"You made it extremely inconvenient."
"I know that too." The corner of his mouth moved. "I intend to be considerably less inconvenient going forward."
"That," she said, "would be a significant improvement." She let her hands settle in his. "I will hold you to it."
"Please," he said. "Do."
She smiled at him. Not the careful smile, not the composed one, not any of the varieties she had developed over the past several weeks for the purposes of managing difficult situations. The real one. The one that was just happiness. Uncomplicated, specific, and entirely hers.
He looked at her with the expression of a man seeing something he had been afraid, for a very long time, that he had lost.
"I should tell my mother," she said.
"Your father is going to have something to say to me."
"Several things, I expect. He has been saving them up." She stood and straightened her dress and looked down at him, and something warm and genuinely happy moved through her. "You had better come and face them. We can leave in the morning."
Thomas stood, and offered her his arm, and she took it, and they went out together into the hallway where her mother was very unconvincingly pretending to have been walking past for no reason at all.
"He is staying for breakfast," Genevieve told her. "We are leaving in the morning."
Her mother looked at Thomas. Thomas looked back at her with the expression of a man prepared to be assessed.
"You look better than you did when you arrived," her mother said finally. She turned and called for tea with the decisive air of a woman closing one chapter and opening another. "Come into the sitting room, both of you. And Thomas, my husband will want to speak to you after."
"I expected so," Thomas said.
Genevieve squeezed his arm, and they followed her mother in.
Epilogue
The house sat on one of those streets that had decided, collectively, to be impressive, and had succeeded in the way that things succeed when they are trying very hard: completely, and without subtlety. Every door was freshly painted. Every railing was without rust.
The window boxes were symmetrical in a manner that suggested someone had measured them, and the overall effect was of a neighborhood that would have been offended by the suggestion that it had anything to prove.
Genevieve had been inside Lydia Hargrove’s particular house once before, at the beginning of the season. She remembered the wallpaper.
It was a gold-and-ivory damask with a pattern of repeating medallions that covered every wall of the front sitting room floor to ceiling, and she had spent the better part of that afternoon visit trying to determine whether it was the sort of wallpaper that rewarded closer inspection or whether it simply became more insistent the longer you looked at it.
She had concluded it was the latter. She still concluded the same, as she was shown in by a maid who took her card with an expression of careful neutrality and left her to wait.
She sat in the chair nearest the window, Lydia's best chair, she suspected. Upholstered in something that matched the wallpaper in the way that indicated a decorator had been given a very clear brief and had executed it without mercy. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at the medallions and felt, for the first time since the whole of it had begun, entirely calm.
Things had changed in the past three days. That was the precise and somewhat remarkable fact of it. Three days since she and Thomas had returned to Harrington Estate, and she was a different person sitting in that chair than she had been sitting in any chair for the past several weeks. Not different in any way she could have fully articulated to anyone who asked. The same opinions.
The same habits. The same tendency to form strong views about wallpaper. But underneath all of that, something had rearranged itself into a configuration that felt, for the first time in longer than she wanted to examine, like her actual self rather than a managed approximation of it.
She heard footsteps in the hall. Quick ones, not the maid's measured pace, but the footsteps of someone who had been told she had a visitor and had come immediately, which meant she had not been warned and was arriving without preparation.
Genevieve recognized that. She had become, over the course of recent months, quite good at recognizing the difference between Clarissa prepared and Clarissa caught off guard, and the distinction mattered, because prepared Clarissa was a different thing to deal with entirely.
The door opened.
Clarissa appeared in it, and she was beautiful and she was composed, and she took in the whole of Genevieve in one quick, assessing look before her expression settled into something pleasantly neutral.
"Genevieve." She came in and closed the door behind her. "This is unexpected."
"I was passing," Genevieve said. "Loosely speaking."