The suitcase is older than you are.

Its leather is cracked along the spine, the brass clasps tarnished green. It belonged to your mother before she died, and now you are folding your life into it—three dresses, a pair of good shoes, a photograph of the kitchen garden in summer, a ribbon you cannot remember the origin of but cannot bear to leave.

Your hands move mechanically. Fold, press, stack. The servants' quarters are small enough that packing should take minutes, but every object is a landmine. The windowsill where you used to sit reading. The crack in the plaster shaped like a crescent moon. The view of the east garden where a boy once threw pebbles at your window to lure you out for midnight adventures.

You press your knuckles against your mouth and breathe.

In the next room, you hear your father moving slowly. He hasn't spoken since Mrs. Clarke called him into the study this morning. Thirty-one years of service dismissed in a single sentence. He'd emerged with his face perfectly composed and said only: Pack light. We leave by evening.

The bleeding cut on your palm throbs beneath its bandage—still wrapped in silk that costs more than your monthly wage.

You are folding the last dress when the footsteps come.

Not your father's careful, measured tread. These are deliberate. Fast. The sound of someone who has stopped pretending to walk and started moving with purpose.

The door doesn't knock. It opens.

William stands in the frame, still wearing last night's suit. The wine stain has dried dark on his knees. His tie is gone. His hair looks like he's dragged his hands through it a hundred times. But it is his face that stops you—not the fury you expected, not the cold mask he's worn since returning from Europe.

Something worse. Clarity.

He looks at the suitcase. At your folded clothes. At the bare windowsill, stripped of its small accumulated life.

His jaw works once. Twice.

Then he crosses the room in three strides, grabs the suitcase, and snaps it shut. He pulls your clothes back out and sets them on the bed. Not throwing. Placing. Each piece laid down with a terrifying, controlled precision.

You reach for the dress on top. His hand closes over your wrist—the same grip from last night, firm but careful around the bandage.

"Stop packing."

You shake your head. Try to pull free. His grip doesn't tighten, but it doesn't yield.

"She had no right."

You look away. The window. The crescent-moon crack. Anywhere.

"Look at me."

You don't. Can't. Because if you look at him now you will see what you saw seven years ago—the seventeen-year-old boy standing in the garden asking you to run away with him, and you will remember the exact expression on his face when you told him no. When you broke both your hearts because his mother was already sharpening knives, and your father's livelihood hung by a thread, and loving William Clarke was a luxury servants' daughters could not afford.

And now it has cost your father everything anyway.

His free hand comes up. His fingers hover near your jaw but don't touch—trembling with the restraint of a man who has spent years converting tenderness into cruelty because cruelty was easier to survive.

"I'm coming with you."

The words land like a detonation in the silent room. Your eyes snap to his.

He is not performing. There is no audience. Just the small room and the cracked suitcase and his ruined suit and the way he's looking at you like he's already made the calculation—the estate, the inheritance, the name, the empire his family built—and found it all weighing less than this.

"My grandmother's trust is in my name. Not theirs." His voice is low. Factual. Like he's reading terms of a contract he's already signed. "I have an apartment on Haverford. Two bedrooms. The lease is mine."

You stare at him. Your lips part but nothing comes.

"Three firms have made offers this quarter. I don't need his company. I don't need his name... We don't need them" He pauses. His thumb presses once against your knuckle—the same one he bandaged hours ago. "I only need you."