Newton meowed from the floor, annoyed at being excluded.
Elinor released her father, kissed his forehead, and gathered Newton into her arms. At the door, she turned back. Her father had picked up the celestial atlas and was running his finger along the page on Lyra, a constellation he had taught her as a child, now the name above the door of an orphanage he would never see.
She memorized the image. Then she walked through the house, climbed into the carriage, and let London pull her back.
The countryside fell away behind her. Newton curled up on the seat. The atlas sat in her lap, and her father’s voice lived in her chest beside the word she had not said in the garden.
I love him. And we agreed to let each other go.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Will you come back?” Toby asked from the doorway of the schoolroom.
The lesson had ended ten minutes ago, and the children had filed out, but Toby lingered, his small frame silhouetted against the corridor light. Behind him, Billy and Angelica hovered, pretending not to listen.
Lucien stood at the back of the room. Elinor stood at the front, her slates stacked, her satchel over her shoulder, the celestial atlas visible through the flap. She looked at Toby, and Lucien watched her face fight a war between honesty and protection.
“I will always care about you,” she said. “All of you. That will never change.”
“But will you come back?” Toby repeated, because children heard what adults left out.
Elinor crouched and took his hands in hers, and Lucien could see the tremble she was hiding from the boy.
“You have wonderful new tutors coming. Mrs. Harding and Miss Peel. They are kind and clever, and they will be here every single day, not just the nights I can manage. You deserve that, Toby. You deserve someone who can be here in the daylight.”
“I like the nighttime lessons,” Toby said. “The stars are better at night.”
Elinor’s composure broke for half a second. Her mouth pressed together and her eyes glistened, and then she pulled Toby into her arms and held him. Billy and Angelica abandoned their pretense and rushed forward, wrapping themselves around her from both sides.
Lucien watched from the back of the room and felt something crack in a place he had believed was already broken.
Mrs. Neal appeared in the doorway, red-eyed, with the quiet certainty of one who knew this parting was final.
“The children will remember every lesson,” Mrs. Neal told Elinor. “Every star, every poem, every story. You gave them a world beyond these walls, and that does not disappear because you are no longer the one teaching it.”
Elinor embraced her. Lucien turned away, his gaze settling on the wall where Georgie’s sketches were pinned: a woman withspectacles before a circle of children, a tall man seated among them with a slate, and a third, newer drawing of them all beneath a sky of stars,Lyrascrawled across the top in uneven chalk.
He unpinned the last and slipped it into his coat.
When the children released Elinor, she straightened, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She turned to Lucien, her expression raw and unguarded, full of grief that had nothing to do with the ruse and everything to do with the life they had made within it.
He walked her to her hackney. The night was clear, and the stars were visible above Lyra House, faint against the London glow but present.
“Orion is out,” she said, looking up.
He looked up. The belt stars burned above them, three bright points in a line.
“The children will remember you,” he said. “They will grow up and tell their own children about the lady who taught them the names of stars.”
“Don’t.” Her voice caught. “Don’t make this harder.”
He stopped. She climbed into the hackney, and he closed the door. Through the window, she looked at him, and the streetlamp caught the tears on her cheeks.
“Goodnight, Lucien.”
“Goodnight, Elinor.”
The hackney pulled away. He stood on the pavement outside the building they had rebuilt together and watched her disappear into the dark.