The sheets were warm when she woke, the heavy blankets atop of her cocooning her into a phantom spring. Cora nestled further into them, her body heavy and sore. Not truly a physical sore, not her muscles or joints, but more one that came from within her. A strange soreness, it felt strongest in her chest and radiated out toward her back. She wondered if perhaps it was from crying, but she doubted it. She hadn't cried herself to sleep last night as she had done for the past several before. She thought then about stretching her shoulders and then her neck, but didn't. Blinking her eyes open to the pale pink that coated her childhood room, she decided against it. Everything felt so warm. She felt so much warmer than she had in what seemed a year. Brighter today, sunlight poured into her room through the white lace curtains at the long windows. Keeping perfectly still, she stared off into the light, taking in easy breaths. The morning sun kissed everything around her.

As she gained more and more consciousness, she became aware of his presence at the end of her bed, sitting there. She let silence remain between them for a few moments more before she slowly brought her eyes to him, having to dip her chin down along her pillow. In the quiet, she could hear her eyelashes brush against the fabric. A feather poked at her cheek.

Robert adjusted himself slightly. "Would you care for breakfast?"

Taking in his words slowly, still not fully aware, Cora finally understood them. She shook her head no.

"I'd feel much better if you ate something. You went to bed without eating anything."

Again, Cora listened to his words and let them sink down into silence again before responding. She wasn't hungry. She didn't know if she'd ever feel hungry again.

"Where is Perkins?" she asked, suddenly feeling the gentle absence of her maid.

Before answering, she watched her husband let out a heavy breath. He pressed his hands. "Ruth's sent both she and Watson to stay at some hotel. Something about proper mourning, we won't be needing to be changed."

Cora nodded slightly in acknowledgement.

"I'll bring you up something, though, should you like it." Robert inched closer to her on her bed, the covers stirring under his movements. "Some toast."

She let her gaze move away from him as he spoke, settling again on the light that filtered brightly into her room. She couldn't eat. She could not eat. "No," she answered. "But thank you."

They sat again in silence, but Cora marked it less cold that it had been for some time. A long time. Six weeks' time. Eventually, she shifted her head again against the pillow and found the edge of the dark pink blankets covering her. She rubbed the hem of one of them between her fingertips.

"Where did you sleep?"

Robert was quiet, but then answered her moments later, in a small voice. "On the sofa, in your father's office."

The green one. She stilled her fingers and brought her eyes again to him. She wanted to ask if he had been comfortable, if he had been cold. A small part of her wanted him to crawl inside the warmth she held around her and lie with her in the bed she'd slept in as a girl. But she did not. Instead she only said a tiny, "Oh." She meant it as apologetic as it sounded, and was momentarily glad of it.

The softness of her voice must have prompted him, though, for he moved closer to her, and he brought his thick hand to hers, though hers were entwined now with the sheets and bedding. She stared at the way his fingers grasped at her hands.

"Are you alright?"

Cora froze. Just like that, with his simple question, his three words, she was cold again.

What? Why? Why would he ask that? Shouldn't he know? No. No, she wasn't alright. Why did he ask such stupid questions? Alright? Was she alright? It took everything in her not to rip her fingers from his. Instead she closed her eyes and swallowed.

"Do you think I'm alright?"

She sensed him tense slightly, could tell he was growing angry. "Cora. You know what I meant."

She shook her head.

"I don't know why you're pushing me away, Cora. I don't know quite what I've done. You couldn't have come, Cora. Not six weeks ago. Please. Let's move past that. We're here now." Robert moved his hands, removed them from hers, but Cora could not open her eyes. She could not look at him. She squeezed her eyes more tightly. "It was out of my control, Cora. Do you think I wanted this? Do you think I wanted any of this? Because I did not." It hurt. Everything in her hurt. "So I suggest, if you're able, you rise and come downstairs, otherwise you should let me know."

She pulled in a long breath and held it.

"Fine." She could feel the bed move as Robert rose from it. "Your grandmother's here."

Cora opened her eyes as he closed the door after him. Part of her was surprised that it wasn't slammed.

The house was never quiet growing up. Her mother was always loud, for one. For two, Harold had been forced to learn the piano, though he swore it a feminine talent and complained woefully as he played. For three, Father could always be heard laughing and swearing with his associates. Crass, but delightfully so, they all seemed to swarm about him, forever in their home, trudging back to his office.

Peering down into the foyer from the balcony, she saw the flowers again that were most assuredly from them, his business people. The Jewish did not send flowers. They die, her father had always said.

They die.

Tickings of clocks that had not been stopped, and the muffled noises of the outside world, ignorant to their loss, were the only noises she heard now, and it was loud. She found it strange. The quiet made her house louder than it had even been before.

As she took the stairs, she strained her ears to hear any noises she could, any that would dull the roar of quiet. Slowly, a low voice rose up to meet her. GranMary.

"...I'll be sure to have soup brought up to her this afternoon. You'll do that, won't you Landry?"

After a few steps more, Cora peered over the banister and through the threshold of the foyer where, despite shiva, despite her Levinson relatives all on stools or crouching low to the floor around the sitting room, her grandmother sat poised in a needlepoint chair. She watched the way the tall woman's long-fingered hands rested open-palmed in her lap. She saw the small curve of her nose, the still-dark, though graying, curls that were tucked under her black hat. The golden cross she wore glinted around her neck.

Cora studied her other relatives' reactions; they didn't seem to notice. Or if they had noticed, they didn't seem to mind, as they all set clustered among themselves, away from her. But Robert. Robert sat on the ground beside her. He sat on the ground beside her and Aunt Ruth.

"And as for Cora," Cora perked at her name; standing straighter on the grand stairwell, she listened closely. "She'll come through it. She was close to her father, God knows. But she'll come through it."

Cora kept her eyes trained on her grandmother as she began again to slowly descend the stairs to see her better. Her hand ran along the smooth mahogany banister. The creamy marble of the steps and floor below gleamed around her.

"Then you haven't heard." It was Aunt Ruth. Cora remained quiet, and she stopped. She saw them clearly now; she saw the expressions they wore, the eagerness in which Aunt Ruth prompted Robert to share their failed news. "Tell her, Robert."

No. Cora narrowed her eyes and found Robert's face. No. He wouldn't. He wouldn't talk of it like this. Please. She was so tired of talking of it.

She watched his eyes go wide for only a moment, and then as he shook his head decidedly. He glanced up at her mother's maid standing nearby, and then again to her aunt and grandmother. The women were watching him expectantly.

"No."

Stunned, Cora stayed silent and still on the stairs, not moving, not caring to move. Stunned that he had chosen not to discuss it, everything around her suddenly came became clear, as if she'd been moving around in a strange fog. Stunned that he had acted that way, a way that reflected her own feelings, she suddenly became aware; there was clarity. The marble step was suddenly cold beneath her feet, even through her stockings. The smoothness of the banister was cool beneath her palms and she held onto it tightly. She held onto the banister as she had done the railing of the ship. She closed her eyes.

Quickly, and unexpectedly, Cora wanted to stand near him. She wanted to hold his hand. She opened her eyes.

Working her down the remainder of the stairs, Cora padded quietly into the sitting room, where Robert, in all his propriety, stood from the floor when she came in. It made her want to smile. Shoeless, his unchanged clothes dirtied from the floor, he still stood as a lady entered the room.

She studied his perplexed expression as she came in. She stared at him momentarily before realizing the cause of it, the cause of this bewildered gaze. She had wanted to smile, but she hadn't noticed that she had. She had smiled. And was. She was smiling up at him. Sadly, yes, but it wasn't a scowl, and it wasn't a frown. A smile.

And Robert smiled back at her.

"GranMary. How wonderful of you to come." Cora, shaking her gaze, met her grandmother and leaned down to peck a quick kiss in the air near her cheek. When she pulled away, she stepped backward, closer to Robert. "Have you seen Mother?"

Mary nodded, "She's having breakfast. Which is something you should do yourself, yes?"

Cora fidgeted by her husband's side, taken aback by the immediacy of her grandmother's words. "I..I'm not terribly hungry."

"But you will eat," Mary tucked her chin and peered up at her with her impossibly communicative, sharp, brown eyes. "Robert, bring her into the dining room. Landry will give her some eggs."

"GranMary -"

"Harold sent for me to take care of you. And of your mother." Cora glanced over at Robert and then down again at her grandmother. A sudden memory GranMary resurfaced, one that Cora had forgotten. When in which Cora was only nine, and dreading the insistence that she learn to ride, though she had been terrifically terrible at it. GranMary, as usual, achieved her objectives, and was soon applauding Cora encouragement near the make-shift horse yard at Newport.

"Now off you go. And enjoy your eggs." And just like twelve years ago, Cora was to acquiesce to GranMary's wishes. "Robert..."

Robert's hand was on the small of her back, and she allowed herself to be lead into the dining room.

Cora leaned against the wall as she sat on the floor, Landry having brought her a tray for her plate of steaming eggs. She could see Robert staring at the steaming plate and cup of coffee from where he sat near her, his ankles crossed, his toes flexing up and down intermittently.

"I'm...I'm truly not hungry." Cora replaced the fork she held to the tray before her, sliding it away. "I can't eat. I...I don't feel hunger. I...I keep thinking of him."

At this admission, she was grateful for Robert's silence.

And then, for the first time since he died, for the first time in a week she spoke of him. The memory quick and unbidden, she told Robert. However, she only heard the words she said; her mind – her thoughts – felt completely separate, as if they weren't there at all. The scene tumbled from her lips slowly, yet easily.

"He came into my room that Tuesday...that Tuesday before I left. I remember it was in the morning, and...being in Newport we had the balcony's doors open to the breeze." She swallowed, her mind feeling the salty gusts. "He came in and he...he held something, there. In his hands. He always did that," she felt her head tip to the side, her words stretching with approval. "He always snuck in little gifts, that...at the time...didn't seem meaningful...and yet..." she licked her lips, and she took in a breath to continue. "Anyway...he came in and...and Landry was packing. I was holding up one of my new dresses, the blue one. The one with the small pearl buttons up the sleeves. And I was looking at the buttons." She paused, yet again, her chest suddenly feeling much heavier. "And I realize now, that I didn't look up at him." Her voice had grown higher, and she felt her eyebrows knitting. "He was talking to me, and yet, I...I didn't look at him..." she trailed off, seeing the scene. She heard him. She could sense him in the periphery of her vision. She could smell the peppermint of his coat. "He...he left, leaving the gift on the table near the door. I didn't open it until we boarded the boat."

Her hands tore nimbly at the brown paper packaging. She read the title again, and again, her fingers tracing over the golden ivy that grew across the cover.

"And what was it?"

Cora took in a breath, a breath that she hadn't realized she needed, when Robert spoke. She brought her eyes to him. "Hmm?"

"The gift. What was it?"

The inscription inside the cover simply read 'from your Father'.

"The Portrait of a Lady," Cora answered, "by Henry James."

She watched as Robert nodded, and as he adjusted very slightly against the wall. "Ah. Yes. I remember you reading it at Downton. The week that I proposed."

She only stared in response. She stared, and she stared, long and hard. "Yes," she finally said.

Also adjusting her now-sore back, she looked away from Robert again, then off into some middle distance where her memories were more clear, where she could sense her father, where she could smell peppermint.

"We weren't as close after that. After I accepted you…." her voice spoke. She heard it, though she had not permitted it to say it.

She showed her father the ring. He sipped his drink in his office as Martha told him about the plans, the wedding a mere six months away, and he frowned.

"No...we weren't as close after that."

There was a long, long silence between them. Cora's thoughts jumped and crawled through dark places and strange feelings until at last they ended on Robert. Robert. The man who had slept on the small green sofa in her father's office. The image of him curled onto it near the fireplace, a small sheet as a cover, appeared in her mind. She pouted slightly.

"I'll sleep with Mother tonight." Cora curled her long fingers around the warmth of her coffee cup's handle. "You may have my bed."

Cora lifted the cup from the saucer, and she took a sip. The heat of the coffee soothed her aching throat.