A quiet moment in the garden of Casa di Tranquilidad was all Milly Pierce needed after working calloused fingers all morning on a client’s gown. Last one. she thought to herself with a sigh.. Her life was dedicated to the honest and simple work of a common woman, and her past commissions were too numerous to recall easily.
She drank her tea in one swift gulp.
As she stared up at the sky, she thought of home. She thought of her real home, Brelus, with it’s bustling and loud streets. She’d seen it after its destruction, and it made her ache for for the familiar Raevir voices and the raucous cries of the Crows as they would come to Adria before battle.
Milly closed her eyes and she could see Constantine Dystov, her late husband, standing in the open fields. His dark hair was being made messy by the wind. She let his memory fade. If he turned and she saw his eyes, fell into them the way she did the first time they met, she would be lost in the dream forever.
She could hear Samuel, her son, playing happily inside.Milly never regretted the time she spent with Edgar because it meant she had tasted motherhood. He provided for her and Sam, but was no more involved in their lives than a portrait would be on a parlor wall. She’d come to expect nothing more of their arrangement. She supposed he keenly felt the burden of caring for them when all he had wanted that day in Felsen was a tryst.
It ate at her, the loneliness, and had been for a long time. The tea this afternoon was bitter, but those memories that would slide into her head during quiet moments were far more difficult to hold without being able to seek comfort from another soul.
The tea’s poison acted swiftly, making the taste nothing but a nuisance as the rest of her consciousness began fading into blackness. Milly Pierce, the clothier, waited for death while sitting in the garden. She rested her head against the side of the villa she called home, but it was nothing more than a stranger’s paradise. At last, there was only a sigh and the faint smile of one without regret.