...

“It’s my fault, isn’t it?”

Daniel’s voice comes softly from the doorway, quiet and tentative. He stands there, looking into her room as though he can’t quite bring himself to enter, shoulders hunched and eyes downcast. He is taller than her, and has been for some years now, with thick muscled arms and a broad frame, but Jessica looks at him and all she can see is the little seven year old who would creep into her room during thunderstorms, or whenever he was woken by nightmares. Uncertain, hesitant, and always looking so very small. Her baby brother.

The anger drains out of her.

She glances down at the shattered pottery strewn across the floor at her feet, and then back to the door. “What, this? No, that one’s on me. It broke when I dropped it.”

Daniel just stares at her. “You didn’t drop it. I saw.”

She winces. Shrugs. “Alright, so it broke when I threw it against the wall. Nothing to do with you either way.”

He looks unconvinced. That’s reasonable, because Jessica isn’t being very convincing. And perhaps that is reasonable too, because truth be told it isn’t not Daniel’s fault that she threw the pot out in her rage. He is just not to blame for it, a subtle but significant distinction that she knows is not worth bringing up now. He would hear the words ‘your fault’ and nothing else and spiral into guilt and self-reproach, which will help no one. Within an hour, Jessica and Daniel Winston need to have disappeared.

If only she can make up her mind on what will disappear with them.

Jessica has always prided herself on being careful. Diligent. She is not rash, she doesn’t not speak before she thinks. Her actions are measured and well-considered, her words perhaps even more so. She thinks and she plans and she deliberates, certain in the knowledge that if she takes her time, eventually she will end up wherever she needs to go. She would call herself, cautious, perhaps. Level-headed. Calm, collected Jessica, utterly immune to impulse and flights of fancy.

But she is here now, with all her worldly possessions strewn across her bed, and her knapsack sitting open and empty beside them, and she cannot help but wonder if, looking back, all her mindfulness was really just indecision after all.

When she had first earned the eye and then confidence of the late Earl of Sutton, perhaps a year after she had first started working at Bryer Castle, had she really been acting out of some desire to secure a more permanent role for herself and her family behind those tall stone walls, or had that fortunate consequence been mere coincidence, the Earl simply appreciating the captive audience inherent in someone who lacked the will power to end or even sway a conversation? When, barely days after the funeral, the younger Sutton - Charles - had begun to pester her for information, had she remained quiet out of some lingering sense of loyalty, or because she hoped to leverage her knowledge for her own gain, or were those simply the rationales her mind provided her to justify how in the dry heat of a direct confrontation, the words had simply stuck in her throat, refusing to be spoken aloud?

When Charles, second Earl of Sutton, had grown aggressive earlier that day, and Daniel had found her, by chance, with her back against the wall of a disused corridor and a blade at her throat, he had drawn his knife without a second thought and stabbed the Earl through the gut, and she had pulled him away. Had she known, in that moment, that fleeing was the right move? She is certain now, that it must be - even now, with the Earl alive when they left him, she knows they will face near certain death if caught, and though dead men can tell no tales, she knows her brother does not truly have it in him to kill a man and live with the burden, for all that he is built like a bruiser - but was she at the time? How much of that calculus did she perform after the fact, and how much of their escape came down to her seeing the bleeding man before her, there for her to harm or help heal, and running from him because that felt the least like making a choice?

“I really messed up, didn’t I?” Daniel again, oddly choked, and luckily this is one area she has always been happy to work on instinct for. She walks over to him, tiptoeing around the ceramic shards, and reaches up to wrap an arm around his shoulders.

“Hey, no, breathe,” she whispers to him, nonsense mutterings as she draws him towards her, head towards her chest. He goes willingly, and it ought to look comical - her holding and comforting a boy twice her size. Perhaps it does. But it is also right and as natural to her as breathing, and as Daniel sobs silently into her shirt and then calms, she finds herself relaxing as well, bit by bit.

Perhaps she does have a tendency to overthink, and perhaps that can manifest itself as indecision. But that is not all she is - an anxious and stifled mess. Perhaps gaining the late Earl’s trust had more to do with his own designs paired with her unwillingness to cause waves. She had still become his confidant - a true confidant - through her own merits. Maybe she will never be sure why she did not wish to cave to the second Earl’s demands, but for whatever reason she made the decision to stay silent and she held fast.

What does it matter, if in her tangled anxieties and stresses and rage, she could not decide which, if any, of the functionally worthless trinkets she stored in her little clay pot should accompany them as they run, when the bigger question, of whether they should run, whether she should run at all, had never even crossed her mind? From the moment she had seen the hilt of Daniel’s blade, recognised the shaggy hair that obscured his hung head, and even before, she had known she would do whatever it takes to keep him as safe as he can be, and here she is, doing it, so surely that she knows this could never be a conscious decision she had to make.

And perhaps that can be enough.