You stay there

You stay on the floor.

Your knees find the rug because the bed is offlimits, and you sit back on your heels in the worn ivory-and-black with Sera’s chest still heavy in the lace and the slap-heat still sitting in your cheek. The chair of her things is close enough to touch and you do not touch it. Blonde hair keeps falling into your mouth and you hook it behind an ear the way you used to hook brown hair, except the ear is hers and the habit does not make you Charlie to look at.

The room is quiet enough that you hear the palace move around it: someone in the hall with a tray, a man’s voice farther off that is not his, a door that is not this door. You wait through all of that. Your feet go cold. The old bottoms are still damp from the frame, and when you shift your weight you feel it, and you stay shifted because there is nothing else to do with the feeling.

A steward opens the latch without knocking. He is older, careful, and he looks at a point over your head while he sets a tray on the floor in front of your knees, not on the table, not on the bed. Water. Bread. A little meat gone dry at the edge. A folded house-robe across his arm that smells like a chest that has been shut since she ran.

"He said you eat where you are," the steward says, and then he finds a longer sentence because the short one sat badly. "He said if you use the bed before he says, I am to tell him, and he said this robe is hers from the winter she left, so you will put it on over that lace if you are cold. I am not to give you anything from the new presses."

"I understand," you say, and you keep it full and quiet so Sera’s voice does not ring. "Is he coming back tonight."

"He will come when he wants the door open. I do not keep his hours." The steward puts the robe on the rug beside the tray, and you see the wear at the cuffs, the place her wrist rubbed, the faint perfume under the dust. Worn. Hers. If you put it on you will still be her, only covered. He hesitates with his hand on the latch. "If you are going to be sick, use the basin. If you shout down the stairs I will have to come back, but I would rather not."

He leaves. The key turns.

You drink the water first because your mouth still tastes like the carriage, and you eat the bread because the body is hungry in a way that does not care who owns it. The meat you leave. You pick up the robe and hold it without putting your arms through, and the cloth is heavier than the lingerie, still shaped like her shoulders, and you know what happened the last two times a worn thing closed on you. You set it back on the rug.

The window has late light on the roofs of Wellmark. Needle Row is a strip of lamps you cannot pick out. Your cheek throbs when you swallow. You stay on the floor with the tray and the robe you have not put on and the lace he bought you in, and you wait through enough time that the light thins and the hall goes quieter, until boots stop outside that are his and not the steward’s.

The latch does not open yet. He is standing there with the key, and he is making you hear him not use it.