“I gave you one,” Michael said quietly. “The transfer takes three business days. That’s how the bank works.”
“You could make it faster.”
“Before the accident, maybe.”
“Don’t make everything about that,” Ruth said sharply. “You always use it as an excuse.”
The words struck the hallway like a slap.
Ruth noticed Abigail standing there with the tray and immediately smoothed her face back into cold control.
“What are you waiting for?” she said. “Take that to him and get back to work.”
She walked away without another glance.
Michael took the breakfast tray from Abigail a moment later and said, in a quieter voice, “The eggs. Did you put pepper in them?”
“Yes, sir. Just a little. You mentioned you liked them that way.”
He looked at her for a second, then said, “They’re perfect.”
It was a small thing. But Abigail recognized what was underneath it.
This man, for all his money and power, was starving for care so basic it should have been ordinary.
From then on, the distance between them changed. Slowly. Carefully. Michael began asking her about the garden, about music, about the books she liked, about what she thought of things far beyond the kitchen or the household. Abigail answered cautiously at first, but Michael listened in a way that made caution begin to loosen. He did not talk over her. He did not dismiss her. He did not ask questions only to hear himself speak afterward. He listened.
And because he listened, she began to tell him pieces of the truth about herself.
She had moved from house to house as a child. She had grown up never fully belonging anywhere. She knew what it was to be tolerated, used, passed along. She knew what loneliness felt like when it settled in the bones.
