***
The drawing room at her parents' house had never felt so small.
Genevieve sat with her embroidery in her lap and did not embroider. The fire was good and the candles were lit and her mother had kissed her forehead after dinner with a particular gentleness. She understood that her daughter was not ready to talk about any of it yet and had left her to the quiet. The quiet was less useful than she had hoped. It mostly gave her thoughts room to move around in, which they were doing with considerable energy.
She had done the right thing. She was nearly certain she had done the right thing. The certainty wavered, periodically, between approximately eight in the evening and whenever she finally managed to sleep, but during the daylight hours she could hold it steadily enough. She had not been able to stay.
Whatever the truth of the forest was, and she believed Thomas—which was its own complicated problem—she would not have been able to remain in that house and perform composure for another week, another month, the rest of her life. She had needed to breathe somewhere that was not managed and watchful and full of things she was not being told.
She had breathed. She had confronted Clarissa. She had drunk a great deal of her mother's tea and taken long walks and written three letters to Caroline and received three back that were warm and practical and asked no questions she was not ready to answer.
She was better. She was not well, exactly, but she was better.
She heard the horse on the drive.
She did not move immediately. Horses arrive; it was not necessarily anything. Her father had been expecting correspondence from his solicitor. It could be—
She heard his voice in the hallway.
She set the embroidery aside with a precision that was almost comical, the absolute steadiness of hands that were compensating for something, and stood. She could hear her mother murmuring something, and then a pause, and then footsteps, and then the door opened and Thomas was in it, and she understood immediately why her mother had let him come in: he looked terrible. Her mother had always been susceptible to people who looked like they were suffering.
She was, it turned out, also susceptible. She hated that about herself, a little.
"I know you asked me to wait," he said. He stayed in the doorway, which she appreciated. He had given her the choice of the distance between them. "I tried. Five days was the best I could manage. I am sorry if it is not enough."
"Come in," she said. "Sit down."
He came in. He did not sit down. He stood in the middle of the room with his hat in his hands and looked at her. The thing that struck her was how unguarded he was. She had grown accustomed, over the months of their marriage, to reading the small signals: the slight tension at his jaw when something mattered, the way he looked at a fixed point somewhere above her head when he was thinking about how to say something. The layered quality of him, the management of it.
There was none of that now. He looked at her with everything simply present, and it was so unfamiliar that for a moment she did not know what to do with it.
"I need to tell you the truth," he said. "All of it. I should have told you weeks ago, and I did not, and I am not going to explain why because none of the reasons are good enough." He stopped. "May I?"
She sat down in the chair by the fire and folded her hands and said: "Tell me."
He told her.
The money had been his own sense of obligation. His stupid, misplaced, tenacious obligation, the obligation of a man who had believed himself responsible for a woman's circumstances because he had once been attached to her and the attachment had ended badly. He had told himself it was honor. He had told himself that assisting her was the decent thing, the right thing, and he had continued to tell himself this long after he had begun to suspect that Clarissa's intentions were not what she represented them to be.
"When did you suspect?" Genevieve asked. Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
"Earlier than I should have admitted." He said it without flinching, which she gave him credit for. "The flirtations. She was… Clarissa is very skilled at making things seem like something other than what they are, and I had a long history of being willing to believe her version of events. But I knew. Somewhere underneath the convenient not-knowing, I knew."
He looked at her steadily. "When you came through those trees I had already told her. That the money was finished. That I would not meet with her again. What you saw was the end of it, not the continuation. I need you to believe that."
"I do believe it."
Something moved across his face.
"You do?"
"I told you on the stairs that I believed you." She looked at him. "I left because I could not stay, not because I thought you were lying."
He was quiet for a moment, absorbing this. Then he crossed the room and sat down across from her, close enough that she could see the firelight on his face, and he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at her with that same unmanaged openness that she still had not entirely adjusted to.
"There is something else," he said.
"All right."