Since Esmera was abandoned on a stranger's doorstep as a baby, the only person who has looked out for her is herself.
Until a lark starts visiting her, leaving behind exotic flowers and iridescent pebbles that the internet doesn't recognise.
Esmera...
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Sensing Esmera rising, Jammas stirred. He fluttered down from his cosy nest tucked between the curtain rail and the wall, returning to his favourite place on Esmera's head as she tugged a light robe over her nightdress. She couldn't see its colour or pattern in the night, and she didn't care as she knotted it around her waist.
Esmera opened her door and peered outside. Seeing only a still, dark passage furrowing towards the stairs leading to the second floor and hearing only soft, peaceful breaths behind Belaren's door down the corridor, she strode out of her room.
Her feet nestled in her soft slippers, they padded up the stairs and along the passage to Tauram's room as she gripped the railing to stop herself from tumbling into the night should she lose her footing. She had only been to Tauram's room twice before, but its route had burned itself into her memory.
Her feet moved with certainty past all the other doors, past the side passages that would only lead her to some other pretty corner of the cottage away from her destination.
Esmera hesitated for only a moment before knocking on the door. She had come this far, and she wasn't going back to bed without first seeing for herself that Tauram was okay. She couldn't.
At the sound of her knuckles tapping against the varnished wood, there was no answer, not even an interruption in the muffled sobs somewhere behind it.
Esmera pushed the door open, steeling her nerves for any possibility, but only an anticlimactic empty room greeted her. Tauram's bedspread was rumpled from where he had lain beneath it before his insistent desire to know his siblings' fates had summoned him from there, but now, there was no sign of him. Esmera followed the soft sobs to his studio. They grew louder, confirming she was on the right track.
Esmera slipped through the doorway to see Tauram leaning his forehead against a blank canvas with his eyes squeezed closed in infinite pain. The shades of blue smeared on the palette on his lap had smudged on his fingers, but he didn't seem to have noticed. The paintbrush in his other hand quivered as he sobbed into his sleeve, while Lundas rubbed his head against his leg, purring softly, sadly.
Esmera's heart broke. She clasped her hands in front of her, containing the pieces within herself long enough to reach Tauram's side. "Hey." She rested a cautious hand on his white cotton-clad shoulder. "Hey, Tauram."
"Esmera?" He looked up, his cheeks glittering with a devastating, tear-stained beauty.
Esmera had never seen a person so broken, in such pain, except for when she looked at herself in the mirror for the first week after she left Stephan.
She had made her vows to him. She was his wife, and that wasn't something she could change simply by will. She had loved him despite everything he had done to her. That was why those first few weeks without him were so terrifying despite being so freeing.
That was why she knew how Tauram was feeling. She too had loved someone who hurt her, someone she would never forget even as she loved them no longer.
"Oh, Tauram," Esmera murmured, drawing him to her.
