Unseen

By the fourth day of the visit, Ava had developed something like a professional expertise in not being noticed, which struck her, more than once, as a strange kind of skill to have honed so thoroughly by nineteen.

"You'll take the linens to the guest wing before breakfast," Delia told her that morning, not quite meeting her eyes, the way she'd taken to doing all week whenever she handed out instructions that involved keeping Ava somewhere useful and somewhere else entirely from wherever the actual household activity was happening. "And once that's done, the kitchen needs help preparing for the afternoon reception. Stay in the back rooms today. I don't want any confusion about who belongs where."

"Understood," Ava said, and meant it more literally than Delia probably intended, given how well she'd already come to understand exactly where she belonged and did not belong this week.

She carried the linens down the long guest wing corridor an hour later, arms full, moving briskly past doors she'd been told, more than once now, not to linger near. It was almost funny, in the particular flat way things became funny once they'd stopped being able to hurt you freshly, how thoroughly her whole family had rearranged the household's daily rhythm around the singular goal of making sure a visiting alpha never had reason to wonder who she was, or why a third daughter seemed to exist in this house only as a rumor the staff occasionally whispered about among themselves.

She passed Bree in the hallway outside the breakfast room, dressed already for whatever activity Delia had scheduled to put her in Draven's path today, judging by the careful, expensive simplicity of the outfit, the kind that looked effortless and cost a fortune in effort to achieve.

"You're up early," Bree said, not unkindly for once, mostly distracted, checking her reflection in the hall mirror.

"Linens don't deliver themselves. Someone in this house has to be up before the sun for something other than looking presentable." Ava kept her tone dry rather than sharp, and Bree, absorbed in her own reflection, didn't seem to register the edge in it at all.

"We're doing a garden walk this morning. Mother thinks it'll look natural, showing him the grounds, letting conversation happen without an audience." Bree caught Ava's eye briefly in the mirror's reflection. "You'll be somewhere else, I assume."

"I'll be wherever the trays need carrying," Ava said. "Which is, historically, somewhere else."

Bree's mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite anything at all, and she turned back to the mirror without further comment, already rehearsing, Ava suspected, whatever charming remark she intended to open with once the garden walk actually began.

The kitchen that afternoon was its own kind of chaos, every surface covered in preparations for the reception, and Ava found herself elbow-deep in pastry work alongside two of the cooks, flour dusted up to her wrists, sweat at her hairline despite the cool morning.

"You've got a real gift for this," the older cook observed, watching her fold dough with quick, practiced hands. "More patience than most girls your age put together. Most would have given up three batches ago and stormed off in a temper."

"I've had a lot of practice being patient," Ava said, which was true in more ways than the cook probably understood, in more ways than she cared to explain to anyone standing in this kitchen today.

"Shame nobody upstairs seems to notice half of what you're capable of." The cook said it plainly, without much heat, the way you'd note weather. "You'd run a household twice this size without breaking a sweat, if anyone up there ever gave you half a chance to prove it."

"I don't think proving things is really on offer for me right now," Ava said, keeping her tone light, though something in her chest tightened briefly at the observation anyway. "Mostly I'm on offer for pastry duty and staying out of the way."

The cook huffed something that might have been sympathy or might have been simple agreement, and didn't argue the point, because there wasn't really an argument to be made against it.

"You know," the younger cook chimed in, not looking up from the tray she was arranging, "I heard Delia telling one of the maids this morning that if the alpha or any of his men ever ask after you directly, we're to say you're occupied with household matters and leave it there. Nothing more. Practiced it herself, apparently, right there in the hallway, like a line for a play."

"That sounds about right." Ava kept folding dough, unbothered on the surface, though the words landed with more weight than she let show. "Consistent, if nothing else."

"Doesn't seem at all fair to me," the younger cook muttered, shaking her head. "Whole household running around trying to hide one of the alpha's own daughters like she's something to be embarrassed about, something shameful to keep tucked out of sight."

"It's not really about fair," Ava said. "It's about what's useful, and what's convenient, and I've had a long time to understand the difference between those things and fairness well enough by now."

Mira found her briefly during the changeover between lunch service and reception preparations, slipping into the kitchen with an excuse about fetching water that fooled absolutely no one.

"You've been buried back here all day long," Mira said, perching on the edge of the worktable despite the cook's disapproving glance. "I barely even saw you at breakfast this morning."

"I've been buried back here most of the entire week, if we're being honest about it." Ava wiped flour from her hands, grateful for the brief excuse to pause. "Turns out invisibility is apparently a full-time occupation. Who knew."

"It's not funny."

"It's a little funny," Ava said. "Or I'm choosing to find it funny, because the honest alternative is finding it exhausting, and I've only got the energy left for one of those two options today."

Mira's expression softened, sympathy plain on her face in a way Ava had learned, over the years, not to lean on too heavily, however genuinely she appreciated it in moments like this one. "For what it's worth, I don't think you're actually invisible. I think everyone else in this house has just decided it's more convenient to pretend you are."

"That's a rather generous way of putting it, honestly."

"I'm trying to be generous. You look like you could genuinely use it today." Mira reached over and stole a scrap of leftover dough, popping it in her mouth before the cook could object. "How's the garden walk going, by the way? Any word yet, or is it too soon to know anything real?"

"Apparently fine, from what little I've heard. Apparently Bree's charming him beautifully, or at least trying her very best to, and apparently nobody's terribly sure yet whether any of it is actually landing." Ava shrugged, aiming for indifference and only half managing it. "Not that it's any of my business either way."

"You keep saying that, over and over. It's none of your business. I'm honestly starting to think you say it mostly just to convince yourself of it."

Ava didn't have a good answer for that, mostly because she suspected Mira wasn't entirely wrong, and she busied herself instead with the next batch of pastry rather than examine the accusation any further than was strictly necessary for her own peace of mind that afternoon.

Word filtered back through the kitchen in fragments throughout the afternoon, secondhand reports from whoever had glimpsed the garden walk in progress. Bree, laughing at something. Bree, showing off the ornamental gardens Delia had insisted on redesigning two summers back specifically for occasions like this one. Draven, according to one of the younger maids who'd caught sight of them from an upstairs window, mostly quiet, mostly listening, his expression giving away exactly nothing about whether any of it was landing the way Bree intended.

"He barely said a word the whole time," the maid reported, setting down a tray of used cups. "Just walked, listened, asked the occasional question. Didn't seem terribly charmed, if you ask me. Not that anyone did."

"Bree will say it went wonderfully regardless," Ava said, not looking up from the pastry she was shaping. "She usually does."

"You're probably right about that, honestly."

"Did he ask about anyone else at all?" the older cook asked, curious despite herself. "Family, I mean, the rest of the household. Seems the sort who'd want to understand a household properly before committing to anything as serious as an alliance."

"If he did ask, I wasn't close enough to hear it," the maid admitted. "Delia kept me well back the whole walk, fetching things, staying out of earshot on purpose. You'd think she was hiding state secrets instead of a simple garden stroll."

Ava kept working, hands steady, and told herself firmly that the small, unwelcome flicker of curiosity she felt about how the garden walk had actually gone, and about whether her name had come up at all in the course of it, was not worth examining any further than she'd already examined it, which was, admittedly, more than once already that afternoon.

By evening, exhausted in the particular way that came from a full day of being useful and invisible in equal measure, Ava slipped out to the back garden for a few minutes alone before the reception's cleanup began in earnest. The reception itself was still going, muted laughter and conversation drifting from the main hall behind her, none of it including her, all of it, in one way or another, orbiting a man she'd now spent four full days successfully avoiding being introduced to.

She sat on the low stone wall bordering the kitchen garden, breathing in air that didn't smell like flour or candle smoke for the first time all day, and allowed herself, briefly and without much guilt, the small, private luxury of feeling sorry for herself.

It wasn't the alliance itself she minded, not really. She had no illusions about wanting to be paraded in front of a grieving stranger for the sake of a political match, no real desire to trade one kind of scrutiny for another. What stung, if she let herself examine it honestly, was smaller and pettier than that, and she almost laughed at herself for admitting it even silently. It was simply exhausting, being so thoroughly, deliberately unseen, day after day, by people who'd decided long before this visit that unseen was exactly where she belonged, and having that decision reaffirmed fresh every single morning, in ever more elaborate arrangements of trays and back rooms and carefully worded instructions about staying out of earshot.

"You're allowed to be tired," she told herself out loud, quietly, to the empty garden, echoing without quite meaning to the exact words Mira had offered her days before. "Nobody's listening to grade you on it right now, whatever the rest of this week has felt like."

Somewhere behind her, the reception noise shifted, a ripple of laughter rising above the general murmur, and Ava wondered, briefly and entirely against her better judgment, whether it was Bree's laugh she'd just heard, and whether whatever had prompted it had actually landed the way Bree hoped it would. She decided, firmly and with some effort, that it didn't matter either way, and that wondering about it at all tonight was simply exhaustion talking louder than it should.

The reception noise carried faintly from the hall, warm light spilling out across the lawn, and Ava sat with it a while longer, unseen exactly the way she'd been trained to be, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she minded it tonight more than she usually let herself admit.