She saw him rise, heard the soft movement of linen, and she looked at the painting and did not look at him while he arranged the sheet at his hips. Then his footsteps crossed the studio floor, and she felt him stop beside her, and she stepped back from the easel and let him look.
He looked at it for a long time.
She had painted him ashonestlyas she saw him. She had painted the man on the velvet sofa: relaxed, present, stripped of the management he applied to himself so habitually that it had ceased to look like it. The green fabric was warm against his skin, and the light fell across him without apology. She had given him his eyes as she saw them, which was the thing she had been uncertain about for the last hour, the choice she had made, and not yet found a way to evaluate.
“Caroline,” he said. His voice wasdifferent, heavy with words she was not sure she would survive hearing right in this moment.
“It is not finished,” she said, quickly. “The background needs?—”
“It is extraordinary,” he said.
She looked at it and, though the honesty of it looked back at her, she did not have anything to say.
“I should like to keep it,” he said. “If you’ll permit it. I’ll have Hartwell send it to Wynford House once it has dried.” He paused, pulled a slight breath. “And when you want it back—if you ever want it back—you have only to say.”
She nodded once. She looked at the painting. It was the last thing on the list, and the list was done.
She had known this was coming, and yet somehow, she didn’t feel prepared for that at all. Because the knowledge that it was done landed in the center of her chest with the blunt, conclusive weight of a door swinging closed.
The boxing match. The university lecture. The gaming hell. The fortune teller. The kiss.
And now this.
Done.
She had thought she would feel accomplished. She had, in the privacy of various sleepless nights, imagined this moment: the list completed, all six items crossed through, the Season’s particular project resolved.
She had imagined something that felt like freedom.
What she felt now wasnothinglike freedom. What she felt was the hollow, bewildered quality of a person who has arrived at the end of the only path they had drawn for themselves and found that they do not, after all, want to stop walking.
I have to marry Ashby, or someone like him.I have to be at a dinner table for the rest of my life, and smile, and attend the right afternoon calls, and become the woman my aunt has been trying to make me since I was seventeen.This is the last night of…whatever this had been.
Her eyes were wet before she fully understood that she had been about to cry.
“Caroline.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“It’s nothing,” she said, and heard, even as she said it, how completely untrue it was.
She pressed her mouth together and looked at the ceiling.
“It is quite clearly something.” His voice had dropped, very slightly, in the tone she associated with the fortune teller’s tent and the park at seven in the morning, and every other time, he had stopped managing the distance and simply looked at her.
She could not quite maintain the ceiling strategy. Her breath came out with a quality she had not given it permission to have.
“It’s finished,” she said. Her voice was steadier than her eyes. “The list. I-it is done. I thought…I thought I would feel…” She stopped. “I don’t know what I thought I would feel.”
“Whatdoyou feel?” he asked.
“Finished,” she said. The word had a taste to it she had not anticipated. “I thought it would feel like an end to something, you know, a completion…a chapter closed. And now, I have to…”
She stopped again.
The thing she had to do was right there, on the other side of tonight: the dinner table and the respectable man and the thirty years of carefully managed domesticity that stretched ahead with the flat, unargued certainty of a road on a map.
“I wanted this,” she said. “All of it. Not just the items. The going out in the dark. The being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. The…”