The Midnight Estate #3
her in reliance to him. And so he did the only thing he’d ever known to do when he was worried—he worked. From the minute
he returned from his sunrise walk to the minute his eyes felt too heavy to continue, he sat at his desk. Every now and again,
Marie would knock politely on his study door and beg him for something to do.
“Why don’t you rest? The television is in the ballroom.” It was a large black-and-white set he bought mostly for Christine
and he wasn’t actually sure how to use it, but he did know Christine watched the news on it from time to time so the thing
must work. That seemed to distract Marie for a few hours, but before he knew it, she was back at the door.
“Excuse me, Silas, I’m sorry to bother you but . . .”
“What is it?” He didn’t want to sound impatient, but Silas felt that every interruption set him back hours. If Marie was going
to knock on his study door several times a day, they were going to have a problem.
“It only picks up one channel,” she said, laughing softly. “And it’s showing some sports match I’ve never seen before—something with a bat and a ball and not much happening, actually. I didn’t want to overstep but . . . would you mind if I do some baking?”
He said yes mostly because it seemed the fastest way to move her on and then he went right back to his work. But maybe a week
later it struck Silas quite suddenly that he hadn’t cooked a thing in days and yet he wasn’t hungry. He emerged from his study,
blinking as if he’d just woken up, and realized the hallway—which even he had noticed was a little dusty—was gleaming. He walked down to the kitchen and found Marie sitting at the table, reading
a book. Something savory and fragrant was in a casserole dish in his oven. There was not a single dirty dish to be seen in
the room.
“Marie—Maeve,” he corrected himself. It felt so awkward to say his sister’s name when he spoke to Marie, but he knew if he didn’t keep
in the habit, he’d slip when they were at Christine’s place.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said quietly. “Why don’t you call me Mae?”
“Mae?”
“Well, it’s kind of close to both names. And it will mean you don’t have to call me . . .” She swallowed. “I just mean it
must be hard to call me by her name, that’s all.”
“Mae,” he repeated, and then he nodded. That might actually work. “Mae, have you been cooking for me?”
She looked at him blankly.
“You didn’t realize I cooked the food you’ve been eating the last few days? Where did you think it came from?”
Now he had a vague memory of her quietly knocking and bringing in plates of food and cups of water and mugs of coffee, of her silently slipping into his study to retrieve the dirty crockery hours later.
It was hard to explain how much he lived in his work when he was writing—how difficult it was to concentrate on his real life when he was fully immersed.
He was never really anywhere real in the days and weeks of an exciting new project because some part of his mind was always working.
Silas was gradually realizing this was a big part of the reason Christine had been so unhappy with him, but he couldn’t bear
to think about that, because it wasn’t like he chose to be this way and he didn’t know how to change. Linda used to say he was born with his head in the clouds and he only visited earth when there was no way to avoid
it.
He scrubbed his hand down over his face, frustrated with himself. He was going to have to figure out how to put some boundaries around his work if he was going to fix his marriage.
“I get a little obsessive when I’m working,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. “I’m sorry. And thank you.”
“What did you do when Christine wasn’t here?” she asked him. “Did you just starve?”
“I tended to work until I physically couldn’t keep going then I’d stop and eat whatever was at hand.”
“I want to be of help and it gives me something to do,” she said, and she looked back to the book on her table.
He realized with a start that it was one of his—the one he wrote during his freshman year at college, the one that earned a major deal and hit best-seller lists and won awards and changed every single aspect of his life.
He couldn’t stand to watch someone read his work, so he turned to walk away, but Marie called out, “Wait. I’ve cleaned the house.
There’s only so much cooking to do and besides, we’re going to run out of food soon again unless we do some shopping.
” Silas had taken her to the grocery store a few times, but every time they ran out of food, she had to nag him to take her back for more.
“You can take the car yourself. Just go into the town.”
“I can’t drive on this side of the road,” she said, visibly horrified. “Please. I will—sooner or later—but let me get used
to it some more first. Please.”
“Okay,” he sighed. “Okay. I’ll take you later this afternoon.” He hesitated. “Should we—should you—think about finding a doctor?”
She flinched as if he’d physically threatened her, then looked back down at the book.
“Not yet,” she said, her voice very small. “Please. Not yet.”
Over the days that followed, they fell into something of a routine, Silas writing and Marie pottering around the house. She
kept him fed and hydrated and she dragged him to the store for food and to buy rugs to dampen the echo in his office, and
she reminded him to visit Christine and Ernest and while he was out, she tidied his desk.
He had two months of mail waiting for him and he’d been putting off opening it because he only wanted to write, but Marie
suggested gently that she could sort it for him, and he was pleased to hand the task over. He came back from a visit to Christine
to find the letters opened and organized on his desk into three piles: for his urgent attention, letters that could wait until
later, letters he could probably throw out. She had dusted half of his office too, and she’d started sorting the chaotic collection
of books he’d acquired over the years since he arrived in Australia, shelving them into categories.
“You seem like an organized, efficient sort,” he said, staring at the piles of letters and feeling so relieved he could have hugged her.
“I suppose,” Marie said awkwardly. “It’s not perfect. I don’t really know what some of those letters mean. And there are some
bills there you really should pay. I can pay them if you want me to but . . . I guess you’d have to give me your chequebook.”
He looked at her thoughtfully.
“The thing is . . . I’m not. Organized and efficient, I mean.”
“Everyone has their strengths. I couldn’t do your work if I had a gun to my head.”
“Can you type?”
“Not well. But I could learn.”
“And can you balance a chequebook?”
Her eyes lit up at this. “Oh yes,” she said. “Math. Numbers. That’s my real strength.”
“Mae,” he said suddenly. “Would you like a job?”
As far as Marie could tell, Silas was one of those people who possessed a single extraordinary skill—but only one skill. He was obviously successful in his work but completely out of his depth when it came to managing the basic functions
of his own life.
She was more than pleased to help him out. It gave her something to do. A purpose to her days. And best of all, a way to repay
his kindness, and to earn herself some money.
Silas helped her set up an office of her own in one of the unused bedrooms at “her” end of the first floor.
He bought her a desk and a chair and pushed the bed against the far wall, and then he went out and came back with a typewriter and book from the library—Touch Typing in Fifty Lessons.
Marie practiced until her hands ached, every day for hours and hours, until she could type fluently, and quickly too. She
started taking tentative drives out on the deserted country roads around the house, with Maeve’s American driver’s license
in her purse in case she happened upon a local police officer. Soon, she felt confident enough to drive as far as Christine
and Meg’s house, and not long after that, into town so she could go to the post office or the grocery store.
After that, Marie drove herself to the police station and she arranged her very own Australian’s driver’s license—in Maeve’s
name, of course—but that she didn’t need to ask Silas for help with this task made her feel an oddly powerful thrill.
Christine was fast becoming a friend, and that left Marie feeling conflicted. She understood the logic behind the story Silas
had come up with on her behalf, and with every passing day, her old life seemed a little further behind her. Every time the
fear would rise that Rupert might find her, she’d remember that arduous journey, and the way the trip itself had shown her
just how big and wide the world was. Rupert would never find her, not tucked away in an airy old mansion just out of Forbes, a place which felt to her as though it might as well
have been another planet. She had Silas to thank for that, and so much more.
But Marie wanted to tell Christine the truth, and she probably could have, except that Silas was so concerned about the optics