"Yes," Genevieve said. That had been her understanding too. That had been everyone's understanding.
"It appears," Samuel said, "that the attachment may have been rather more serious on one side than the other." He looked at her steadily, not flinching from it, because he was that kind of friend and she was grateful for it even as she felt the information landing with the slow, cold weight of something she was going to need time to properly receive.
"She is back, and she is apparently alone, and the story is beginning to move, Genevieve. It will be in every drawing room in the county within the week. I would estimate sooner."
She nodded. She was aware that she was nodding and that the nodding was something her body had decided to do while her mind was elsewhere, somewhere adjacent to the morning room, not quite present.
"The tea party," she said.
"This afternoon, yes." His voice was careful. "I thought you and Thomas should know before you walked into a room full of people who might already know and who would absolutely be watching to see how you received it."
"Yes." She nodded again. "Yes, of course. You are right. Thank you." She looked at him, and felt the warmth she had for him, genuine and considerable, sitting alongside everything else. "Samuel, thank you. Truly. You did not have to come all this way at this hour."
"I rather thought I did," he said simply.
“I suppose I am grateful you did,” she nodded, looking back down at her tea.
She thought about Clarissa.
She thought about her sister at seventeen, sitting at the pianoforte in the blue drawing room at home, playing something she had composed herself with a focus and a passion that had always been beautiful to watch, entirely absorbed, entirely unaware of being observed.
She thought about Clarissa at her dressing table the morning of some long-ago assembly, laughing at something Genevieve had said, her reflection bright in the mirror. She thought about the particular quality of her sister's certainty, the way she had always moved through the world as though it had been arranged for her comfort.
It was a quality that had sometimes been maddening and had always, underneath the madness, been something Genevieve had quietly admired, because she had understood it came from a genuine and unshakeable confidence in herself that was, in its way, rather wonderful.
She hoped Clarissa was all right.
She hoped she was home. She hoped, despite everything, that the Penrose house was doing what houses were supposed to do, which was close around the person who needed it.
When it was Samuel’s turn to leave she thanked him again and led him toward the foyer.
“I do hope next time I will be coming with better news,” he said.
“My sister’s return is good news,” she assured him.
He studied her face for a moment.
“In one sense it is, in another, I do hope you are ready for the whispers that may come with her,” Samuel said gently before walking through the door.
Genevieve stood there for a moment, her hands held in front of her, her gloves hiding the way her knuckles went white. Then she turned.
She went back to the morning room and sat down and looked at the half-written letter to Caroline and the cooling tea and the crossed-out sentences about the kiss that seemed, now, to belong to a morning that was very far away.
And then, slowly and without quite meaning to, she felt the nervousness arrive.
It crept in at the edges, quiet and uninvited, settling in the way that fears settled when they were not the dramatic, named kind. Rather they were the small, ambient kind that did not announce themselves clearly enough to be argued with. She tried to identify it and found it slippery, refusing to resolve into a single specific thing she could look at directly and dismiss.
It was not, she thought, jealousy. She examined that carefully, because she owed herself the honesty of the examination, and she did not think it was jealousy. She did not want her sister's life or her sister's situation, which by all accounts was not a situation anyone would want.
It was not quite fear, either, though it had something of fear's texture.
It was the particular unease of someone who had been building something carefully and had just become aware that the ground beneath it was less certain than they had believed. She and Thomas had been moving toward something.
She had felt it; had been as certain of it as she had been certain of anything. And the kiss had been… the kiss had been real, she knew it had been real, she had not imagined the way he had looked at her afterward or the warmth that had been present in him ever since, unhurried and quiet but absolutely there.
But Clarissa was back.
And Thomas had loved Clarissa, or had believed he had, which amounted to the same thing in terms of what it had cost him when she left. And now she was back, and alone, and the story was moving, and this afternoon they were going to walk into a room full of people who would be watching both of them with the focused interest of people who had just been given a new and considerably more interesting version of a story they had thought was concluded.