The house filled the way storms did in Nereth: slowly at first, then all at once, until everyone pretended it had always been this way.
A cradle appeared in the corner. Then another. Small bundles became toddlers. Toddlers became children who learned to move around each other like furniture, careful and practiced, their bodies memorizing where not to step, how not to spill, how not to be noticed at the wrong time.
From the street, the home looked blessed. Curtains drawn neatly. Door swept. Eve's hands always busy, always polite. And Adam, when he was seen, was seen properly. He carried himself with the calm certainty people trusted. He greeted elders with reverence, helped neighbors with a smile that looked sincere from a distance, and spoke of family the way other men spoke of prayer.
When he laughed in public, it was warm. When he placed a hand on a child's head in front of witnesses, it looked like love.
Inside, the air was different.
It was not loud, exactly. It was crowded. There is a difference. Loudness can be joy. Crowding is survival.
Children slept together because there was never enough space, not in the rooms and not in the world Adam created for them. They made nests out of folded cloth and borrowed warmth from each other's bodies, limbs tangled in the dark. On cold nights, it was comforting. On hot nights, it was suffocating. Either way, it taught them early that comfort was something you shared because no one was handing it out.
Food was not guaranteed. Care was not offered. School was discussed like a luxury, not a duty. When one child fell ill, Eve treated it quietly with what she had, because asking Adam meant inviting irritation. And irritation was a danger in that house, unpredictable and quick to grow teeth.
Eve learned to stretch everything. Meals. Patience. Hope.
She told herself it was temporary. She told herself Adam was working. That a man's burdens were heavy in a city like Nereth, where expectations walked beside you like shadows. She told herself that faith required sacrifice, and that perhaps this was what sacrifice looked like: a woman carrying more than she thought she could, while God watched and measured.
Adam always had an explanation.
Work, he said, when Eve asked why he was gone so often.
Work, he said, when the children asked where he had been.
Work, he said, when they needed something he didn't want to provide.
He spoke of provision as if speaking were the same as doing. He spoke of the future as if the future could raise children.
Sometimes he returned late with the smell of other streets on him, his clothes untouched by the day-to-day mess of his own home. He would step inside like a guest rather than a father, glance around as if assessing a place that belonged to someone else, and then complain about what he saw.
Not enough order. Not enough quiet. Not enough gratitude.
And always, there was that particular gentleness he saved for the outside world. When neighbors visited, Adam would soften. His voice lowered. His face rearranged into kindness. The children would watch him become someone else, a man they recognized only in performance. He would serve tea, ask after their studies, praise Eve with words that sounded generous.
When the door closed, the generosity stayed outside.
One child tested him more than the others. There is always one, in a house like that. A child born with a spine too stubborn to bend, a mouth too honest to stay shut. Defiance is not always arrogance. Sometimes it is simply a refusal to disappear.
Adam noticed that child the way men notice a flaw in a wall. Often. With irritation.
Eve tried to step between them, quietly at first. A hand on a shoulder. A look meant to warn without challenging. She learned to read Adam's moods the way sailors read the sea. When his jaw tightened, she redirected. When his eyes sharpened, she lowered her own. When the child spoke too loudly, she pressed a finger to their lips not out of discipline, but out of fear.
The house trained everyone.
Another child was different in a way the family did not know how to name. Quiet, distant, sometimes lost in a world only they could see. The child did not meet eyes often, did not respond to comfort the way comfort was expected to work. Noise overwhelmed them. Touch could startle them. They could become still as stone or suddenly too loud, too frantic, as if their body had no middle ground.
Eve loved that child fiercely. Not because it was easy, but because it was necessary. She learned new ways to soothe. New ways to speak. New ways to listen. She did it alone, the same way she did everything else.
Adam dismissed what he did not understand.
He preferred children who made him look good.
He preferred silence. Obedience. The illusion of control.
When Eve brought up concerns, he acted wounded, as if her worry was an accusation. He reminded her of his faith. Of his work. Of how much pressure he carried. He said her heart was too soft, her mind too anxious. He said she should trust him.
Eve wanted to.
Love makes people perform miracles of reasoning. It makes them build explanations out of scraps. Eve became skilled at it. Every night, she laid her doubts down like folded laundry and told herself she would pick them up another day, when she was stronger, when the children were older, when Adam was less tired, when work was less demanding.
But as the years stacked up, so did the evidence.
The children grew without milestones. Without stories of school. Without trips to healers unless Eve begged or bartered. They learned adult skills before they learned to be children. They learned how to share one blanket, one loaf, one room, one mother.
And Adam, in the middle of it all, remained untouched, as if fatherhood were something happening nearby rather than something happening to him.
One evening, after the last child had finally fallen asleep, Eve sat on the floor beside their small pile of bodies, listening to the chorus of breathing in the dark.
She watched them sleep the way people watch candles when the wind is strong. With attention. With worry. With the quiet acceptance that at any moment something could go out.
From the other room came the faint sound of Adam moving, unhurried, separate. He did not come to check on them. He did not ask if they had eaten enough. He did not sit beside Eve, not even for a moment, to share the exhaustion that belonged to both of them.
Eve looked at her children, all of them pressed together like a single living thing, and felt something shift inside her.
Not rage. Not yet.
Something colder.
A simple understanding, clean as a blade: she was raising this house alone, and the man who had promised God everything had somehow found a way to give his family almost nothing at all.