The agency’s hall echoed with the shuffle of weary feet, its air thick with the steam of bubbling kettles and the murmurs of the broken. Eleanor stood behind the trestle, her hands chapped from stirring, her patched dress dappled with broth. The line stretched long— borers with calloused fists, women clutching babes in shawls, a child whose ribs pressed sharp against his skin. She spooned thin gruel into his bowl, her gaze lingering on his hollow cheeks, and whispered, “You’re not alone,” her voice a thread of warmth in the chill.

  He looked up, eyes dull with hunger, and nodded—a small gesture that pierced her. She saw Eldric in him, his frail frame bent by fate, and James too, his soldier’s pride ground to dust. Each day at the agency carved deeper into her soul; she fed them, yes, but could not fill the void that gnawed at them all. A widow sobbed nearby, her man lost to the mines, and Eleanor pressed a heel of bread into her palm, their fingers brushing—two mourners bound by silent loss.

  She returned home as twilight bled into the sky, Wolthrope’s chimneys spewing soot like a mourner’s veil. Eldric sat by the fire, its glow faint on his sallow face, the wooden horse still. “Mama’s back,” she said, and he smiled, weak but true. Margaret rocked on her pallet, her voice a frail echo: “Good ss,” she murmured, a rare glimpse through the fog of her mind. Eleanor knelt, smoothing her mother’s brow, and felt a pang—Margaret’s tenderness, once a river, now a trickle soon to dry.

  Henry wheezed in the corner, his hands idle, and Eleanor’s chest tightened. She fed the poor, yet her own slipped further into shadow—Eldric’s cough, her parents’ drift. She lit a candle, its fme a trembling sentinel, and sank beside her son. “We’ll endure,” she told him, though her heart whispered a dirge: endurance was but a pause before the inevitable fall.