[Edmund’s POV]
The kettle clicks off and I'm standing here holding two mugs because my hands didn't get the memo. I put the second one back—muscle memory, the ghost of a morning routine I can't seem to kill—and carry Blythe's tea upstairs with both hands like it's something that could shatter.
She's on the bed where Cora left her, cross-legged, sketchbook sealed on the desk like evidence. Her jaw is set in that Whitfield style—same stubbornness, same steel. I sit on the mattress edge and hand her the mug, and whatever scaffolding she built for her sister's visit comes apart.
Not dramatic. Her shoulders fold inward, her mouth presses into a line that won't hold, and then she's crying—the kind she held back while Cora was sitting right here. The mug trembles until I take it back, because hot liquid and grief are a terrible pairing.
"She knew the whole time." Muffled against her knees, voice scraped raw. "Two and a half years, standing in that kitchen lying to my face every single morning."
I don't touch her—not yet, not until she decides whether contact is welcome or another invasion from an adult who thinks he knows what she needs. My hands rest on my thighs and I wait, because waiting is the one useful thing I've learned from three years of sitting in doorways at bedtime.
"Did she tell you?" Blythe lifts her head—swollen eyes, zero interest in pretending. "About the Wilson's. Did Cora tell you before I found out?"
"No." I hold her gaze because she deserves a straight answer without cushioning. "I found it in your medical file when the fostering paperwork came through. Same way you did."
"So nobody tells anyone anything." She drags her sleeve across her face. "Everyone just decides what Blythe gets to know about Blythe's own body and calls it love."
"You're right." No softening, no pivot. "You had every right to know, and the people who loved you most decided you didn't."
Her fingers twist the duvet into a rope. "I compared her to Dad and then she said it wasn't the same. But the mechanism is identical, isn't it—someone decides you can't handle truth, so they handle it for you."
And here's the thing—I'm choosing this carefully because the wrong word does actual damage—she's not wrong. The mechanism is the same even when the motive is opposite. Telling a sixteen-year-old that intent outweighs impact is exactly the kind of nonsense that makes teenagers stop trusting adults.
"The anger and the love don't cancel each other out." I lean forward, elbows on knees. "You can be furious at Cora and still know she'd walk through fire for you. Both get to exist in the same room."
"I don't want them in the same room." Her chin wobbles once before she catches it. "I want to be angry without someone telling me she meant well."
"Then be angry. I won't talk you out of it." My hands stay open on my knees—palms up, no agenda, the body language of trying to fix things for people.
She studies me—checking whether I mean it or I'm performing the shape of meaning it. Whatever she reads passes, because her shoulders drop half an inch and she reaches for the tea with both hands.
We sit for four minutes—her drinking, me existing nearby, the house ticking through its evening sounds. Then Oliver appears in the doorway clutching the bear book, because his internal radar for emotional disturbance operates on frequencies only toddlers can receive.
He walks straight to Blythe, book extended like a treaty, and climbs into her lap without invitation. "You have to read it. Daddy does the voice wrong."
Her arms close around him—automatic, instinctive. Her chin drops to his hair, and she reads about a bear and his missing hat in a voice still thick but steady enough for a boy who demands full narrative commitment.
Oliver leans into her with his whole weight, hand finding her collar and gripping it, because he anchors to people the way other children anchor to blankets. Blythe's breathing evens out mid-sentence, her body deciding before her brain does that comfort can flow in both directions.
I watch from the mattress edge—a man in his own house, somehow a guest in a moment that assembled itself without permission. The bear finds his hat on the last page, and Oliver is asleep before Blythe finishes the sentence.
The next morning Cora is in my doorway at nine-fourteen, bag on her shoulder—came straight here before coffee, before sitting, before any of the rituals I've accidentally memorized.
"I need to see Blythe tonight." No preamble, no breathing room. "After work. I'll come to the house."
"I spoke with Blythe this morning." I set my coffee down because this needs both hands free. "She asked me specifically not to arrange a visit. She said she needs more time."
Her spine straightens—the Kettleworth posture, the one from the countless nights I wasn’t there and nobody knew about it. A woman reclassifying someone from ally to obstacle.
"She's sixteen, Edmund." Cora steps fully into the office. "She's hurt and making decisions from that place. My job is to show up anyway."
"It's her boundary." I stay behind the desk because closing distance right now would be a mistake I'd carry for weeks. "Her words, her eyes on mine."
"You're enforcing a teenager's boundary against the sister who raised her?" Her bag strap twists in her grip. "Who fed her, kept her alive—"
"Yes." The word costs something I'll be paying back for a while. "Because the alternative is me deciding I know better than she does about who she's ready to see."
Her nostrils flare—a tell so small she'd never allow it if she knew I'd learned to read her this precisely. "Two weeks of guardianship and you're already deciding when I see my own sister."
"She's keeping herself from you, Cora." My voice drops because volume is the wrong instrument. "I'm not going to override that. If I drag her to the door and say deal with it, I become exactly the kind of person who decides what Blythe can handle."
"I'll talk to her tomorrow." I offer it across a gap I didn't create. "The second she's ready, I call you."
"Don't." She shifts her bag higher on her shoulder, jaw tight. "Don't finish that sentence." She turns and walks out, and the air behind her holds her shape for a bit longer.
I stay in the doorway. The floor hums around me—keyboards, phones, James laughing somewhere far off—and Cora sits at her desk and opens her laptop and begins typing with her back so straight it could be load-bearing.
My hand grips the doorframe. The tightness in my chest has nothing to do with the argument—nothing to do with custody or the careful, correct thing I just said that tasted like swallowing glass.
It's from watching her walk away and knowing, with a clarity I've been running from for weeks, that somewhere between the Whitmore pitch and a kitchen in Kettleworth, Cora stopped being my assistant. She's the last thought before I close my eyes at night, and the first one when I open them.