[It's not as if she's unfamiliar with parental disappointments. Her own, certainly, but the girl's two fathers were . . . lacking, let's say, in their own ways. They pushed their own agendas and to hell with the child they had sired (or stolen); that was what the rescue mission was about.
Truly: that's what repenting her own sins were about. She'd used the girl for her own ends, and yes, one could make excuses, one could offer up reasonings about fundings and sexism and the need for a patron, the desperate need to get Robert, but the point of it is: Rosalind watches this memory, and she may feel Day's emotions, but god, but she knows the look in his mother's eye. She knows it so well.
And what is she meant to do with all that, once the memory ends and she's left with that opal?
For half a day, she does nothing. But when she catches sight of him, eternally helpful, eternally cheerful, ducking into the Invincible, she goes stiff.]
Lornlit.
[. . .]
Daylight. A word, if you will.
[She beckons to her table in the back, a gesture with a surprising amount of patience.]
iv
Truly: that's what repenting her own sins were about. She'd used the girl for her own ends, and yes, one could make excuses, one could offer up reasonings about fundings and sexism and the need for a patron, the desperate need to get Robert, but the point of it is: Rosalind watches this memory, and she may feel Day's emotions, but god, but she knows the look in his mother's eye. She knows it so well.
And what is she meant to do with all that, once the memory ends and she's left with that opal?
For half a day, she does nothing. But when she catches sight of him, eternally helpful, eternally cheerful, ducking into the Invincible, she goes stiff.]
Lornlit.
[. . .]
Daylight. A word, if you will.
[She beckons to her table in the back, a gesture with a surprising amount of patience.]