Chapter 38: The Dance We Never Had
Nothing was said the next morning about the words I'd whispered into an empty room, but everything felt different anyway. Adrian reached for the teapot at breakfast and poured my cup without thinking, the same automatic habit he'd abandoned days earlier, and something in that small gesture settled warm in my chest.
Mrs. Brooks noticed. Victor noticed. I noticed. Nobody said a word, though the silence carried none of the heaviness it had held all week.
It felt like the first ray of sunlight breaking through a storm that had lasted far too long.
I carried two cups of coffee into his study later that morning instead of waiting for him to find me, setting one beside his stack of reports. "I remembered how you take it," I said.
He looked at the cup, then
