Thomas stopped.
"You said you understand what's happening to her," Samuel said, quite mildly. "I am asking whether that's actually true. Or whether you understand the circumstances and have mistaken that for understanding her."
Thomas did not answer immediately, because the answer that came to him first was defensive, and the one that came after was closer to honest, and the honest one was less comfortable.
"I do not know how to reach her," he said, finally. "That's what I do not understand. I know what's wrong. I know why it's wrong. I know, if we are being entirely plain about it, that I am a significant part of why it's wrong." He stopped. "What I cannot work out is how to dismantle whatever she has built. Without making it worse. Without her retreating further because I have pushed when I should not have."
Samuel looked at him for a moment.
"That," he said, "is a more honest answer than I expected."
"Do not make it a compliment."
"I was not going to." He picked up his cutlery again. "For what it's worth, I do not think it's a problem of approach. I do not think there is a method you are missing."
"Then what is it?"
Samuel considered this for longer than was comfortable.
"I think she needs to believe that reaching her is something you actually want. Not something you are attempting because the situation has become unmanageable." He met Thomas's eyes. "Those are different things. And she is very good at telling them apart."
Thomas said nothing.
He blamed himself. He was quite clear-eyed about it when he permitted himself to be, which was not as often as it should have been because clear-sightedness about his own failures was not a comfortable occupation. He had allowed Clarissa to continue their arrangement. The money, the meetings, the whole miserable business, for longer than he should have.
He would tell himself it was a necessity, it was honor, he told himself a great many things that had contained enough truth to be convincing and enough self-deception to be dangerous. And meanwhile Genevieve had absorbed the consequences, had sat in drawing rooms while people said things about her, her husband, and her sister, and had done it alone, and had not told him directly. Instead, it seemed, she was confiding in others.
That last part rankled. He was ashamed that it rankled, it seemed a rather small thing to feel wounded by, when she was the one who had been wounded, and the shame of that recognition did not make the feeling go away. She had chosen to confide in Samuel.
She received Samuel's letters with something that resembled relief and carried them away to her sitting room and did not tell Thomas what they contained, and he had told himself it was reasonable, it was her friendship and her business, and had not permitted himself to examine the tightness in his chest when he thought about it for too long.
“You should speak to her. Clear up this misunderstanding,” Samuel said and looked up at Thomas. “At least, I do hope it is a misunderstanding.”
“Of course,” Thomas nodded.
“Then, fix it,” Samuel said, taking a bite of his dinner. He looked up at Thomas and made a gesture that told the man to go. Thomas nodded, standing up quickly and practically racing outside to recapture his horse.
She was in the small sitting room, settled into the chair by the window with a book open across her lap. She looked up when he appeared in the doorway, and she smiled at him.
It was not her smile.
It was more like a mask that she had learned to wear.
His heart ached as he remembered her old smile. He needed that old smile to return.
"I wondered," he said, and tried to make it sound easy, "whether you might like to walk in the garden. It's a reasonable evening."
"That sounds very nice," she said.
She set the book down and rose and did not ask him what had prompted it, and he did not offer an answer, and they went out together into the mild air of the garden where he was going to have to find something to say.
The garden in the evening had a quality that Thomas had always found unexpectedly affecting. Something about the way the daylight clung to the edges of things, the way the shadows collected in the spaces between the hedgerows. He was planning to change a great deal of it.
He had been looking forward to discussing these plans with Genevieve for weeks, imagining her engagement with the project in some detail, the ideas she would contribute that he had not thought of, and the pleasure of building something together.
They had been walking for perhaps five minutes before he reached for her hand.
She was slightly ahead of him on the path, not by much, not dramatically, and he drew her back gently, tucking her arm through his. She came without resistance. She walked beside him and her arm was in his and there was, nonetheless, a quality to it that he could not name and could not stop noticing.