Chapter 28: The Quiet Days
Eva's POV
Time passed like the slow melting of frost — quietly, without much notice, until one morning Eva looked up from her place by the tall Ainsley windows and realized the sharpness in the air was gone.
It had been days. Or maybe weeks. She wasn't counting anymore.
The strange part was how ordinary things had become again — almost suspiciously so. No glowing eyes in her reflection. No flickering pulse of something other under her skin. No whispers in her sleep or voices she didn't recognize. No goddess.
Whatever dream had stirred in her that night, it hadn't returned. It no longer surfaced when she closed her eyes. It didn't haunt the edges of her vision. It didn't even hum under her ribs like it once had.
It was simply… gone.
Slipped out of her like fog at dawn.
And with its absence came the unsettling calm of forgetting. It wasn't that she refused to remember — it was that something inside her chose not to. The way the body forgets pain so it can survive. The way memory blurs after waking.
Eva didn't try to retrieve it. She didn't want to.
Not when life, in its slow, strange way, was beginning to take shape again.
*****
She didn't go to school. That was never going to work.
Even Evelyn had stopped bringing it up.
"A girl like you," she once said while watching Eva reorganize an entire shelf of obscure 18th-century medical texts by region of origin, "would drive any teacher mad."
Vivienne had smirked from her seat on the velvet chaise and added, "Or teach the class herself by week's end."
Eva hadn't argued. She liked learning too much to be confined. And she was too clever to pretend she belonged in a room full of children who didn't see the world the way she did — not when her thoughts moved like clockwork and sometimes like stormclouds.
So instead, she stayed home.
Explored.
Adjusted.
The Ainsley estate was vast — a mansion carved out of silence and secrets, with rooms she hadn't yet mapped and halls that seemed to whisper when walked alone. She took to wandering each day, notebook in hand, cataloguing what others ignored. The patterns in the stonework. The way light touched different corners of the east wing depending on the hour. The creak in the library floorboard just before the third bookshelf — and how if you pressed it twice, it shifted slightly, revealing the edge of a hidden panel that no one had yet dared to open.
She didn't open it either.
Not yet.
There were some secrets that needed to wait.
*****
Vivienne had started walking with her more often — not always saying much, but always near. Her presence was comforting in an odd way, like a rhythm Eva didn't know she'd been craving.
Sometimes, she would bring tea in the late afternoons and sit beside her in the overgrown glass conservatory. They would listen to the wind. Watch how it made the ivy tremble. Vivienne would hum something — an old song Eva never asked the name of — and stroke her hair with fingers too careful to be casual.
"Do you feel safe here?" she asked one afternoon, not looking at her.
Eva didn't respond immediately. "Yes. But I feel watched."
Vivienne only nodded. "You're very loved, Eva. That makes people… curious."
"Or afraid."
Vivienne's gaze shifted then, grey and unreadable. "Both things can be true."
*****
Evelyn, for her part, had become softer than Eva ever remembered. She still teased and occasionally fussed, but she no longer pressed. There was something in her now — some quiet awareness — that Eva wasn't just a child to be raised.
She was something else. Something that needed space.
And Evelyn, for all her perfectionism, seemed to understand that.
She braided Eva's hair in the mornings now, brushing it with a gentleness that made Eva's chest ache.
"You're taller," Evelyn said one morning.
"You say that every week."
"Well, it's true every week." She gave a small smile. "You don't just grow in height, you know. You change."
"Do I seem different?"
Evelyn hesitated, then tucked a strand of hair behind Eva's ear. "You seem… quieter. But not empty. Like you're thinking of something important."
Eva didn't answer. Because she wasn't sure what it was she was thinking of. Just a silence inside her. A tension she couldn't name.
*****
Reginald had become… a complication.
He no longer looked at her like a ghost. That much was clear.
He had stopped avoiding her, stopped jumping when she entered a room. There was a steadiness in him now that hadn't been there before. Not love, not quite — but a cautious sort of acceptance.
Or guilt, perhaps, reshaped into effort.
He still rarely spoke at length to her. But he had started leaving small gestures — the occasional book, sometimes a note about a botanical garden nearby she might enjoy, or a reference to a medical article he'd clipped from the paper.
He called her Évangeline more often now, and when he did, it sounded less like a name and more like an apology folded into a prayer.
One evening, she caught him standing in the doorway of the drawing room, watching her sketch anatomical diagrams by the firelight.
"Your hand's steadier," he murmured after a long silence.
She looked up. "It has to be."
He nodded once. "You'll be good. When you choose your field."
"I've already chosen."
He gave a quiet, almost imperceptible smile. "Of course you have."
It wasn't praise, but it wasn't doubt either. That, Eva realized, was more than she'd expected.
*****
Sometimes, Eva caught herself pausing in front of mirrors again.
Not because of what she saw — but because of what she didn't.
The girl staring back at her had pale grey eyes, soft and silvered at the edges, nothing like the storm-dark gaze of a goddess. Her reflection blinked when she did. It didn't flicker. It didn't glow.
But still, at night, she sometimes dreamed of coals glowing softly in the dark — the faint violet of something ancient, sleeping.
She never remembered the dreams. Not fully.
Only the way they made her wake with her throat dry, her heart too loud in her ears.
*****
She kept a new journal now — one without the markings of old stories or coded memories.
This one was plain, bound in soft brown leather, gifted by Vivienne.
Eva used it to record what she saw in the garden. What birds returned each morning. The changes in the ivy patterns along the north wall. The way Evelyn's laughter sounded different when she thought no one was listening.
Normal things.
Mortal things.
Because she had decided, quietly, not to chase after what she might be.
Athena had kissed her brow and told her to live as a mortal.
She would do just that.
She would forget — not because she had to, but because she wanted to.
Because the world she had now, fragile and imperfect, was one she wanted to understand from the inside, not from above.
*****
One rainy morning, she wandered into the back of the estate, near the lesser-known wing that hadn't been renovated since the late 1800s. She found Vivienne there, sorting through old letters and boxes of antique jewelry.
"You're not supposed to be here," Vivienne said without turning.
"You're not supposed to be going through people's secrets," Eva countered.
Vivienne smiled faintly. "Touché."
Eva stepped closer. "Are any of those yours?"
"Some," Vivienne admitted. "Some were my mother's. Some… may have belonged to someone you'll know when you're older."
Eva paused. "Will I like them?"
Vivienne looked over, her expression unreadable. "I think you'll understand them. Whether you'll like them… depends."
Eva glanced down at a delicate silver comb with a small carving of ivy leaves and rosebuds. "Why are you showing me this?"
"Because," Vivienne said softly, "I don't want you to forget who you are. Even if you don't remember yet."
Eva looked at her sharply.
But Vivienne didn't elaborate.
And Eva didn't push.
*****
That night, she returned to her room with that same comb tucked into her pocket.
She placed it beside her journal on the desk, stared at both objects for a long time, and finally climbed into bed without opening either.
The wind outside was soft. The kind that brushed through curtains without waking anyone.
She closed her eyes and dreamed of nothing.
Nothing at all.
And for the first time in a long while, she slept without fear.