One thing at a time. The bag first. Then the rest.
Chapter 30
He was already moving before the sound of her horse's hooves had fully faded into the trees.
Clarissa's hand found his arm.
"Thomas—"
"Do not." He turned to face her, and whatever she saw in his expression made her go still. "I meant what I said before she arrived. I will not see you again. The money is finished. All of it."
"You are upset."
"I am clear-headed. Those are different things." He removed her hand from his arm with a deliberateness that was not rough and was not gentle. "Whatever I owed you, Clarissa, and I gave you more than I should have, for longer than I should have, it's done. What comes next is your own affair."
"She will not understand what she saw."
"Then I will explain it to her." He picked up his reins. "That is between me and my wife."
"Your wife." Clarissa's voice was strained. "You have changed your tune considerably."
"Yes," he said. "I have." He looked at her—at the composed, beautiful face that he had once believed himself to know better than any other face in the world—and finally understood that he had known it barely at all. He had known the aesthetic of it and mistaken that for the substance, which was a failure of perception he intended to stop making. "Goodbye, Clarissa."
Her composure did not break. It rarely did, and he was past finding this admirable.
He rode.
The grounds passed around him without registering. He was aware of them peripherally. The early spring green of the fields, the sky doing something pale and complicated overhead. But his mind was elsewhere, running through what he would say and discarding each attempt before it was fully formed.
There was no adequate version of this conversation. He understood that clearly enough. There was no arrangement of words that would undo the image of what Genevieve had seen, no explanation that would land without first requiring her to extend a trust that he had given her insufficient reason to extend.
He himself had done it. Not the specific thing she had witnessed. That, at least, he could say honestly was not what it appeared, but the conditions for it. The months of management. The money given in secret, the meetings conducted without explanation, the whole careful architecture of a situation he had told himself was contained and private and nobody's concern but his own. He had built it, brick by brick, with the industriousness of a man who was very good at not examining what he was doing while he was doing it.
And Genevieve had lived in the house he had built, and had known something was wrong, and had been too loyal or too proud or too afraid of what she would find to push past the surface of it. He had allowed that. He had in fact relied on it, and this was the thing that sat in him most heavily as the house came into view at the end of the drive. Not the practical problem of explanation.
The other thing. The worse thing. The fact that he had known, on some level beneath the comfortable not-examining, that Genevieve was struggling, and had not done the one thing that would have helped her, which was simply to tell her the truth.
He had not told her because telling her would have required telling himself first. And the self-telling would have required him to look honestly at what he was doing and why, and that would have revealed things he had not been ready to see.
He was ready now. He was furiously, desperately ready. It was many weeks too late.
His grandmother was at the entrance to the house.
He dismounted before the horse had fully stopped.
"Where is she?"
"Inside." His grandmother’s expression contained a comprehensive disappointment that went well beyond the events of the afternoon and encompassed, he felt, a broader survey of his character over a significant period of time. "She came back a quarter of an hour ago."
"I need to—"
"Thomas." Her voice stopped him the way it had stopped him since childhood, with a quality of authority that had never required volume. "I sent her."
He looked at her.
"I told her where you were." She said it directly, without apology, in the manner of someone who had made a decision and intended to stand fully behind it.
"I have watched that girl become a shadow of herself for weeks. I have watched her sit at dinner and perform pleasantness as if it was her occupation, and come to breakfast wearing a face she had decided on in advance, and taking walks in the garden and come back more diminished than when she left." Her voice was level and entirely unsparing.