"Yes." Thomas refilled his glass. He was aware it was not improving the impression he was making and found he could not summon the energy to care about impressions this evening. "Would you like some?"
"Evidently." Samuel held out a glass with the composure of a man making the best of a situation he has walked into voluntarily. "You look terrible, incidentally."
"You enjoy telling me so."
"I am consistent." Samuel settled back. "The gossip has reached the club."
Thomas looked at him.
"That Genevieve has left." Samuel said it plainly, as he said most things. "It's in fairly wide circulation. I heard it from three separate people before I had been there an hour."
"Mercy." Thomas set his glass down. "Already."
"I am afraid so." Samuel looked at the fire. "Clarissa, I assume."
"Almost certainly."
"You do not sound surprised."
"I am not." Thomas was quiet for a moment. "I have been wrong about her for a very long time. I managed, through considerable effort and a great deal of willful self-deception, to avoid admitting that until it became impossible not to." He picked up the glass again. "She was never what I thought she was. I constructed a version of her and called it love and spent weeks after she left mourning something that had not actually existed."
He stopped. "Genevieve saw it. From the beginning. She tried to tell me, in her way. Not directly, she was too careful with me to be direct about it. If I had been willing to see it… I was not willing. I was too attached to my own version of events to let anyone else's version touch it."
Samuel said nothing. He was very good at nothing when nothing was what the situation required.
"She was right about everything," Thomas said. "That's the conclusion I keep arriving at, and I keep arriving at it from different directions, and it keeps being the same conclusion. Every assessment she made was correct. Everything she understood about Clarissa, about the situation, about what I was doing and why, correct.
And I gave her absolutely no reason to believe I saw it, no reason to believe I was paying the right kind of attention, and she walked around this house for weeks performing composure that must have cost her an enormous amount, and I—" He stopped. "I watched her do it. I was concerned about it. I did not do anything useful about it." He looked at the fire. "She told me she was in love with me. On the stairs. While she was leaving."
Samuel looked at him.
"And then she left," Thomas said.
"What are you going to do about it?"
"I do not know." He said it with the flatness of a man who has been sitting with the same question for five hours and has made no progress and knows it. "She asked me not to follow immediately. I told her I would come when she was ready. And then—"
He gestured at the decanter with the slightly resigned air of a man acknowledging a decision he had made and was not proud of. "She said she needed somewhere quiet to think. She said she needed time. And I have been—" He stopped. "I have been giving her time."
"Have you?" Samuel's tone was perfectly neutral.
"Yes."
"For five days."
"She asked."
"She asked you not to follow her in the immediate aftermath of a significant shock," Samuel said. "She did not ask you to disappear into your study and communicate via letter and spend the intervening period in the company of a decanter." He turned his own glass slowly. "Those are different requests, Thomas."
Thomas looked at him.
"She needs space."
"She needs to know that she matters enough for you to come and tell her so in person." Samuel met his eyes, and there was something in his gaze that was direct in a way he did not always permit himself to be direct. "Those are also different things."
The fire shifted. A log settled, sending up a small shower of sparks that illuminated briefly and then went dark. Thomas looked at it and thought about the letter he had sent that afternoon, the four crossed-out words before yours, the whole insufficient business of it, and understood with a clarity he had been avoiding that Samuel was right in exactly the way he was right about everything he bothered to have an opinion on.
"The gossip," Thomas said. "She will have to know about the gossip."