Falling For The Politician's Son

The Morning After

CAITLYN

He was still looking at me like I was a problem he had not yet decided how to solve.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"I heard a crash," I finally managed. "I thought someone had broken in. I was trying to be responsible."

Something moved across his expression. Not amusement exactly, but something adjacent to it that was somehow worse. He looked at me for one more long moment, then he turned away, walked back into the study, and crouched down to pick up the books scattered across the floor. He stacked them without looking at me, his wet coat still dripping steadily onto the rug, his jaw set and his movements deliberate.

I stood in the doorway not knowing whether I was dismissed or still in trouble.

He stood up, pulled a key from between the pages of the last book, and held it in his fist for a moment before sliding it into his coat pocket. Then he looked back at me over his shoulder.

"Clean this room before I return in the morning." His voice was flat and cold and left no room for discussion. "And I don't want to find you wandering around the house when I get back. Stay in your room."

He walked past me into the hallway.

"Sir—" I turned after him. "Am I — are you firing me?"

He did not stop walking. Did not turn around. Just moved toward the front door with the same unhurried certainty he seemed to carry everywhere, sliding his gloves back onto his hands one finger at a time.

"Sir, please—"

The front door opened. Rain rushed in, loud and cold and immediate, and then the door slammed shut behind him and he was gone.

I stood in the entrance hall staring at the closed door.

The sound of rain filled the whole house.

I had been here less than twelve hours.

I pressed both hands over my face and stood there for a moment, just breathing, just trying to think clearly past the panic that was tightening steadily in my chest. I thought about my mother. I thought about Sherman showing up at the shop again, about the sound of furniture hitting the floor, about the way Becky had cried with her hands over her mouth.

I dropped my hands.

I was not losing this job.

I turned around and walked back into the study and I cleaned it until there was nothing left to clean. I put every book back in its place on the shelves, spine out, in the order I found them. I mopped the wet footprints off the floor and wiped down the desk and straightened the papers and stood in the doorway when I was done and looked at the room until I was satisfied that nothing was out of place.

Then I went to bed and stared at the ceiling until exhaustion pulled me under.

Morning came grey and quiet.

I woke at nine, showered, dressed, and went downstairs to find the house still empty. Bert and Fanny would not officially start for another two days, I remembered. The house was mine and the silence of it pressed in from every wall.

I pulled the curtains open in the sitting room and let the morning light come in. The garden outside was still wet from the rain, everything dark green and glistening, and there was something about it that was almost peaceful. Under different circumstances I might have loved it here.

I pressed my forehead briefly against the glass.

My mother was still in trouble. Sherman was still circling. And I had called my employer a thief on his first night home and watched him walk out into a rainstorm rather than stay in the same house as me.

These were the facts I was working with.

I heard the front door.

I spun away from the window.

He came in the way he did everything, like the space rearranged itself around him rather than the other way around. His coat was the same one from last night, still damp at the hem, his dark hair pushed back off his forehead, his jaw set and his expression closed in a way that made him look like a man who had not slept. He pulled his gloves off with his teeth as he moved toward the stairs, not looking at me, not looking at anything except wherever he was going.

"Mr. Morningstar."

His head turned.

The look he gave me was the kind that made you want to take a step back. I did not take a step back.

"What did I say," he said slowly, "about finding you lingering?"

"You didn't fire me." I pressed my hands together in front of me. "You didn't actually say the words. So until you say the words I am still employed here and I am asking you to please let me explain about last night. I heard a crash and the door was open and I didn't know who you were, nobody told me what you looked like, nobody gave me a photograph or a description or anything, so when I saw a man in a wet coat tearing through the bookshelves in the middle of the night I made an assumption that I now understand was wrong and I am sorry." I stopped. Took a breath. "Please don't fire me. I really need this job."

He stared at me.

The silence stretched long enough that I started composing a second argument in my head.

Then I noticed it. The colour of him was wrong. His skin, which had been sharp and angular and certain last night, was flushed now, a deep red sitting high on his cheekbones and across the bridge of his nose. His eyes, which had been so cold and controlled, were dim in a way that had nothing to do with mood. His hand on the stair rail was gripping it more than holding it.

He was not just tired.

"Sir." I moved toward him before I had decided to. "Are you alright?"

"Step back, Maid."

I reached up and pressed the back of my hand against his forehead before I could think better of it.

He was burning.

He pulled away from my hand like I had stung him. "Don't."

"You're sick." I reached for him again, more carefully this time. "Your coat is still damp from last night, did you sleep in this?" I touched the lapel of his coat and felt the cold wet fabric beneath my fingers. "How long were you out in the rain?"

"That is none of your—"

"You're running a fever." I said it simply, not as an argument, just as a fact that was going to need addressing regardless of whether he liked it. "You need to get out of these clothes before it gets worse."

The look he gave me could have stripped paint.

But he did not move away when I took hold of his arm. He let me steer him, stiffly and with tremendous reluctance, up the stairs and to his bedroom door, where he stopped and looked at me with an expression that made it very clear this was the absolute limit of what he was willing to allow.

"I'll find something dry for you." I pushed the door open and moved to his wardrobe before he could object. "Change and get into bed. I'm going to make you something to eat."

"I don't need—"

"You were out in the rain all night." I pulled a grey sweater and sweatpants from the wardrobe and turned around. He was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and his jaw tight and his flushed face arranged into an expression of extreme displeasure that might have been more convincing if he had not looked quite so unsteady on his feet. I walked to the bed and laid the clothes across it. "I'll be outside. Please change before I come back."

I walked past him to the door.

"Maid."

I stopped.

"When I said you are never allowed in this room." His voice was quieter than before, rougher at the edges. "That rule still stands. This is a temporary exception. Do you understand?"

I looked back at him.

Up close, in the morning light, he looked younger than he had in the dark study last night. Not soft. Nothing about him was soft. But younger, and tired, and underneath all that cold precision there was something that looked very much like a person who had been holding himself together through the specific effort of will rather than any natural ease.

"Yes sir," I said. "I understand."

I made chicken soup from what I could find in the kitchen, slow and careful, the way my mother taught me. When I came back upstairs and knocked he was already in bed, the damp coat gone, the dry clothes on, his head back against the pillow and his eyes closed. He opened them when I knocked.

I set the bowl on the nightstand. He looked at it, then at me, and something in the set of his jaw made it clear he was about to tell me to leave.

"You should eat while it's hot," I said before he could.

He picked up the spoon. Put it down. I could see the effort it was taking him to do something as simple as sit upright, so I knelt by the side of the bed without asking permission and picked the spoon up myself.

He looked at me kneeling on his floor like I had done something personally offensive.

"I can feed myself," he said.

"You put the spoon down twice."

His jaw tightened. But he did not stop me when I lifted the spoon toward him.

We stayed like that in silence while he ate, me kneeling on the cold floor, him too proud to ask for help and too sick to refuse it, the morning light sitting quietly in the window between us. I had fed my mother soup like this once, when she had the flu so bad she could not lift her arms, and I had felt so helpless that night that I made her three bowls just to have something useful to do with my hands.

This felt different. I could not explain exactly how.

He swallowed the last of it and I stood up to take the bowl. His eyes followed me across the room, dimmer than before but still watching, still that same careful assessment that made me feel like every movement I made was being noted and filed away somewhere.

"You made this from scratch," he said. It was not quite a question.

"Yes sir."

He was quiet for a moment.

"It tastes like something my mother used to make."

I stopped at the door and looked back at him.

His eyes were closed now, his head turned slightly toward the window, and his face had gone very still in the way faces go when something is being held back rather than expressed. He looked, for just that one unguarded moment, like someone carrying something heavy that he had been carrying alone for a very long time.

I thought about asking. I thought better of it.

"I'll check on you this evening," I said quietly. "Get some rest, sir."

He didn't answer.

But he didn't tell me not to come back either.

I pulled the door gently closed behind me and stood in the hallway with the empty bowl in my hands and the strange, unsettling feeling that I had just seen something I was not supposed to see.

Something that was going to make all of this a great deal more complicated.