Clarissa sat down across from her, unhurried, with the ease of a woman on her own ground.
"You were not passing. We are nowhere near anything you would have occasion to pass." She settled back in her chair. "You look well."
"I am well." Genevieve held her gaze comfortably. "Very well, actually. Thomas and I returned to Harrington Estate three days ago."
A pause. Something moved behind Clarissa's eyes and was managed before it became visible.
"I see."
"I thought you should know. Since you have apparently taken some trouble to suggest otherwise to people." She said it in the same pleasant, even tone she had been cultivating for weeks now. "Lydia Hargrove made a remark at the Carstairs' last Tuesday that was attributed to you. I will not repeat it. I think you know what it was."
Clarissa looked at her and said nothing. This was one of her techniques, the composed silence that invited the other person to fill it, to over-explain, to reveal more than they had intended. Genevieve was familiar with it. She let the silence sit without touching it.
After a moment, Clarissa spoke.
"Why are you here, Genevieve? Not to repeat remarks you say you will not repeat, I imagine."
"No." Genevieve looked at her steadily. "I came to tell you something. Two things, actually."
"How organized."
"I have been making an effort." She folded her hands. "The first thing is that I know what you intended. You came back and you wanted my marriage, my confidence, my place in a life you felt you had some prior claim to, even though you walked away from it."
She watched her sister's face. "You succeeded for a time. I want you to know I am not unaware of the effort it took. The gossip, the appearances, that afternoon in the forest. It was a considerable campaign, and parts of it were very effective."
Clarissa's chin had risen fractionally.
"If you have come here to accuse me of—"
"I have not come to accuse you of anything." Genevieve kept her voice level. "I came to tell you the second thing, which is that it did not work. Not ultimately. What you did drove Thomas and me apart for a few days, and then it drove us back together, and what we have now is—" She paused, not for effect but because she was choosing the word carefully. "It is considerably more than what we had before you arrived."
The silence this time was a different quality. Clarissa was looking at her with an expression she could not entirely read, which was unusual. She had been reading Clarissa's expressions since childhood. This one was new. Perhaps not new exactly but rarely seen. It had the quality of a woman looking at something she had not expected to find and was not sure what to do with.
"That," Clarissa said, "is a deeply irritating thing to say."
"Yes, I thought it might be."
"You have changed."
"I have been paying more attention." Genevieve looked at her. "I spent rather a lot of time over the past weeks being quiet and careful and hoping that if I managed everything precisely enough it would all resolve itself without my having to do anything uncomfortable. And then I stopped doing that, and things became considerably clearer."
She paused. "I think you know what I mean. I think you are quite good at managing things and quite practiced at not looking at what the managing is for."
Clarissa's expression sharpened.
"Be careful," Clarissa almost growled.
"I am not trying to wound you. I am trying to be honest with you, possibly for the first time in our acquaintance, because I think we have spent our entire lives being very careful with each other in ways that have not served either of us particularly well."
"We are sisters. Not acquaintances."
"Yes." Genevieve looked at her. "We are. And I love you. I want to be very clear about that, because nothing I am about to say is going to sound like it, and I need you to know that it is true regardless. You are my sister and you will be my sister regardless of what either of us does about it." She stood, and smoothed her skirt, and reached for her gloves on the arm of the chair.
"What I am going to tell you is that my marriage is not territory you can reach from where you are standing. Thomas and I are—we are very well, Clarissa. We are genuinely, actually well, in a way that I do not think we were before, and I know that is not what you intended. Having said that, you are not to write to us. You are not to visit us. You are to stay away as much as one feasibly can.”
“You cannot be serious, Genevieve!” Clarissa argued, standing up.
“I am,” Genevieve said, her voice freezing over. “And I would ask that you respect my wishes.”