A receptionist from the clinic where Lena had once waited too long to be seen. A teenage boy with his little brothers. A woman who said quietly at the door, “I heard nobody gets turned away here.”
“Nobody does,” Eleanor said, tying an apron around her waist.
Later, when the room had filled with clatter and steam and the softer noise of people eating without shame, Gideon stood beside his sister at the serving table and watched Tilly set the bear carefully in the empty chair between them.
“He sits in the middle,” she announced.
“Why?” Eleanor asked.
Tilly looked at them as if the answer were obvious.
“So nobody gets lost again.”
Gideon looked at the child, then at the sister he had found too late and still in time, and for the first time since Ashbourne Hall’s marble floor had turned cold beneath his wet shoes, the ache in his chest eased.
Outside, rain tapped the windows. Inside, soup bowls emptied, bread disappeared, and the chandeliers burned above everyone equally.
It was not the life they should have had.
But it was a table.
And this time, everyone stayed.
