Seventeen years, ten months, two weeks, three days...
Each moment is agony.
Every second of every day, George Beaumont is reminded of his young wife's untimely death. With every glimpse of that painting up on that mantle, with every glimpse of his...
A/N: There's a self-harm trigger warning here. I mean, this whole story is a warning, but you know. Just a heads-up.
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Winter of 1870
"How do you deal with it, Papa?" asks Anne the second George opens the door. Her eyes are focused on the window situated on the far side of the room, but even from this distance, he hears the strange removal in her voice.
"Deal with what, liakadía?" He takes a tentative step closer, thinking that if he steps with too much force, she could break.
"Your wife. How much Ray looks like her. Doesn't her ghost ever leave you?" She turns towards him, but her gaze lands on the entrance from whence he had come.
"Ghosts are about as real as fairy stories, Anne. They are not important. What is important is you getting better. Would you like me to tell the cook to make you cream puffs? You adore those. Or maybe shepherd's pie? You need to eat. Look at how thin you've become."
"Pumpkin pie."
George freezes, then forces himself to relax. Anne has always been observant. She sees it all; how he clenched his jaw, how his body had tensed up...
"You want some pumpkin pie?"
"No, the girl. The one in the red dress. The one that looks like Ray. She's always around you. She smells like pumpkin pie. That is your wife, am I correct?"
"How much laudanum did you take?" he asks incredulously. Still, it is chilling. She could not have known that. She could not see what died a long time ago.
She yawns, crawling back under her blankets. George knows. For years, he has depended on laudanum, and he recognizes the same spacey removal that always comes after overdosing on it. Still, he lets Anne go. He cannot speak after that.
"I drank some of it. Maybe more than I should have. Either way, she's real."
"Go back to sleep, Anne. None of this is good for you."
She shifts away from him, curling herself up into a ball.
"Tell Raymond that. Let him go back to school where I can't trouble him. I'll be all right in the end."
"He won't like that."
"I don't care. Now go," she says dismissively, leaving George speechless. That is not the girl he considered his own daughter for nine years. That steady, aloof tone is not the voice girl he watched his son fall in love with. She is not the girl who rode on his shoulders until she had become too big to carry.
So George doesn't go. Instead, he walks over to her, ruffling her dark hair.
"She doesn't like it, you know. She's the one who always tells me to hide your laudanum bottles and whiskey. She hates how they smell. She told me that you... you're supposed to smell like paint and wildflowers, not tobacco and alcohol. She hates it. She likes the paint better. Wait... you paint?"
