Something moved in her sister's face. Then Clarissa handed her second glove to her maid with the air of a woman making a concession she has decided to frame as grace, and followed her in.
Her mother offered the morning room. Genevieve thanked her and closed the door.
Clarissa looked at her with an expression of patient inquiry.
Genevieve sat in it for a moment.
She looked at her sister across the pleasant, familiar room, and she thought about what she intended to say, and she took her time about beginning, because she was not going to rush this, was not going to let urgency make it imprecise.
"I owe you an apology," she said.
Clarissa blinked. It was, Genevieve thought, possibly the most genuine expression she had seen on her sister's face in years. The unguarded surprise of someone who had prepared for several possible openings, and this had not been among them.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I have been defending you for years." Genevieve kept her voice even and unhurried. "To people who turned out not to be wrong about you. I told myself it was loyalty. I think it was closer to vanity. I did not want to revise my opinion, because revising it would have meant admitting I had been wrong to hold it in the first place, and I have always found that particular admission difficult."
She paused. "I apologize for doing so. For the people I argued with on your behalf who did not deserve to be argued with, and for you, because being defended by someone who is defending a fiction of you rather than the reality is not something I imagine has ever actually served you."
Clarissa looked at her for a long moment.
"That," she said, "is a very strange apology."
"It is the only honest one I have."
"Most people who come to apologize want something from me in return."
"I do not want anything from you." Genevieve looked at her steadily. "I want to have this conversation and then I want you to go wherever you are going, and I want to go back to my life. That's all."
"All right," she said. "Say what you came to say."
"I know what you have been doing," Genevieve said. "The gossip. Lydia Hargrove. What you said and to whom and the general campaign of it. And the forest." She held her sister's gaze. "I want you to understand that I know, and that I have known for longer than you probably assumed, because you have always underestimated how much I was paying attention."
"And what do you intend to do about it?"
"That is what I came to tell you." Genevieve sat forward slightly. "I am not going to do anything about it in the sense you mean. I am not going to issue ultimatums or involve anyone else or make it into a larger drama than it needs to be." She paused.
"What I am going to do is tell you plainly that it is finished. The allowances. The defending. The habit I have had my entire life of extending you more grace than the evidence supported, because you were my sister and I loved you and I believed that had to count for something."
Clarissa's chin had come up.
"I see you have developed opinions."
"I have always had opinions. I kept them to myself where you were concerned because I thought that was what love required." Genevieve looked at her. "I have revised that position."
"How very modern of you."
"Clarissa." She said the name with patience rather than sharpness. "Why? That's the question I keep returning to. You left. Not under any compulsion, not because anything was done to you, you left because you chose to, because you decided there was something you wanted more than what you had, and you went after it. And then you came back and found that the life you left had continued without you, and you decided that was intolerable."
She held her sister's gaze. "I have tried very hard to understand it. I have spent weeks trying to construct a version of it that is fair to you, because that is what I have always done. I construct fair versions of things involving you. But I cannot make this one work. Because what you have done has not made you happy. I am looking at you now and you are not a happy woman, Clarissa. Whatever you thought you were going to get from all of this, I do not think you received it."
The silence that followed was different from the previous ones. The composed patience of it had changed quality. It was thinner, somehow, less complete. Something had moved in Clarissa's face when Genevieve said ‘happy,’ something that was there, and then was not, controlled back into place with the speed and precision of long practice. But Genevieve had seen it. She had been seeing things clearly for some time now.
"My happiness," Clarissa said, "is my own affair."
"Yes. It is." Genevieve stood. "And my marriage is mine.”
Clarissa looked at her from the chair. Her posture was perfect. Her expression was composed. But something underneath all of it was very still in a way that was different from her usual stillness.