January 24th, 1891 — Crouch Home, Swallowbury
Ben had never been an organized person. He could usually find things in a minute or two, when he needed them, and even when he couldn't it hadn't ever been the end of the world, so he saw no need to change his ways now. Letters were sorted vaguely into piles of things he needed to deal with, things he ought to give to someone at the main office to file, personal things, things that had been resolved, things that he could just as easily have thrown in the trash but had instead left in a pile. They were all messy piles, there was some overlap between them, but there was a system of sorts. So when he'd gone into his office that morning and seen things had been moved, he'd known immediately that something had happened. When he took a look at the desk more clearly and realized what papers happened to be on top, he knew exactly what. He'd taken care not to leave anything that mentioned Elliot out where it could be easily found, yet here they all were, right on top. The housekeeper wouldn't have touched anything on his desk; she'd long since given up on trying to tidy his work things. Melody must have found them, and in order to do that, she must have gone looking.
For a long while after he'd made the discover he simply sat in his desk chair, trying to figure out what might happen next. Melody was not going to take this well, but it was too late to do anything about it. He should have burned the letters as he'd received them, if he was being honest. He could have burned them now, but even after they'd been discovered he couldn't bring himself to destroy the only descriptions he had of his son. At least he'd had the most recent letter still tucked into his breast pocket when he'd gone out last night. That was the only one that had his name on it, which meant Melody wouldn't have had the information she needed to piece together his identity, or his mother's.
It did mean that he likely couldn't write to her for the foreseeable future, though. Melody didn't trust him, so she might go snooping again. She was intelligent, so she might figure it out. She was desperate, so she might even get someone else involved in order to figure it out.
This was bad.
He got nothing done that morning; just fretted aimlessly. He started a letter to Art, but couldn't decide what to say. He intentionally spilled ink on the half-written letter before throwing it in the trash, so that if Melody went snooping in his waste basket she wouldn't catch on to anything. He considered trying to ask Aldous for advice, but where would he even start? There was too much context here that Aldous was missing, and it would have taken him hours just to get his brother on the same page — during which time he would probably have a heart attack and die, Ben thought miserably.
When it was time for lunch he went down to the table, wondering if Melody would join him. It was possible she might have locked herself up in her room, expecting an apology. It was possible she had already gone off to the solicitor to seek a divorce.
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