alternative was letting my mind run ahead to eleven o'clock and that would not help me arrive there in any useful condition. The supplement. The tea. The food that was warm and adequate and present in the straightforward way it always was. Outside the window the morning was brighter than yesterday, the flat silver gone and something with more colour in it replacing it, the stone of the courtyard catching a pale winter sun that had no real warmth in it but offered the suggestion of warmth, which was something.

I thought about what I wanted to say to her.

I had been thinking about it for two days and I was not certain I was any closer to knowing, which was its own kind of answer. The prepared version — the questions I had said I wanted answered first, the how long and the why and the what is your connection to Quintus — those were all still there and still necessary. But underneath them was something else, something that did not have the clean shape of a question, something more formless and more basic.

I wanted to know what her face did when she saw mine.

Not what she said. Not the explanation, which would be constructed and purposeful regardless of how honest she intended it to be. What her face did in the first second before she could construct anything.

I had spent my life reading that kind of information from people because it was the only reliable kind, the kind that came before the management of it, and it had rarely been wrong.

I finished the tea and set the cup down and looked at the pale winter sun on the courtyard stones.

In three hours I was going to sit across a table from a woman who had let me believe she was dead for twenty-two years and who had scent markers connecting her to a grandfather who had sold me at twelve, and I was going to watch her face before she said a word and know more from that single second than from everything that followed.

I had survived worse.

I straightened in my chair and felt the steadiness of it, the solidity of my own spine, the particular quiet of a person who has been through enough that what is coming, however hard, does not feel unsurvivable.

The courtyard below went about its morning.

Eleven o'clock was coming whether I was ready or not.

I was ready.