Esme stepped out of the fireplace.
The place looked—
Esme wasn't entirely certain how to finish that thought.
Old was the obvious word, but old didn't quite cover it. Malfoy Manor was old in a different sense. It was preserved. Maintained with a precision that suggested the primary concern was not comfort but impression. Every surface speaking of money and lineage and the kind of power that wanted to be noticed before it was questioned. The ceilings were high and the windows tall and the furnishings the kind that had been chosen to last rather than to invite. The sitting room she had arrived in was immaculate. Not a book left on a table. Not a cushion out of place. Nothing that suggested anyone sat here and simply existed.
It looked, she thought, like a room that had never been allowed to become a home.
She had been born here. Six years of her life had begun and ended in this building, and she retained almost nothing of it — the smell of stone and something cold underneath it, and the quality of the light through windows that were always very clean. She had only visited once since, for Lucius's wedding, and had spent that day focused entirely on Narcissa and not at all on the house. It had not seemed worth attending to.
So, this is the first time she gave this room any attention.
The door opened.
Narcissa came in rather quickly. She had been alerted — of course she had, the wards would have registered a Floo arrival even if they hadn't blocked it — but the expression on her face said clearly that she had not been told who, and that whoever she had been expecting, it was not this.
She stopped.
Esme watched her take it in — the hair, the eyes, the set of features that were unmistakably Malfoy in their arrangement even on a face that had spent years in France and had never learned to look like it belonged here.
"Esmeralda?" The name came out with the careful composure of someone who had arrived at the only plausible conclusion and was not yet certain how to feel about it.
Esme turned to face her fully. Narcissa Malfoy nee Black was exactly as she remembered from the wedding — precise, composed, the kind of beautiful that looked like it had been maintained rather than simply possessed. She looked, Esme thought, like someone who had learned very young that the world was safer if you gave it nothing to work with.
"Good morning, Narcissa," Esme said. "Je m'excuse for the unannounced visit. I should have written ahead." She said it with the tone of someone who was acknowledging a social norm rather than apologizing for violating it. "I would like to speak with my father and my brother, please."
Narcissa's composure held. It was very good composure. But Esme had spent years reading patients who were trying not to show how frightened they were, and she could see the calculation happening behind the metal gray eyes — the rapid assessment of what this visit meant, why now, what had prompted it, what the correct response was.
"Of course," Narcissa said, after a beat that was just slightly too long. "I'll have someone—"
"Please don't trouble yourself," Esme said pleasantly. "I'm happy to wait here."
It was not entirely a reassurance. They both understood that.
Narcissa looked at her for one more moment — taking in, Esme suspected, the same things she herself had noted in the mirror that morning. The Malfoy coloring that sat so oddly on a woman who spoke with a French lilt and stood in the middle of their immaculate sitting room as though she had every right to be there, which she did, which was perhaps the most unsettling part of all.
"I'll let them know you're here," Narcissa said, and withdrew.
The door closed behind her.
*****
"She's here?"
Abraxas was on his feet before Narcissa finished speaking. He looked, for one unguarded moment, exactly like what he was — an old man caught in his morning clothes, undignified, wrong-footed — and then the moment passed and the machinery of a lifetime's habit reasserted itself. He was already moving toward the wardrobe.
"Did she say why she came?" Lucius asked. He had the expression he wore when he was processing information he hadn't anticipated and preferred not to show it.
"No." Narcissa watched her father-in-law pull out his formal coat with the purposeful air of a man who considered dignity non-negotiable regardless of the hour. "She simply asked to speak with you both. She's waiting in the sitting room."
"Are the children with her?" Abraxas asked, his back to them, already exchanging his house shoes for something appropriate.
"She came alone."
Abraxas clicked his tongue. "Why would she come without the children?"
"I would imagine," Lucius said, with the carefully measured patience of someone who had been measuring it for quite some time, "that she had reasons of her own for that. In any case, I understand Arcturus Black has not yet been introduced to the children either. Sirius Black probably wanted the children to meet his grandfather first." A slight pause. "One hears these things."
One heard a great many things, when one maintained the right connections. Lucius had maintained them meticulously.
Abraxas made a sound that managed to convey his opinion of Arcturus Black without technically saying anything actionable. "Of course, that man takes priority." He examined his reflection briefly, adjusted his collar, found it acceptable. "I'd wager it was that damned Sirius Black who prevented it. Keeping her from her own family."
"Sirius is her husband," Lucius said. "In the noble houses, his word takes precedence in family matters." He said it neutrally, as a statement of fact rather than an endorsement. "That is how these arrangements function."
"Regardless." Abraxas turned from the mirror with the bearing of a man who had decided the conversation was over. "I am still their grandfather. Blood does not negotiate."
Lucius said nothing. He thought, briefly and without particular bitterness, of Draco — who was also Abraxas's grandson, who was present in this house every day, and whose grandfather had spent the better part of the last several months finding fault with how Lucius was running the family, managing the accounts, conducting himself in the Wizengamot, raising his son, and maintaining the grounds. He kept this thought to himself, as he didn't want to argue.
He had been hoping, quietly and without allowing himself to say so, that his father might have returned to France by now. Abraxas had come back to Britain for the Black family meeting and had simply — not left. There was no tactful way to raise the subject. There was no version of Father, perhaps it is time that did not end badly.
"Shall we," Abraxas said, and marched toward the door with the authority of a man accustomed to rooms arranging themselves around his arrival.
Lucius followed.
*****
The door opened.
Esme did not stand.
Abraxas Malfoy walked in first, which she had expected. He had always been the kind of man who entered rooms before other people could arrange themselves. She watched him cross the threshold and take her in, and she watched the moment he processed what he was seeing. The slight pause. The reassessment. He had not seen her since she was a child, and whatever he had been expecting, the reality of a grown woman who looked back at him with her mother's composure in her father's colors had clearly given him a moment's pause.
Lucius came in behind him, more controlled.
She looked at her father.
He was older than she had imagined, which was a foolish thing to notice — of course he was older, years had passed, she had simply not bothered to update the image she carried. He was tall still, and the Malfoy bearing was intact, and he had dressed properly for the occasion which told her something about how much this mattered to him. But underneath all of that, underneath the formality and the bearing and the coat chosen to convey dignity —
She saw it immediately.
The slight discoloration at the jaw, barely visible above his collar. The quality of the skin on his hands, the dullness of it. The way he moved with the careful deliberateness of someone who had learned to compensate for something, whose body was doing more work than it should have needed to do just to cross a room.
"Ah, Esmeralda—" Abraxas began, with the tone of a man attempting warmth from a considerable distance.
"Don't." Esme was on her feet. The word came out before she'd decided to say it, sharp and involuntary, and she held up one hand. "Don't come near me."
Abraxas stopped. His expression shifted — surprise first, then something that arranged itself quickly into offence. "I beg your pardon. I am your father—"
"Mon Dieu," Esme said, and it was not a gentle invocation. She was looking at him the way she looked at patients who had waited too long and were now her problem to solve. "Are you insane? When did you last see a healer?"
"I don't require—"
"You are walking around this manor." Her voice was precise and carrying and entirely without diplomacy. "In this state. With your grandson in this house." She turned to Lucius, who was watching this exchange with the expression of a man trying to determine what was happening and whether he should be alarmed. The answer, his face suggested, was becoming increasingly yes. "How long has he been like this?"
"I'm not entirely—" Lucius began.
"You are walking around with Dragon pox," Esme said, looking back at Abraxas, "and you call that fine and healthy?"
The word landed in the room with the quality of a dropped stone.
Lucius went still.
"I do not have Dragonpox," Abraxas said, with the dignity of a man who had decided the correct response to an outrageous accusation was to be outraged.
"Sacré bleu," Esme said, flatly, which was the French equivalent of don't be ridiculous and carried considerably more feeling. "I have diagnosed this disease more times than I care to count. I know the signs the moment I see them." She turned to Lucius. Her voice shifted — still precise, but now with the authority of a healer who had walked into an emergency and taken charge of it. "Prepare a room for isolation. Ground floor if possible. Good ventilation. Away from the child."
Lucius opened his mouth.
"Now, please," Esme said, in the tone that meant this is not a request.
She drew her wand. With three efficient movements her travelling dress became a healer's uniform — clean white, high collar, practical cut. Her hair went up. Gloves appeared on her hands, pale blue, clinical. A mask settled over the lower half of her face, and above it her eyes were entirely professional and entirely focused. A medical-grade Bubble-Head Charm followed, shimmering briefly before settling.
She turned to her father.
He was looking at her with an expression she couldn't entirely read — something between indignation and, underneath it, something else that he was managing carefully.
"Now see here," he said. "I am perfectly—"
"You are not." She took his arm with the firm, impersonal grip of someone who had held far more resistant patients than this. "You are going to the isolation room, and you are going to let me examine you, and you are going to do both of these things without further argument." She looked at him steadily over the mask. "You may be angry with me afterward. That is fine. But you will do it."
She began moving him toward the door.
"Lucius," she said, without looking back. "Disinfect the sitting room. The whole ground floor if he has been moving through it freely. Narcissa and Draco should be checked as a precaution — I will see to them when I'm finished with him."
The Manor, within minutes, was no longer Lucius's house in any practical sense.
Narcissa had heard the word Dragonpox through the sitting room door — or perhaps it had been a house elf, they moved faster than people gave them credit for — and the result was immediate and thorough. She appeared in the corridor with Draco's hand in hers and the expression of a woman who had decided and intended to act on it.
"I'm taking him to Father's," she said. Meaning Cygnus. Meaning away, and quickly.
"You are not," Lucius said.
Narcissa looked at him. "Lucius—"
"Think." He kept his voice low. "If Cygnus knows, it will be in every drawing room in Britain before the week is out." He held her gaze. "We manage this here. Quietly."
A pause. Narcissa looked at Draco, who was watching both with the focused attention of a child who understood that something serious was happening and had decided that stillness was the correct response. Then she looked back at Lucius.
She let go of Draco's hand.
"Blinky," she said, and the house elf appeared immediately. "Tipsy. Fern." Three more. "Mollo." A fifth, blinking up at her. "Full disinfection. Every room he has entered. Every surface. Start on the ground floor and work up. Nothing is to leave this house until I say so." She looked at them with the clarity she brought to things she had decided. "Now."
They scattered.
Narcissa took Draco by the shoulders and steered him toward the stairs without further discussion, issuing instructions over her shoulder as she went — which rooms, which precautions, which house elves were to attend to him specifically — with the efficiency of a woman who had always understood that in a crisis the most useful thing you could do was act.
Lucius remained in the corridor.
From behind the closed door of the isolation room, he could hear his father's voice, still protesting, still insisting and underneath it, steady and entirely unmoved, Esme's. Not raised. Not arguing. Simply continuing to do what she was doing regardless of the commentary accompanying it. The wards she had cast on the room glowed faintly at the threshold, pale blue, professional. She had put them up in under a minute. He had watched her do it and had found himself recalculating something he hadn't realized he'd been holding incorrectly.
He had known she was a healer. But that was the extent of it. After Esmeralda's graduation from being a full fledge healer, her name disappeared in the papers. At least from Lucius' spy network. There was barely anything mention about her but the fact that she walked into his house unannounced, identified a disease his own household had failed to notice in months of daily proximity, converted a sitting room into a medical ward, and was now managing a patient who had spent forty years managing everyone else. All of this within approximately twelve minutes of her arrival. It showed one thing. Esmeralda has built experience somewhere. Her career as a healer flourished somewhere but she didn't carry her family name. Maybe that is why they never heard of a Healer Malfoy roaming about.
He was also, underneath all of it and in a place, he intended to keep very private, deeply irritated with his father.
Abraxas had been in this house since August. He had been in this house with Draco, with Narcissa, with the house elves and the staff and Lucius himself. He had been moving through the rooms, sitting at the table, conducting himself as though he were still the head of this family and Lucius's every decision was subject to his review. And he had known. He must have known — or suspected — and he had said nothing, and Lucius had noticed nothing, and it had taken his French sister less than five minutes to see what months of living in the same house had not revealed.
He breathed in slowly through his nose. Let it out.
From behind the doors, he could hear Esmeralda and Abraxas arguing.
"Abraxas." Esme's voice. Patient, flat, final. "If you attempt to remove that ward one more time, I will sedate you. I am entirely serious."
A pause.
"You wouldn't dare," Abraxas said.
"I have sedated far more difficult patients than you." A beat. "Sit down."
Silence.
Then, remarkably, the sound of a chair.
Lucius looked at the closed door for a moment.
He was, he decided, going to reserve judgment on Esmeralda until he understood what she had come here for. But he was updating his assessment of her, quietly and without announcing it, in the way he updated all things that turned out to be more significant than he had initially assumed.
She had not come to diagnose their father. That had simply happened because she recognized the signs and that was urgent. That doesn't mean Lucius will forget. He will still find out what.
*****
The examination took the better part of two hours.
Abraxas protested through the first twenty minutes of it, made pointed observations about the indignity of the situation for approximately another ten, and then subsided into a silence that was not quite cooperation but was at least not active obstruction. Esme worked through it without comment. She had learned early in her career that patients who talked were easier than patients who didn't, because talking meant they were still oriented and still fighting, and fighting was useful when you needed them to stay still and breathe evenly while you assessed the damage.
The damage was considerable.
She did not let this show on her face. She catalogued it the way she catalogued everything — methodically, without flinching, building the full picture before she allowed herself to have an opinion about it. The discoloration was more extensive than the collar had suggested. The systemic involvement was further along than it should have been for a man who claimed to have only recently noticed something was wrong, which meant either he had noticed much earlier and said nothing or he had been spectacularly unobservant about his own body, and given that this was Abraxas Malfoy she suspected the former.
She did not say this either.
When she was finished, she removed her gloves, cast a cleansing charm on her hands, and stood at the window for a moment with her back to him while she decided how to present what she had found.
"Well?" Abraxas said, from the bed. He had the tone of a man who intended to receive whatever she said from a position of dignity regardless of what it cost him.
"I'll speak with you and Lucius together," she said. "Once I'm satisfied the room is properly contained."
"I am your father," he said. "You will speak with me directly."
"I will speak with you and Lucius together," she said again, in the same tone, and turned to check the wards.
Lucius came in an hour later, when Esme had satisfied herself that the containment was adequate. He had changed into fresh clothes, and his composure was entirely restored, which told her he had used the hour well. He looked at his father on the bed — still upright, still formal, still wearing the coat he had put on that morning as though the setting were a drawing room rather than an improvised isolation ward — and then at Esme, who was standing at the window with her hands folded and her healer's mask lowered.
"How bad?" Lucius said.
No preamble. She appreciated that.
"Sit down," she said. Not unkindly.
Lucius sat. He chose the chair farthest from his father, which she noted without commenting on.
"Dragonpox progresses in stages," she said. "The early stage presents as fatigue, the discoloration you may have noticed at the jaw and hands, general malaise. It is during this stage that most people seek treatment, because the symptoms are uncomfortable but manageable and the disease has not yet become systemic." She paused. "Father is not in the early stage."
Lucius's expression did not change. "How far progressed?"
"The middle stage. The systemic involvement is established. The discoloration is more extensive than it appears — it is affecting tissue beneath the surface." She kept her voice even, the way she kept it even when she had difficult things to say and needed the person in front of her to be able to hear them. "He has not yet reached the infectious phase, which is why I said not yet rather than not at all when I told you to disinfect the house. The precautions I've put in place are sufficient for now. That will change."
"When?"
"Within weeks, most likely. I will know more as I monitor the progression."
Lucius looked at his father. Abraxas was looking at the middle distance with the expression of a man who was listening carefully and had decided that the correct response to what he was hearing was to not respond to it.
"How long —" Lucius said. It was not quite a question. It had the quality of something he had decided to ask before he lost the nerve for it. "How long does he have?"
The room was very quiet.
"Two years," Esme said. "If the progression is slow and the management is consistent and he does not develop complications." She paused. "Less, if it moves quickly. Less, if he is not careful." She looked at Abraxas, who had still not looked at her. "Less, if he continues to behave as though nothing is wrong. If he starts breathing fire. Then it's too late."
"Two years," Lucius said.
"At the outside. With good management." She held his gaze. "I am not going to tell you it is certain. Nothing about this disease is certain except its direction."
Lucius was quiet for a moment. Something moved across his face that he controlled quickly, but not before she saw it — something that was not grief exactly, or not only grief, but the complicated thing that happened when you had spent months being exhausted by a person and were now being told you had two years left to be exhausted by them.
"I see," he said, which was what people said when they didn't yet have the words for what they meant.
"Two years." Abraxas said it himself, finally, from the bed. His voice was entirely level. "That is your assessment."
"It is," Esme said.
"You are mistaken." He said it without heat, without drama, with the complete conviction of a man who had decided that reality was negotiable. "I am in excellent health. What you are seeing is—"
"Abraxas." Her voice was not raised. It did not need to be. "I have treated forty-seven cases of Dragonpox. I know this disease. There is no cure. You can't heal from it no matter how good a healer one was." She looked at him steadily. "You are not in excellent health. The timeline I have given you is generous and depends entirely on whether you choose to cooperate with treatment." A pause. "I am not telling you this to be unkind. I am telling you because you need to know, and because someone in this family should have told you before now, and because—" She stopped.
Because I came here for answers and instead, I found this, she did not say.
"Because it is the truth," she finished. "And I do not see the use in anything else."
Abraxas looked at her for the first time since she had begun speaking.
She looked back.
She did not know what he saw. She knew what she saw — an old man in a coat he had put on for dignity's sake, in a room he hadn't chosen to be in, being told by a daughter he had never known that he was running out of time. The Malfoy bearing was still there. It was remarkable, actually, how intact it remained. But underneath it, for just a moment, something else was visible. Something that had not been managed in time.
Then it was gone.
"I do not require your pity," Abraxas said.
"I'm not offering it," Esme said. "I'm offering treatment. They are not the same thing." She picked up her gloves. "I will return tomorrow. In the meantime, the wards on this room will hold and I expect them to remain intact." She looked at him with the flat directness she brought to patients who needed to understand that she was not asking. "Do not test them."
She looked at Lucius, who had not spoken since I see.
"I recommend you take his wand for good measure." She said.
*****
Lucius walked her to the front entrance in silence. It was a different silence from the one in the isolation room. He was a man who processed things privately and thoroughly, and he was doing it now.
At the door, he stopped.
"You didn't come here to diagnose him," he said. It was not an accusation. It was the observation of someone who had filed the question earlier and had decided this was the appropriate moment to retrieve it.
"Non," Esme said.
"Then why?"
She was quiet for a moment. Outside, the grounds of Malfoy Manor stretched in their meticulous order, and the morning light did nothing to make them feel less like a statement.
"I found something," she said carefully. "Something that concerning our mother. There are implications that I needed to verify." She paused. "I had questions that only he could answer."
Lucius looked at her with the careful attention he brought to things he did not yet fully understand. "And now?"
"And now I know that asking him those questions will have to wait." She met his gaze evenly. "A man who has just been told he has two years or less to live does not need additional burdens placed on him today. Whatever I came here to ask, it will have to wait."
Lucius absorbed this. She could see him weighing it — the information she had withheld, the reason she had withheld it, the question of whether it posed an immediate threat to anyone in the house. He was thorough. She had expected nothing less.
"Is it urgent?" he asked.
"Not immediately," she said. "I will return to treat him regardless. I can raise it when the time is right." She looked at him steadily. "I am not here to cause trouble, Lucius. I did not come to collect what I am owed or to make this family uncomfortable. I simply needed an answer, and I will wait for a better moment to ask for it."
He nodded once, slowly, the nod of a man filing something under watch and assess.
The silence stretched another beat.
She had thought, on the Floo over, that she might say something to him about it — the years of visits ignored, the way he had looked through her at the wedding the way one looks through a window, the particular art of being in a room with a sibling and behaving as though the space were empty. She had prepared nothing. She hadn't been certain she wanted to say anything at all.
Standing here now, looking at Lucius Malfoy in the entrance hall of the house they had not grown up in together, she found the words simply weren't there. Not because she was sparing him. Because what would be the point? He knew. He was not a man who failed to notice things. He had simply chosen, every time, not to act on what he noticed.
She wasn't angry. She had been, once, a long time ago. Now she was simply — accurate about it.
"Narcissa," she said instead, and his expression sharpened immediately. "Where is she?"
"Upstairs with Draco."
"I'll go see her."
Narcissa came downstairs ten minutes later with Draco's hand in hers and the composed expression of a woman who had been managing herself under pressure for long enough that it had become second nature. She had changed her dress. Small detail. It told Esme that she had used the ten minutes to collect herself, which meant the word Dragonpox had hit her harder than she intended to show.
"How is Draco?" Esme asked.
"Well," Narcissa said. "He has no symptoms." She said it with the controlled certainty of a mother who had checked twice and intended to check again.
"Good. I'd like to examine you both briefly — purely as a precaution, given the exposure." She looked at Draco, who was watching her with the focused, measuring attention of a child who had clearly inherited his mother's instinct for assessment. "Would that be alright?"
Draco looked at his mother. Narcissa nodded.
The examinations were brief. Neither of them had been infected, which Esme had suspected but needed to confirm. She told them so without ceremony and watched the quality of relief that moved through Narcissa's shoulders — very small, very controlled, barely visible.
"In the meantime," Esme said, "I need to ask you to consider your arrangements."
Narcissa's composure held. "What arrangements?"
"Where you and Draco will be staying while Abraxas is in the house. He is not allowed to move anymore to avoid infecting others." Esme kept her voice matter-of-fact. "He has not yet reached the infectious stage, but he will. The precautions I have put in place are adequate for now, but a manor of this size with shared corridors and common rooms presents risk. Particularly for a child."
"My father's house—" Narcissa began.
"Is out of the question," Lucius said, from the doorway.
Narcissa looked at him. Something moved between them — the specific, compressed communication of two people who had been having versions of the same argument for years.
"Cygnus will talk," Lucius said quietly. "You know he will. I am not having my father's condition spread through every drawing room in Britain before we have managed a single conversation about it."
Narcissa's jaw was very slightly set. "Then where do you suggest?"
There was a pause.
"You could stay at with us," Esme said.
Both looked at her.
"Temporarily," she clarified. "Our home is large enough. The wards are entirely separate from anything here. Draco would be entirely safe and there is room." She said it practically, as a logistical solution rather than an overture, because it would land better that way and because it was true. "I would need to speak with Sirius first, but I don't anticipate — it would not be a problem."
Narcissa looked at her for a moment with the expression she wore when she was thinking something she wasn't ready to say. Whatever she was thinking, she kept it.
"That is a generous offer," she said carefully.
"It is a practical one," Esme said. "The decision is yours and Lucius's."
"We'll discuss it," Lucius said, which was his way of ending a conversation without closing it.
Esme nodded. She began drawing on her outer robe, which was the signal that she was almost done. Narcissa, who read signals precisely, remained where she was but relaxed her posture slightly — the small adjustment of someone who had been braced and was beginning to let themselves not be.
"One more thing," Esme said.
She said it without particular emphasis. Narcissa looked at her and Lucius looked at her and neither of them was braced for it, which was probably the only way it could be said at all.
"Narcissa," Esme said. "You are pregnant."
The entrance hall went very quiet.
Narcissa stared at her.
"I noticed it during the examination," Esme said. "I would estimate eight weeks. Perhaps nine." She kept her voice gentle but direct — the voice she used when she needed someone to hear difficult news and stay present for it. "You likely didn't know. The early signs are easy to miss, especially—" She paused. "Especially when you haven't had reason to expect it."
Narcissa's composure had not broken. But it had changed — the quality of it was different now, the controlled stillness of someone absorbing something so large that the body did not yet know where to put it.
"I'm — " she said.
"Pregnant, yes." Esme looked at her steadily. "And I need you to hear the next part with the same attention." She waited until Narcissa's eyes met hers. "It is not a certain pregnancy. I want to be honest with you. Given your history, you are still within the window of highest risk. This is not a guarantee. It is a possibility that requires careful management."
Lucius had not spoken. He was standing very still in the doorway with the expression of a man who had been handed something precious and was not yet certain he was allowed to hold it.
"What does careful management mean?" Narcissa asked. Her voice was entirely steady. Esme respected that.
"Rest. No significant physical exertion. No prolonged stress." She looked at Narcissa with the flat directness that meant what followed was not optional. "Living in a house with a Dragonpox patient while managing the logistics of his care and containing the information from your family — that is not rest, Narcissa. That is the opposite of what you need."
Silence.
"The offer of Blacktide is no longer merely practical," Esme said. "It is my medical recommendation. I cannot compel you. But I am telling you clearly — the stress of this situation poses a risk to you and to the pregnancy that I would very much like to see avoided." She looked between them both. "You have time to decide. Not unlimited time, but some."
She fastened the last button of her robe.
"I will return tomorrow to see to Abraxas," she said. "If either of you have questions before then, you know where to find me."
She looked at Narcissa one more time — at the composed, contained face that was holding something enormous with the practiced control of a woman who had learned young that you did not put things down in front of people unless you trusted them entirely.
"Congratulations," Esme said quietly. Simply. As though it were allowed to be that, for a moment, underneath everything else.
Then she stepped back to the fireplace and was gone.