Moving in properly felt entirely different from simply arriving as a frightened stranger that first terrible night. Once the contract was signed, once the strange formality of it all had settled into something resembling actual routine, Rosa gave Silveria a proper tour of the house, unhurried this time, nothing whatsoever like the rushed, overwhelming introduction from her very first evening here.
"This is the east wing," Rosa said, leading her down a long hallway lined with tall windows that let in soft, warm morning light. "It's entirely yours now, dear. Your bedroom, your private sitting room, and a proper study too, if you'd like one set up specifically for your work."
"My work," Silveria repeated slowly, testing the unfamiliar phrase carefully on her own tongue. It still felt genuinely strange to claim her sketching as something worthy of an entire dedicated room, something legitimate enough to deserve its own careful space.
"Mr. Crew mentioned you might want the space properly arranged," Rosa said, something knowing entering her tone. "He had the room cleared out entirely last week, in fact, before you'd even finished settling into the rest of the house."
Silveria stopped walking abruptly. "He did that himself?"
"He did," Rosa confirmed, continuing on down the hallway. "Didn't say a great deal about it, mind you. Simply told Benson to have the room properly emptied and a proper desk brought in, good natural light, plenty of shelving for your materials."
Silveria didn't quite know what to do with that particular piece of information, so she simply filed it carefully away, another small, confusing piece of the larger puzzle that was her new husband. A man who had told her flatly, twice now, not to fall in love with him, who kept an entire separate wing of his enormous house carefully divided from hers, and who apparently also quietly arranged a private study for her modest hobby without saying a single direct word about it to her face.
The tour continued on through the remainder of the enormous house. The kitchen, warm and pleasantly bustling even in the middle of a quiet afternoon, the staff moving efficiently around each other in a practiced dance. The gardens, sprawling and immaculately maintained, with a small stone bench tucked beneath an old, sprawling oak tree that Silveria immediately claimed silently as her own favorite spot in the entire property. The formal dining room, far too large and grand for just two people, with a polished table that could easily seat twenty guests comfortably.
"Does anyone actually eat properly in here?" Silveria asked, running her fingers curiously along the gleaming polished wood.
"Special occasions only, typically," Rosa said. "Most ordinary days, if Mr. Crew eats a proper meal at all rather than simply working through it, he prefers the smaller, more intimate dining room just off the main kitchen."
"And the west wing?" Silveria asked carefully, genuine curiosity coloring her voice. "That's Mr. Crew's side of the house, correct?"
Something careful and guarded entered Rosa's normally open expression at that particular question. "That's his private space," she said simply. "I wouldn't go wandering over there uninvited, dear, if I were in your position."
"Does he actually want it that way? The separate wings, I mean, kept so carefully apart from each other?"
"He's always wanted it precisely that way," Rosa said quietly, her voice dropping slightly. "Long before you ever arrived here, dear. This entire house has been carefully divided like this since he was quite a young man, not very long after everything terrible happened to his family."
Silveria tried her best not to let that particular answer sting, though it did regardless, some small, unreasonable part of her stinging sharply at the quiet reminder of exactly how little of himself Damien apparently intended to properly share with her, even now that they were formally, legally bound together. It shouldn't have mattered to her at all, not really. They had a carefully negotiated contract between them, not a genuine marriage, not in any real sense that properly counted. But something about living inside a house this enormous, this quietly starved of any real warmth or connection, made the careful distance between them feel considerably heavier than it probably should have felt to someone in her particular position.
She spent that entire first proper week slowly learning the shape of her strange new life within these walls. Breakfast eaten alone, most mornings, unless Damien happened to already be seated at the table, which wasn't especially often given how early he typically left for the office downtown. Long, empty afternoons with remarkably little to properly fill them except books pulled somewhat randomly from the library shelves and the old sketchbooks she'd packed without really planning to seriously use them again, not properly, not the way she used to before everything surrounding Lilibeth's disastrous wedding had turned her entire life so completely upside down.
She found herself drawn back steadily to that particular garden bench most days, sketching whatever happened to come to mind, necklines and sleeves and the graceful fall of fabric across imaginary shoulders, designs nobody would ever actually see or properly wear. It was considerably easier here than it had ever once been back at her parents' house, no genuine risk of someone discovering the sketchbook and mocking her cruelly for wasting valuable time on something so impractical and self-indulgent. Here, at least, she had genuine privacy, even if that particular privacy came wrapped tightly in a loneliness she hadn't quite properly expected to feel so acutely.
One particular afternoon, curled comfortably up on her favorite bench with pencil moving almost entirely without conscious thought, she looked up to find Benson approaching steadily across the lawn, something careful and considerate in his usually neutral expression.
"Mrs. Crew," he said, stopping a respectful distance away. "I wanted to properly make certain you were settling in adequately. Is there anything at all the household is currently failing to provide you?"
"No," she said, genuinely surprised by the thoughtful question. "Everyone here has been remarkably kind to me. Thank you, Benson, truly."
He hesitated visibly, like there was considerably more he wanted to properly say but wasn't quite certain how to phrase it appropriately. "This house can feel quite large and rather quiet, especially at first, when you're not yet accustomed to its particular rhythms," he said finally. "If you ever find yourself wanting some company, the staff dining room remains always open to you, whenever you'd like. I understand that might seem somewhat unusual, given your current position here as Mrs. Crew, but Mr. Crew has genuinely never once objected to it happening in the past, not with anyone."
Something in his careful, deliberate phrasing made her wonder exactly how much the staff already properly understood about the strange, unconventional nature of her marriage, how much they'd already quietly guessed simply from watching the two carefully separate wings, the deliberate distance maintained between them, the contract that had clearly been drawn up and formally signed with lawyers present rather than anything resembling genuine love or affection.
"Thank you," she said again, meaning it considerably more than the simple words alone could properly convey. "I appreciate that more than you probably realize, Benson."
He nodded politely and left her properly to her sketching, and Silveria sat there for a long while afterward, pencil still resting idle in her hand, thinking carefully about the strange, quiet kindness of the various people living and working within this house, all of them somehow working steadily around the cold, guarded edges of the man they clearly respected, perhaps even genuinely cared for, despite everything he apparently refused to let himself properly show to the outside world.
She thought, too, about the study he'd quietly arranged for her without a single word of explanation, and found herself wondering what it might look like once it was finally finished, whether she'd have proper room to lay out fabric samples, whether the light would be good enough in the afternoons for detailed sketching work. It was such a small gesture, in the grand scheme of everything that had happened to her these past weeks. And yet it had stayed with her regardless, turning over quietly in her mind at odd moments throughout the day, a small, unexpected kindness from a man who had gone to considerable lengths to convince her he wasn't capable of such things.
That evening, walking past the east wing's newly cleared room on her way to dinner, she paused at the open door and looked inside properly for the first time. Empty still, waiting for furniture, but the light through the tall windows was exactly as good as she might have hoped, warm and golden even this late in the day. She stood there a moment longer than she strictly needed to, something warm and cautiously hopeful settling quietly in her chest, before continuing on toward the dining room and whatever the rest of the evening might hold.
The desk arrived two days later, along with proper shelving and a set of good lamps positioned carefully to catch the afternoon light. Silveria hadn't asked for any of it, hadn't even mentioned the room again since Rosa had first shown it to her, and yet somehow the furniture reflected precisely what she would have chosen herself, simple and functional, nothing ostentatious, exactly the kind of space where actual work might happen rather than merely being displayed for guests.
She arranged her sketchbooks carefully on the new shelves that first evening, along with the small collection of fabric swatches she'd managed to bring with her from the Hitler house, tucked away in a bag nobody had bothered to properly search before she'd left. It wasn't much. A handful of samples she'd collected over the years, scraps she'd saved from discarded projects, pieces that meant considerably more to her than their modest monetary value might suggest to an outside observer.
Rosa found her there later that evening, still arranging things carefully, and smiled at the sight of her settled so comfortably among her own belongings for the first time since arriving.
"This suits you," Rosa said, glancing around the small but well-appointed room. "Better than the rest of this enormous house does, if I'm being honest with you."
"It feels like the first thing here that's actually mine," Silveria admitted, running her fingers along the edge of the desk. "Everything else feels borrowed, somehow. Beautiful, but not properly belonging to me."
"Give it time," Rosa said gently. "Houses take a while to properly feel like home, especially houses as large and complicated as this particular one. I remember feeling exactly the same way myself, when I first started working here all those years ago."
"Does it feel like home to you now?" Silveria asked curiously.
Rosa considered the question seriously before answering. "It does," she said finally. "Though I suspect that has considerably more to do with the people I've come to know here than with the house itself. Buildings are just buildings, in the end, dear. It's who fills them that properly matters."
Silveria thought about that observation long after Rosa had said her goodnights and left her alone in the quiet study, surrounded by her own small collection of belongings for the first time in longer than she could properly remember. She thought about Damien, somewhere in his own separate wing of this enormous house, and wondered whether he had ever managed to make any single room here feel properly like home again, not since the accident had taken everything and everyone that once made this entire house feel alive.