It happened almost by accident, on an otherwise unremarkable evening nearly two weeks after Sasha's first proper visit.
Silveria had fallen asleep on the garden bench, sketchbook still open across her lap, exhausted after a long afternoon spent helping Rosa organize the enormous linen closet on the second floor. When she woke, the sun had already begun setting, and Damien was sitting on the opposite end of the bench, watching her with an expression she couldn't quite decipher.
"You fell asleep out here," he said, when she blinked up at him in confusion.
"Apparently," she said, sitting up quickly, embarrassed at having been caught so vulnerable and unguarded. "How long have you been sitting there?"
"Not long," he said, though something in his tone suggested it might have been longer than he was properly admitting. His eyes flicked briefly to the small silver pendant resting against her collarbone, the one she'd worn every single day since long before she could properly remember, a simple crescent moon on a delicate chain. "I don't think I've properly asked you about that before."
Silveria's hand rose automatically to touch the familiar shape. "It's the only thing I have from before the Hitlers adopted me," she said quietly. "I don't actually know where it came from originally. They found me wearing it, apparently, though nobody's ever properly explained much more than that to me."
Something shifted behind Damien's eyes, sharp and immediate, though he quickly smoothed the reaction away before she could properly identify it. "You've had it your entire life?"
"As far as I know," she said. "I used to ask my mother about it when I was young. She always said it wasn't important, that I should stop asking questions about things that couldn't be properly answered anyway."
"May I see it?" he asked, something careful entering his voice now.
She unclasped the chain and handed it over, watching him turn the small pendant slowly between his fingers, studying it with an intensity that seemed considerably greater than the object itself should have properly warranted.
"It's just a crescent moon," she said. "Nothing especially valuable, I'd imagine, in terms of actual worth."
"Probably not," he agreed, though something in his voice suggested he wasn't entirely certain of that particular assessment. He handed it back to her carefully. "It's a lovely design regardless of its value."
"Why the sudden interest?" she asked, watching his face carefully.
"No particular reason," he said, though the answer came a beat too quickly to feel entirely honest to her ears. "I suppose I'm simply curious about the parts of your life the official paperwork doesn't properly cover."
Silveria studied him carefully, sensing there was considerably more beneath his careful, deflecting tone than he was willing to share with her just yet. But she recognized, too, the particular shape of a door being gently closed, the same careful evasion she'd noticed from him before whenever conversation drifted too close to something he wasn't properly ready to discuss.
"You do that a lot," she said instead of pressing further. "Ask careful questions, then close the conversation the moment it gets genuinely interesting."
"I'm aware," he admitted, something almost sheepish crossing his expression. "It's a rather difficult habit to properly break, apparently."
"Try, sometime," she said, refastening the pendant around her neck. "I might surprise you with how well I handle actual honesty, if you gave me the proper chance."
He didn't respond to that directly, but something in his expression, thoughtful and slightly unsettled, told her the comment had landed somewhere genuinely real, even if he wasn't quite ready to acknowledge it out loud just yet. They sat together in comfortable silence as the last of the sunset faded slowly from the garden, and Silveria found herself wondering, not for the first time, exactly how many careful, closed doors existed somewhere inside the quiet, complicated man beside her, and how long it might eventually take before he trusted her enough to properly open even one of them completely.
"Can I ask you something in return?" Damien said after a while, breaking the comfortable silence.
"Of course."
"Do you ever wonder about your actual family? Your birth parents, I mean, whoever they might have been?"
The question caught her off guard, though not unpleasantly. "Sometimes," she admitted. "Less than I used to, honestly. I spent years wondering as a child, imagining elaborate stories about who they might have been, why they'd given me up. Eventually I decided the wondering hurt more than it helped, and I mostly stopped."
"Mostly?"
"There are moments," she said quietly. "Like right now, actually, talking about the pendant. It makes me wonder again, briefly, before I remember there's likely no way to ever properly find out."
"Would you want to know, if there were a way?" he asked, something careful in his tone that she couldn't quite properly place.
She considered the question seriously. "I think so," she said finally. "Even if the answer turned out to be painful. I've spent so much of my life not knowing things about myself that other people apparently decided I didn't need to know. I'd rather have the truth, whatever it turns out to be, than keep living inside someone else's careful silence."
Something complicated passed across Damien's face at that, gone before she could properly read it. "That's a brave way to think about it," he said quietly.
"Or a foolish one," she said, managing a small smile. "I suppose we'll never properly know which, since there's no way to actually find out."
He didn't respond to that immediately, his attention seeming to drift somewhere distant for a moment, before he shook himself slightly and returned his focus properly to her. "For what it's worth," he said, "I don't think it's foolish at all."
They sat together a while longer as the garden settled into evening shadow, and Silveria found herself thinking, as she often did lately, that there was considerably more happening beneath Damien's careful, guarded exterior than she had properly access to yet, layers upon layers of things left unsaid that she was slowly, patiently learning to wait for.
• • •
That night, unable to properly sleep, she found herself back in the study she'd been given, pulling the pendant off once more to examine it properly under the good desk lamp Damien had arranged for her. She turned it over slowly in her fingers, studying the small, worn crescent moon from every angle, searching for some detail she might have missed in eighteen years of wearing it without truly looking.
There was nothing obviously remarkable about it. No maker's mark, no engraving, nothing that might properly identify where it had come from or who had given it to her. Just a simple, worn piece of silver that had somehow survived whatever circumstances had led to her being found and eventually adopted into a family that never properly wanted her.
She thought about Damien's reaction to it, the sharp flicker of something behind his eyes before he'd carefully smoothed his expression away. It could have been nothing, she told herself. Simple curiosity, the way he'd claimed. And yet something about the intensity of his attention, the careful way he'd turned it over in his own hands, suggested he'd been looking for something specific, something he hadn't properly found, or hadn't wanted to admit finding.
A soft knock interrupted her thoughts. Rosa stood in the doorway, a cup of tea in each hand.
"I saw your light still on," Rosa said, offering one of the cups. "Thought you might want company."
"Thank you," Silveria said, accepting the tea gratefully. "I couldn't properly sleep."
Rosa settled into the chair across from the desk, studying the pendant still resting in Silveria's palm. "That's a lovely piece," she said. "I don't believe I've properly noticed it before, though I suppose you always wear it tucked beneath your collar."
"It's the only thing I have from before the Hitlers," Silveria said. "Damien asked about it tonight. He seemed... interested, in a way I couldn't quite properly explain."
Something crossed Rosa's face, brief and thoughtful. "Interested how?"
"I'm not entirely certain," Silveria admitted. "Like he recognized something, maybe. Or was looking for something he didn't find."
Rosa was quiet for a moment, sipping her tea thoughtfully. "This family has had a great many things happen to it over the years," she said carefully. "Secrets, some of them. I don't know the full extent of what Damien's father was involved in, business-wise, before he died. There were always whispers, projects that never quite made sense to those of us just working in the household."
"What kind of whispers?"
"Nothing I could properly repeat with any confidence," Rosa said. "Just impressions, mostly. That Alex Crew was involved in things beyond simple shipping and logistics. Research projects, some said. I never learned the details, and it's not really my place to speculate about matters I don't properly understand."
Silveria turned the pendant over once more in her fingers, something uneasy settling in her stomach at the vague, unsettling implication. "Do you think it's connected somehow? The pendant, I mean, to whatever Damien's father was involved in?"
"I couldn't properly say," Rosa admitted. "It's likely nothing more than an old woman's idle speculation, dear. I wouldn't put too much weight on it."
But even as Rosa said the words, something in her careful tone suggested she wasn't entirely convinced of her own reassurance, and long after Rosa had finished her tea and said her goodnights, Silveria sat alone in the quiet study, the pendant still resting in her palm, wondering exactly what small, worn piece of silver might actually be capable of unlocking, if she ever found the proper key to understand it.
She thought about asking Damien directly the next morning, pressing past his careful deflection to demand a real answer. But something held her back, some instinct that the timing wasn't quite right yet, that whatever he was guarding so carefully needed to come from him in his own time, the same patient approach Felix had described weeks earlier when talking about how to properly handle Damien's stubbornness.
Instead, she carefully wrapped the pendant back around her neck, tucking it beneath her collar where it usually rested, and told herself that whatever secrets it held would surface eventually, one way or another. She had waited eighteen years already for answers about her own origins. She could wait a while longer, she decided, if it meant giving Damien the space to trust her with whatever he knew, rather than forcing the truth out of him before he was properly ready to share it.
She fell asleep eventually with the pendant's familiar weight settled against her skin, and dreamed, for the first time in years, of a woman's voice singing something soft and unfamiliar, though when she woke the next morning, she couldn't properly remember the tune at all, only the vague, lingering warmth of having heard it.