CHAPTER FIFTEEN #2
Viola seemed to accept this. She squeezed Mel’s hand and turned her attention to a seabird circling overhead, her questions temporarily satisfied.
The walk continued. The children ran and explored and came back to report their findings. Mel listened and responded and maintained the appearance of complete engagement while some part of her remained fixed on the gossip sheet she had folded so carefully and left on the kitchen table.
She would not write to him. She would send no message of reproach or disappointment. What would be the point? He knew what he had done. He knew what the gossip sheets would report. If he cared about her opinion, he would not have given them something to report in the first place.
And if he did not care about her opinion, then no letter from her would make a difference.
That evening, after the children were asleep, Mrs. Kemp found Mel in the study. She was sitting at the desk that had become associated in her mind with evening conversations and philosophical discussions and the slow dismantling of walls she had spent years constructing.
“Miss Grace? Are you feeling quite well?”
Mel looked up from the book she had been pretending to read.
“Perfectly fine, thank you. Just a slight headache.”
Mrs. Kemp’s expression suggested that she had opinions about slight headaches and the things that caused them, but she said nothing. She simply nodded and withdrew, leaving Mel alone with her headache and her book and the particular silence of a house where someone important was missing.
The headache lasted three days.
It was not, of course, an actual headache.
It was the physical manifestation of grief that had no other outlet, the body’s way of expressing what the mind refused to acknowledge.
Mel knew this. She understood the connection between emotional distress and physical symptoms, had read enough philosophy and natural science to recognise what was happening inside her.
Understanding did not make it stop.
She continued to teach. She continued to care for the children. She continued to maintain the professional competence that had always been her armor against a world that offered no protection to women of her station.
Viola’s nightmares subsided, for which Mel was grateful.
The child had been sleeping through the night for two days now, her vague fears apparently fading without the intervention of midnight milk and lullabies.
Perhaps the nightmares had been connected to anxiety about her father’s departure. Perhaps they would return when he did.
If he returned at all.
No. Mel stopped that thought before it could fully form. He would return. Whatever his failings, whatever his scandals, he was devoted to his children. He would not abandon them entirely, would not leave them waiting forever for a father who never came.
He would simply continue to be what he had always been: a presence that came and went, that charmed and disappointed in equal measure, that promised more than it could deliver.
And Mel would be here, as she had promised to be. She would teach his children and care for his household and watch him come and go with the particular stoicism of a woman who had learned not to expect anything she was not prepared to lose.
On the third evening, she sat in her room after the children were asleep and looked at the shell on her windowsill. The perfect shell that Viola had given her on the beach, the one that represented trust and connection and the slow building of something precious.
She had built something precious here. Not with Rhys, not the impossible thing she had been foolish enough to hope for, but with the children. With Anna and Viola and Thistle, who needed her and cherished her and would be devastated if she left.
She could not leave as she had promised. And unlike some people, Mel kept her promises.
The shell caught the candlelight, its surface gleaming with the particular iridescence that had made Viola select it from all the shells on the beach. It was beautiful. It was fragile. It was something that could be broken if handled carelessly.
Mel picked it up and held it in her palm, feeling its smooth weight, remembering the moment Viola had pressed it into her hand with shy pride.
She would stay. She would cherish these children with everything she had. She would be present and constant and real, all the things their father struggled to be.
And she would not allow herself to hope for anything more.
Hope was dangerous. Hope was what made disappointment possible. She had learned that lesson at sixteen, when her father walked out of her life and took hope with him. She had relearned it in the years since, through every small devastation that life had offered.
She would not learn it again.
The shell went back on the windowsill and Mel went to bed and in the morning, she rose and dressed and went downstairs to teach Latin, as though nothing had happened at all.
Because nothing had happened. A man had gone to London and done what men in London did. A woman had read about it in the gossip sheets and felt the appropriate disappointment. Nothing had changed except the final extinguishing of a hope she should never have allowed herself to feel.
She had survived worse than this and would survive this too.
The headache faded on the fourth day. Mel took it as a sign that her body was finally accepting what her mind had known all along, that expecting anything from anyone was a recipe for disaster, and that the only person she could truly rely on was herself.
She was enough. She had always been enough. And if the house felt emptier without him, if the evenings felt longer without their conversations, if some part of her listened for footsteps that never came, well. She would adjust, she would adapt, she would survive.
It was what she did.