I don’t stay long after. My thoughts are heavy on the walk back to the school; I try to act cheery for Gwen, listen to her, but I have to force myself to focus.

Once back, I get changed and then stay in my room. Maybe I should see my friends and give my mind a chance to breathe, but I don’t want to bring the mood down, sitting around in a sulk. Rather, I start work on sewing Iris’s dress. It’s going to take a while to finish. By area, half the dress will be embroidery, so it would probably take me a month of sewing every evening. I’ll try not to do that (to avoid straining my wrist and such), so my tentative deadline is the end of term.

Something else that sets this dress apart from my others is that I have a small selection of similar shades and tints of purple thread to use. It will mostly be in one colour, which I chose to match Iris’s eye colour, but I want to add subtle detail to it as well, make it something that looks impressive from afar and up close.

Altogether, it’s tedious work that naturally eats up my focus.

I do that for a couple of hours, taking me to midafternoon, four o’clock? Only some of my brooding has been cleared away, but it’s enough for me to comfortably put on a polite smile. So I go to the lounge and check for my friends. They’re there, so I join them.

Maybe they notice I’m not in the best mood, but they’re good at understanding when not to ask, continuing their chats as I offer a few words here and there, mostly just listening. It’s things like how Helena’s family are doing (which can sometimes take a while if all her siblings and her parents have been busy), what Belle’s sister has heard (socialites gather quite the amount of gossip in a week), and there’s a couple of questions about Clarice, but I understandably haven’t heard again from her since Wednesday.

After dinner and a walk, I excuse myself to my room. My sewing stuff is still out, but I feel too tired for that now, worried my hands won’t stay steady or that my concentration will slip.

Instead, I take out a spare notebook and set it on my desk. In a neat script, I write “Nora’s Lesson Planner” across the front. Then I open the first page and make it into an index. It won’t have page numbers, though, but bookmarks—slips of coloured ribbon. Blue for maths, red for reading comprehension, yellow for writing skills. I’ll start with those.

Maths, I don’t know. Even though Gwen boasted to Victoria about studying mathematics at school, I’m pretty sure she only learns arithmetic, and probably not much more than addition and subtraction.

What do I want to teach her? What do I want her to learn? What would she want to learn? I have countless questions, no answers. Or rather, my only answer is, “Something useful,” but that only leads to asking what does “useful” mean.

After struggling with that for a while, I try to simplify the problem. She should know counting. How much? She should be able to confidently and reliably count to twenty. In her everyday life, when would she need to count more than twenty of something? Twenty shillings to a pound, nothing else really.

With that as my starting point, I start writing down a list of very specific and measurable skills, relevant skills. Multiplication is related to buying several of the same item and calculating wages, division loosely related to sharing out things, but ratios are important for cooking and when converting from pennies to shillings (and shillings to pounds). Geometry is related to how much fabric (or other material) is needed for covering something. I even sneak in a bit of very specific algebra in a couple of places.

It’s quite messy, especially as I often change my mind or otherwise rethink how to word something, but it feels… accomplishable. I feel like I can sit down and ask Gwen if she can count to twenty and, if she can’t, then I can teach her and help her until she can and then move on to the next item.

Ellie’s memories… don’t really go back to her childhood. I can’t just recycle those lessons. Even if I could, I probably wouldn’t. I don’t have, like, thirty hours a week with Gwen, so I have to make the most of my time.

For a change of pace, I flip through a dozen blank pages and title the page I end up on “Reading Comprehension”. This is a more subjective subject, I know, but a few “skills” come to mind. Vocabulary, grammar. If I write a few really short stories (a page or two long), then I can write mini-tests about them as well. Things like recognising implicit emotions based on what happens to the character or correctly interpreting descriptions of emotions.

As I think through some of those ideas, jotting down notes for myself, a knock on the door interrupts me.

“Who is it?” I ask.

“Me,” Violet replies.

I smile, and start neatening up my desk as I say, “Come in.”

So she does and closes the door behind her. I make room for her, retreating to sit on my bed. Except, rather than the chair I vacated for her, she comes over to sit next to me. I’m surprised, but it’s a happy surprise. Her arm, warm, leans against me, the pressure a subtle reminder she’s next to me, close to me.

I wasn’t watching her come over, so I don’t know what face she’s making. Probably, she’s checking on me since I was out of it earlier, right? Giving me the chance to talk to her if I want to, or otherwise reassuring me while I sort out whatever’s bothering me.

However, her kind action is poisonous today, dredging up the emotions from when I spoke to Lottie and all the thoughts that followed.

My throat closes up, hard to breathe and harder to speak. But I promised her I wouldn’t keep things like this to myself. “Can I ask you something strange?” I whisper.

“You can even ask me something that isn’t strange,” she says, her voice warm, comforting.

My lips dry, I wet them, and my uncomfortable hands need to fidget for a moment, and I delay myself another couple of seconds before clamping down on the behaviour.

“Would you do any unreasonable thing I ask you to do?” I ask.

Because I’m wondering if what made Eleanor the protagonist wasn’t her beauty, but that she had the ability to capture hearts; not just the faerie kings’ hearts, but human hearts.

And what if I have it too?

I can’t remember Violet ever saying no to me, yet I can list oh so many times I’ve been unreasonable. From the sleepover, to leading her around by the hand when we were children, I have… always been infringing on her, emotionally and physically. Not just on her. Handing out nicknames, insisting on using first names….

The silence drags on and, as it does, it’s as if my heart refuses to beat until she gives me a reply, a painful knot in my chest, burning. My consciousness feels far away, my vision narrow and hearing weak.

But I’m slowly pulled back when Violet holds my hand. She squeezes me tightly, painfully so. That pain clears my mind a bit.

“You have some strange thought in your head, don’t you?” she asks.

Strange doesn’t begin to describe it.

With no reply coming from me, she rests her head on my shoulder, her hair brushing against my cheek, almost ticklish. “I do have a lot of trust and faith in you, but it’s not blind, and it is deserved. Rather than ask me if I would do any unreasonable thing you ask me to do, you should ask yourself if you would ever ask me to do something unreasonable without a reason. Besides, have I not objected to your requests many times over the years, only for you to address my concerns?”

Her words are convincing, soothing. It makes me wonder if being able to see another’s heart is simply a case of closeness.

“You are a very persuasive person, but a lot of your charm comes from your sincerity and thoughtfulness. You show others affection, seem to take pride in it, and it’s noticeable how genuinely you do so. You notice many little details others would miss, incorporating them into how you treat people. More than all that, though, you are a good person who simply wants to love and be loved. I can’t speak for anyone else, but that is why I’m here. Our bond is built on your warmth and kindness, on your willingness to reach out to me and forgive me for my faults, and on your love which gives me the strength to strive to be a better person myself.”

Hearing her speak is jarring, a painful dissonance forming between my view of myself and the person she’s describing. It’s like an echo of the pain Lottie felt, suddenly overburdened with good intentions, smothered.

I’ve always known that, as well as beautiful, I am kind and generous and forgiving, but it has always been to a fault. It’s not something worth praise. I’m not worthy of being praised. Praise my work, praise my effort, but don’t praise me.

Please, don’t praise Ellie.

I don’t know if Violet can sense my distress, but she chooses this moment to stand up, pull me up as well, and then she embraces me. She holds me tight, and I just break. Crying into her neck, I hug her, my chest heaving with every sob, shaking. My legs soon give out and, unable to support me for long, she manages to manoeuvre us into a sitting position, now almost cradling me.

This is just too hard for me. I want to be Ellie. Not even the Ellie from the other world, I can just be Ellie the baker’s daughter. Someone normal. No nobility, no reincarnating into a book. I could just… have friends, you know?

I draw in a long, shaky breath, and let go of that dream. Life… always has problems.

Right now, I’m freaking out over nothing, but I have a lot of people who care about me and whom I care deeply about. The problems I face aren’t insurmountable. And I know I would have got through this without Violet, but I’m glad she’s here for me. It’s a lot easier to deal with this when I feel safe enough to let everything out.

Prying myself off of her, I whisper, “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she says.

Sitting next to her on my bed, I dry my eyes. Then, seeing her shoulder, I cringe. Using my sleeve, I dry it. “Sorry,” I mumble, relieved that it wasn’t a snotty cry.

She gently laughs off my apology. After a moment of silence, she asks, “Do you need me to stay with you?”

I shake my head.

“Do you want me to stay?”

I hesitate for a long second, and then nod.

So she does.

For a couple of minutes, we sit in silence; I’m busy picking up my broken thoughts. Just, I care for Lottie so much, it really messed me up to realise I’ve been hurting her. I almost wanted something to blame. Rather than me or her, it’s because of some weird power I have, you know?

“Were you doing homework?” Violet asks.

Pulled from my thoughts, it takes me a moment to see where she’s looking—my desk. I smile to myself. “In a sense,” I say. Before she can say anything in reply, though, a thought comes to me. “Can I ask you to do something unreasonable?”

She lightly giggles, the sound like medicine to my raw heart. “For a good reason,” she says.

“Would you cry on my shoulder when you need to?”

The seconds pass—one, two, five, ten—and then she simply says, “I will.”