Replaced as a Daughter

"Mother's resting. She doesn't need visitors right now." 

 

The nurse said it kindly enough, but she said it the way you'd say something to a stranger who'd wandered into the wrong wing of the house. Marie stood in the hallway outside Isolde's rooms with a tray of tea she'd made herself, the same blend she used to mix when the headaches got bad, willow bark and chamomile and a little honey to cut the bitterness. She used to know exactly how much of each. Her hands had remembered the measurements even after two years of not touching them. 

 

"I used to manage her mornings," Marie said. "Before." 

 

"Lady Sera handles that now." The nurse said it plainly, no unkindness in it, just fact. "She knows the schedule. The medication, the appetite, all of it. Doctor Hale coordinates with her directly." 

 

Marie looked past the nurse's shoulder into the room, where she could see, just barely, Sera sitting at the edge of the bed reading something aloud to Isolde, adjusting a pillow, checking a small dosing cup against the light before handing it over. It looked practiced. It looked like something Sera had done every day for months, because she had. 

 

"Of course," Marie said, and left the tea tray on the side table anyway, because it seemed wasteful to carry it back down, and walked away before anyone could see whether that stung. 

 

It did sting, more than the room had, more than the portrait on the stairs. The room had been about the past. This was about now, about the fact that whatever reason she'd told herself she was staying for had already been claimed by somebody else, filled in so completely that there wasn't even a gap left for her to slide into. She'd built the whole shape of her return around this, being needed, being the one who understood her mother's body better than anyone. She'd survived two years partly on that idea. And it had taken Sera less time than that to make herself indispensable. 

 

She didn't go looking for a fight over it. She'd told Callum the truth in the hallway that morning, and she meant to hold to it. She wasn't here to reclaim anything. If there was nothing left of her old place to reclaim, then there was nothing to grieve either, only something to get through. 

 

The household had no patience for anyone standing still that day. Servants moved through the halls with armfuls of linen and polished silver, the whole estate bracing itself for a king's arrival by dusk. Marie found herself simply moving with the current of it, because standing alone in a hallway with nothing to do felt worse than being useful to no one in particular. 

 

A woman with an apron and a stack of folded tablecloths nearly walked into her near the kitchens. 

 

"Oh, good, another pair of hands." The woman thrust half the stack into Marie's arms without waiting for a response. "These go in the west hall, tables three through six. Mind the good silver, the steward will have your head if it's scratched before tonight." 

 

Marie looked down at the tablecloths in her arms. She could have corrected her. Could have said, I'm not staff, I'm the Alpha's daughter, or whatever she still technically was. The words sat in her mouth for a second and then she just swallowed them. It was easier to carry linen than to explain who she used to be to someone who had never known her as anything else. And there was something almost restful in it, doing a task with a clear beginning and end, nobody watching her for signs of what prison had done to her, nobody deciding for her what she was and wasn't allowed to attend. 

 

So she carried the tablecloths. She laid them across the long tables in the west hall, smoothed the wrinkles the way she'd learned to smooth every wrinkle in that place, quick and thorough and without complaint, and moved on to the next task handed to her, polishing silver, arranging chairs, whatever came next. 

 

She was setting a row of glasses when she felt someone watching her. 

 

He stood near the far doorway, tall, broad through the shoulders, dressed like a man who belonged at the center of tonight's event rather than its edges. She didn't know him. That alone told her he wasn't family, wasn't staff, was someone who'd arrived early or wandered off from wherever the important guests were being kept. He was looking at her the way you look at something you're trying to place and can't. 

 

She kept working. It wasn't her job to explain herself to strangers. 

 

"You," he said, moving closer, and there was something already hardening in his voice, some judgment already half formed before he'd said more than one word. "I know who you are." 

 

She looked up at him properly then, glass still in hand, and said nothing. 

 

"Marie Winston," he said, like the name itself was an accusation. "Doing servant's work. How touching." 

 

There was no warmth in it at all. He said it the way you'd describe a performance you'd already decided was in poor taste, something staged for an audience, something meant to be seen and pitied. She set the glass down slowly and met his eyes, and understood, before he said another word, exactly what kind of conversation this was about to become.