"You might suggest," his grandmother said, as he moved past her, "that she call when Genevieve is at home."
"Grandmother."
"I am merely observing, Thomas, that it is somewhat irregular—"
"I am aware of what you are observing." He said it without heat but with enough firmness that she let the matter rest, which was as much as he could hope for. He could feel her watching him go down the corridor, filing that information away, and he did not turn around.
Clarissa was in the hall, not the drawing room, which meant she had declined to be shown in and had waited, instead, near the door. She had the posture of someone who was prepared to be turned away.
She was dressed beautifully. He noticed this and did not know what to do with the noticing, so he set it aside and looked at her face instead, which was tired. That was the first and clearest thing. Underneath the composure and the careful presentation, she looked tired in a way that was not about sleep.
"Clarissa," he said.
"Thomas." She looked at him with the expression he had once known very well, the one she wore when she was uncertain about her reception and was managing the uncertainty by appearing not to feel it. "I am sorry to call without notice. I know it is… I know it is not the done thing."
"Come in," he said.
He showed her into the drawing room himself and felt, distantly, the room's slight wrongness. It had been Genevieve's room for months now, had her books on the side table and her particular arrangements of the furniture and the small evidence of her daily presence everywhere he looked, and standing in it with Clarissa produced a sensation he had no ready category for.
He sat in the chair across from her, leaving an appropriate distance between them. She settled onto the sofa and looked at her hands and then at him, and the tears came.
"I know this is improper," she said, between careful breaths. "If I had anywhere else to go, I would not… my parents, Thomas. They are threatening to cut off my allowance entirely. To send me away. They will not hear my account of what happened, they simply…" She pressed his handkerchief to her cheek. "I know I have no right to be here."
"Tell me what happened," he said.
She looked at her hands. "It is not a short story."
"I have time."
She took a breath.
"My parents were… when I came home, they would not let me explain. My mother would not see me at first. My father—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "He said things that I do not think he will easily take back. That I had ruined myself, that I had ruined the family's standing, that whatever had happened to me was—that I had brought it entirely upon myself."
Thomas said nothing.
"He had told me we would marry," she continued. "Captain Hale. He said his situation would be resolved within the season, that there were arrangements being made, that once his colonel had… it does not matter. The details do not matter now." She looked up briefly and then away. "I believed him. I want you to know that I genuinely believed him."
"I see," Thomas said. "When did you understand that he did not intend to follow through?"
She blinked slightly. Just slightly.
"Some weeks in. He became less available. His letters were shorter. When I asked about the arrangements, he became impatient, and I did not want to—" She stopped. "I was afraid that if I pressed him, he would—"
"You were afraid he would leave."
"Yes."
"But he left anyway."
A silence.
"Yes," she said, more quietly. "He left anyway."
Thomas looked at her. She was crying again, or nearly—her eyes had the particular brightness of someone managing tears rather than releasing them, which was a distinction he had learned to make.
"And your parents will not help you."
"They say they will not. I think…" She folded her hands in her lap with the precise, controlled movement of someone arranging themselves. "I think my father may soften, eventually. He always has. But eventually, maybe a very long time, and in the meantime, I have almost nothing that is fully my own, and I cannot…" She looked at him directly for the first time since she had begun. "I cannot stay as I am indefinitely, Thomas."