When Alfred and Orion returned from their adventure they were late for dinner and Orion was over-tired, and it was with a sympathetic wince that Alfred handed him over to the nurse. Actually it would have been more precise to say Orion was late for dinner; Alfred had either missed it entirely or Zelda had pushed it back. It took him nearly fifteen minutes to discover which it was, with the nurse embroiled in a battle against the toddlers and Zelda having disappeared somewhere or other. There was food in the kitchen, and it looked to not have been served yet, but if the housekeeper was sticking around to serve it later she was nowhere to be found at the moment. He stood in the kitchen for a moment, hemming and hawing over the idea of making himself a plate and eating it alone. What eventually prevented him was mostly that it seemed a difficult decision to defend, or to walk back; a degree of finality they'd been dancing around and avoiding for months.

So he went upstairs. He took his boots off first, because otherwise he would inevitably have trudged. He poked his head tentatively into the bedroom, the dressing room, and even the closet before it occurred to him to check the bath.

There she was. He didn't say anything, but raised an eyebrow inquisitively from where he'd stopped just inside the doorway. He felt (absurdly, perhaps) as though he was trespassing, even though he hadn't crossed the threshold into the room.

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