4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
Greta and the Queen
The house has emptied. Jerome is at basketball, Noah behind the wheel, Charles sealed in his room, and Greta is left in the cooling kitchen with only Millie for company. She moves through the clearing-up with the muscle memory of decades — bowls stacked, crumbs swept, the table wiped in slow circles — but each familiar gesture lands differently tonight, with Claire's accusations still turning beneath the surface and Paul's silence growing louder by the hour. Millie watches from the kitchen threshold with the patience of a creature who has decided exactly how this evening will end. She is right.
Greta moves through the aftermath of dinner alone, her hands following routines her mind has already left behind. The kitchen still holds the warmth of the meal — the fading scent of rosemary, the cold soup wearing its puckered skin, the crumble untouched on the counter — but the people who filled the room have dispersed, and what remains is the particular silence of a house that has exhaled its family and not yet drawn breath again. Millie stations herself at the threshold between hallway and kitchen with the quiet authority of a creature who knows she belongs, and the chapter becomes a duet between a woman talking to a dog who will not answer and a dog who answers anyway through presence alone. Greta's complaints — the shedding, the barking, the garden beds — are the surface layer of a conversation she cannot have with anyone else, and Millie's theatrical sighs and slow blinks are a kind of companionship that asks nothing in return. The evening deepens outside the window: the lemon tree stills, the stars appear without conviction, a wind chime reaches for a melody it cannot find. When Greta finally flicks off the kitchen light and walks toward the sewing room, Millie rises without invitation and falls into step beside her — and it is that wordless act of accompaniment, more than anything else, that holds the night together.
