"And why," Clarissa said, to the window, "would I do that?"
“Because if you do not stop, the rest of society will see quite quickly that you are fixated on a married man. That you cannot keep away from a man who is not yours. I do not believe your reputation could take such a thing. Do you?”
Clarissa said nothing. Her eyes flickered over Genevieve, as if she had not understood the opponent she had walked into battle with.
A pause. Then something shifted. The composure thinned, though did not break. Clarissa did not break. It thinned enough that what was underneath it became visible, and what was underneath it was not triumph. Not any longer. It was something rawer than that. Something that looked, to Genevieve's experienced eye, less like satisfaction and more like a woman who had finally stopped performing for an audience of one.
"You have no idea," Clarissa said. "What it was like. To come back and find that everything had—" She stopped. Her jaw set. She looked away and then back. "I did not plan all of it. Not from the beginning. I want you to know that, for whatever it's worth."
Genevieve was quiet. She let it sit.
"I came back because I had nowhere better to go," Clarissa said. The words came out in a tone she did not often use: stripped of performance, blunter than her usual register, with the flat quality of a thing finally admitted rather than constructed.
"That is not a thing I find easy to say. But it is the truth, and you are… you have always been the one person who responds better to the truth than to anything else, which is very inconvenient for everyone around you, but there it is." She looked at the window. "I saw you happy and I could not bear it. Not because I wanted Thomas. Or not only." She paused again. "Because I wanted something that looked like that. And I did not know how to want it without… without reaching for yours."
Genevieve looked at her sister. At the composed, beautiful face that had been a mystery to her for most of her life, and which was, for this one unguarded moment, simply a person.
"I know," she said. Not as absolution. Not as the beginning of something restored. Just as what it was: the truth acknowledged. "I know that, Clarissa."
Something moved in her sister's face. She recovered it quickly. She always recovered quickly. But it had been there.
"I do apologize, though," Clarissa said. The words were quiet, and they were hers, and they cost her something. Genevieve could see the cost of them, the precise and unfamiliar effort of saying a thing without dressing it in qualifications. "For the forest. For Lydia. For all of it."
Genevieve looked at her for a long moment.
"I believe you," she said. "And I forgive you. I want to be clear about that, because I mean it and because you deserve to hear it plainly." She held her sister's gaze.
"But forgiveness and proximity are not the same thing. What I said stands. You are not to write. You are not to visit. I need you to stay away, genuinely away, for long enough that we both have room to become something different to each other. If that is ever possible." She paused. "I think it might be. Eventually. But not yet."
Clarissa was still. The stillness was not the composed performance stillness. It was just stillness.
"You should go," she said finally. "Before Lydia comes back."
"I know. She will want to make it into something."
"She is very gifted at that."
"She has learned from a master of the craft," Genevieve said.
She moved to the door. She stopped with her hand on the frame, because she was her mother's daughter.
"I meant what I said to you at home," she said, without turning around. "I am not your enemy. I never was. Whatever you decide to do with that is your own affair, but I wanted to say it again, here, so that you have it."
She did not wait for an answer. She had not expected one. She went out into the hallway with its gold wallpaper, past the maid who appeared with the precise timing of someone who had been listening for the visit to conclude, and out the front door into the spring morning.
The air outside was clean and cool and smelled of new leaves, the particular freshness of a city that has just come through winter and is not yet into the full business of summer. Her carriage was waiting at the curb. The driver touched his hat.
She climbed in and settled back against the seat and looked out the window at the street as they moved off, at the symmetrical window boxes and the freshly painted doors, and she let herself genuinely feel, which was something she had been practicing, lately, with more intention.
What she felt was light. It was the lightness of having looked at something directly and found it smaller than the shadow it had been casting, and having realized that the shadow had been, at least in part, her own contribution.
She had fed it with her silence and her careful allowances and her long habit of thinking well of people past the point where the evidence supported it, and it had grown accordingly, and now she had looked at it in a well-lit room, and it had turned out to be exactly the size of one unhappy woman making bad choices.
She could feel sorry for that and still protect herself from it. She was learning that these things were not mutually exclusive.
The carriage turned out of the street and into the broader thoroughfare and picked up pace. She had perhaps forty minutes before they reached Harrington Estate. Forty minutes of the spring light and the sound of the wheels and the gentle pleasure of knowing exactly where she was going.
Thomas would be in the garden. He had been in the garden every morning since they had returned. She had watched him from the upstairs window on the first day, not yet ready to go down, needing to observe him before she was ready to be observed in return, and he had been crouched over a patch of ground near the south wall with a handful of soil and an expression of complete absorption. She had stood at the window and thought: there he is. The real one. The one she had glimpsed in pieces over the months of their marriage and had not been given sufficient reason, until very recently, to simply look at directly.