Lydia, with the instincts of a woman who understood when a room had changed ownership, found a reason to be elsewhere. Even beside that, Lydia and Genevieve had never gotten on. The door closed behind her with a tact that was almost impressive.
They stood for a moment in that specific awkwardness of two people who know each other very well and are not entirely certain what version of that knowing applies now.
Then Genevieve crossed the room and embraced her.
It was not a tentative thing. That was the part Clarissa had not prepared for, the straightforwardness of it, the complete absence of performance. Genevieve simply held her, the way she had when they were girls and Clarissa had once, in a moment she had subsequently never acknowledged, cried over something she could not even remember now.
Her sister had not said anything then either. She had just been there, warm and entirely reliable, in the specific way that Genevieve always was… and Clarissa had never known how to be.
She permitted herself to be held for three seconds before she stepped back.
"You look well," she said, because it was true and because it was easier than anything else.
"So do you." Genevieve looked at her steadily. Underneath it, though, Clarissa caught the tension. She did her best not to smile at the idea that just her presence had caused her sister some issue. "Are you? Actually."
"I am managing."
"That is not what I asked."
Clarissa looked at her sister. She thought of everything Lydia had reported. The horse race. The laughter. He spoke to her before he spoke to anyone else in the room. She thought of the plan still forming in the back of her mind, the shape of what came next.
"I am home," she said. "That is something."
Genevieve studied her for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then she nodded, accepting it the way she accepted most things.
"I am glad you are back," she said. "I mean that, Clarissa. Whatever else, I am glad you are safe and I am glad you are home."
The simplicity of it was, in its way, the most difficult thing she had said.
"Thank you," Clarissa said.
It was the most honest thing she said all afternoon.
Chapter 22
The Mercer ball was not, by any measure that mattered, a great ball. The Mercers were prosperous and ambitious, and their ballroom was large enough.
But they occupied that precise stratum of society where the truly fashionable came when they had nothing better to do, and everyone else came hoping proximity might do something for them. Genevieve had attended two of their events before and found them lively and warm in a way she preferred to more elevated gatherings.
She wore the pale green silk that Thomas had said, on two separate occasions, suited her particularly well. She had noted both occasions without commenting on them.
She had not told Thomas why she had chosen it. She had simply worn it, and he had looked at her in the hallway before they left with an expression that lasted only a moment before he offered his arm, and she had decided that was sufficient. She had been nervous in a way she could not entirely account for. She had attended a dozen events with Thomas by now and had long since moved past the self-consciousness of the early weeks. But something in her said tonight would not be so simple.
It is truly illogical, is it not?
They arrived to find the rooms already populous, the music already under way, and the ambient temperature of the gathering already several degrees above comfortable. Genevieve moved through the crowd , her hand on Thomas's arm, nodding and smiling and exchanging the small, warm fragments of conversation that constituted the first half hour of any ball. After a short while, Thomas went to speak to a friend he had seen across the room.
For a small moment, the tightness and anxiety in her chest released. She smiled as she talked and laughed with people.
Then, she turned her head.
She saw Clarissa before Clarissa saw her.
It gave her a moment she had not asked for and was not entirely sure she wanted. A moment of observing her sister unobserved, which was a luxury Clarissa had never particularly extended to her in return. She looked well. Better than Genevieve had expected, though she could not have said what she had expected exactly. Something chastened, perhaps? Something slightly reduced? There was nothing reduced about Clarissa. There never had been.
Her sister was standing near the far window with a small group that Genevieve recognized in part. Lydia Hargrove, and one or two others whose connection to Clarissa she could not immediately place. She was wearing something deep blue that suited her spectacularly, because Clarissa had always known how to wear colors. Her hair was dressed high and she was laughing at something with the full, beautiful laugh that had always made people turn to look at her.
Genevieve felt the small, familiar complicated feeling that had been Clarissa's accompaniment in her life. Not dislike, nothing so simple, but rather the bracing sensation of encountering a force of nature and needing to decide how to stand in relation to it.