Page 56 of The Wallflower Takes All

He inclined his head. “You accounted for Lady Montague.”

“Yes.”

“And for possible debts attached to the household.”

“Of course.”

“And for the question of separate funds in the event of widowhood.”

Poppy looked down at her gloves. “I thought it best to be practical.”

“You were more than practical. You were careful.”

Careful. Now there was a word chosen with unsettling precision.

“I have had practice,” she said.

“So I gathered.”

“I do not want to be caught unaware.” Her voice was quieter now. “Not again.”

Mr. Ashby did not answer immediately.

“Were you?” he finally asked.

“Was I what?”

“Caught unaware.”

It was impertinent, perhaps. Too direct. Yet he seemed to ask it as he asked legal questions, not to pry but to gather every particular.

Poppy could have deflected. She was very good at deflecting. Instead, perhaps because the night had already stripped away too many of her defenses, she said, “When Papa died, yes.”

Mr. Ashby’s expression changed, but he did not interrupt.

“I was thirteen,” she said. “Old enough to understand people were speaking softly around me. Not old enough to know what any of it meant. Not really. One day there was Papa, and laughter, and Mama in yellow silk singing too loudly after dinner, and the next…” She paused. “The next, everyone was whispering about settlements and entailments and what Lady Montague would do now.”

“What did she do?” he nearly whispered.

Poppy looked toward the staircase.

“She…stopped,” Poppy said, expelling a long breath. “It happened slowly, without any single moment people could point to and say, ‘There, that is when it changed.’ She stopped being the person who knew where my gloves were. She stopped knowing whether bills had been paid or servants dismissed or letters answered. She still laughed. She laughed more, perhaps. But the part of her that had been my mother retreated somewhere I could not follow.”

The foyer seemed very still after that.

“That sounds unkind,” Poppy said.

He shook his head. “It doesn’t. I understand.” Mr. Ashby’s gaze lowered for a moment. “My father changed as well after my mother died.”

Poppy looked at him. She had known his mother had died, but until this moment she had not considered that they shared this awful inheritance: a parent altered by grief, and a childhood shaped around the space it left behind.

“He didn’t stop loving me,” Gabriel continued quietly. “I never doubted that. But something in him went elsewhere for a time. He became softer in some ways and absent in others. He forgot meals, appointments, letters. He gave away money we ought to have kept because suffering had become impossible for him to refuse.” His mouth tightened. “I was only a boy, but I remember thinking that if I could keep everything in its proper place, perhaps the house would hold together.”

Poppy’s expression softened.

All at once, the severe lines of him altered in her mind. The punctuality, the ledgers, the exactness, the unyielding insistence upon proper conduct—she had thought them judgment, perhaps even disdain. Now she saw something deeper beneath them.

A boy trying to keep a grieving house from collapsing.