"How are you?" he asked. "Since your return."
"Difficult," she said, with an honesty that caught him slightly off guard. He had expected the charming deflection. "My parents are well. I am sure you know that, though." She glanced down for just a moment. "But I am home. I keep telling myself that."
He nodded slowly.
"And your sister—?"
He was not entirely certain why he said it. The question had been somewhere in the back of his mind since the moment the carriage door opened, whether Genevieve knew, whether she had been told, what it meant for the household he was still learning how to inhabit. It was the sensible thing to think about. The appropriate thing.
Something moved across Clarissa's face. He caught it, just barely, just for a second, before the smile returned, warm and seamless. He was left holding the impression of it. Not hurt. Not quite. Something more complicated, and more interesting, and he told himself firmly that it was not his business.
"Genevieve," she said. Her voice was perfectly pleasant. "She must be so happy. With everything."
"She is well," he said.
He left it there. He was aware of the brevity of it and chose it anyway. Some instinct that he could not fully explain kept him from saying more, from offering Genevieve up to this conversation the way he might discuss any other subject. It felt wrong in a way that made his stomach twist.
Clarissa looked at him for a moment. Then she moved, a small, decisive step, toward the edge of the track, further from the carriage, and he found himself moving with her.
They stood in the dappled shadow of the tree line, close enough that he was aware of the warmth of the afternoon on her and the familiar scent of her perfume, which had not changed, which he found himself noticing with the particular unhappiness of a man who would very much rather not.
"I need to say this properly," she said. Her voice had lost its brightness. What was underneath it was quieter and cost her more, or seemed to. "I was foolish. I was vain and impulsive, and I let myself believe something that I should have questioned. There was an officer." She met his eyes. "I think you know some version of it."
"Only what you wrote in the letter," he said carefully.
"He was—" She stopped. Seemed to gather herself. "He was very persuasive. The sort of man who makes you feel as though you are the center of the world, and I… I had never felt quite like that before, and I did not think clearly, and I believed that what he felt was real." A pause. "It was not. He did not love me. I do not think he was capable of it. But I did not understand that until it was… until I had already—"
She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.
“I was a fool,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
Thomas looked at her. He was not certain he believed every part of it. He was not, despite the way Clarissa had always made him feel, entirely without judgment. But he did not disbelieve it either. He knew she was not a simple person, had always known that, and the story as she told it had an uncomfortable plausibility.
More than that: he felt, looking at her now, that there was real pain in her. That whatever the full accounting of it, she had not emerged from the experience without cost.
And that was the problem, he thought distantly. He had always found it very difficult to encounter Clarissa's pain and do nothing about it.
"I was wrong to leave," she said. Her voice was very quiet now. "I have thought about it every day since. That is the truth, Thomas, whatever you choose to do with it."
He should have said something measured here. Something kind but bounded, the sort of response a man gives when he has his feelings at a reliable distance. He had the words prepared, more or less. He had been preparing them for months.
"You have nothing to be forgiven for," he said, his heart hammering in his chest.
He meant it, and he also knew, even as he said it, that it was not the whole truth. That somewhere beneath the generosity of it was a man who had spent a very long time not being entirely all right, and who was now standing in the woods with the cause of it and finding that he still, still, could not be anything less than kind to her.
And then she was against him.
It happened quickly. The sound she made, something between a sob and his name, and then she had closed the distance and pressed herself into him and her arms were around him and he had a single suspended moment of sheer surprise before his arms came up around her, because what else could he do? Because this was Clarissa, and she was weeping, and he had never in his life been capable of standing unmoved beside her distress.
He held her. He told himself that was all he was doing.
And yet what arrived, unbidden, in that same suspended moment, was not what he would have predicted. It was Genevieve's face. Not as accusation, simply as presence, the way a candle registers in peripheral vision even when you are looking somewhere else.
The particular quality of her attention when she was listening to him. The way she tucked her feet beneath her in the chair by the fire and did not notice she had done it. Ordinary things. Entirely ordinary things that had apparently been accumulating somewhere without his permission.
The ache in his chest was real. He did not try to deny it. He was simply no longer entirely certain what it was for. The way he wanted to hold her tighter but had to restrain himself from doing so in the name of propriety.
The weeping subsided eventually, the way the weather does. She pulled back and pressed his handkerchief to her eyes with the brisk efficiency of a woman reclaiming herself, and he was left with the sensation of her absence where she had been.