THREE HOURS LATER, VIOLET found herself dawdling outside Sebastian’s home.
In the years in which they’d worked together, they had found a hundred ways to meet without exciting comment. When they were in Cambridge, meeting was relatively easy: their houses were a mere mile apart, a twenty-minute walk along a wooded path. Thick trees hid their passage from gossip. Violet’s greenhouse was shielded from the prying eyes of servants by a tall shrubbery, while the path to his study was obscured by a maze of head-high boxwoods that allowed her to come and go without knocking at his door.
She waited now within that maze, marshaling her breath and her nerves. She had to make this right, had to try and figure out a way to continue. But she could remember the look on his face, that look of sad determination, and she didn’t know how to change that.
She sat on a stone bench and kicked the crushed white stone of the path in frustration. If she just laid out everything in order, there had to be a solution. A proper, reasonable solution.
Stone crunched; she looked up in consternation.
It was Sebastian. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, but even in his shirtsleeves, that serious expression made him seem formal. He had one hand in his waistcoat pocket and he was watching her with an unreadable expression.
She thought about standing—thought about it so long that she realized that the moment had passed. She’d look a fool popping to her feet now, half a minute after he arrived.
She settled for inclining her head in his direction. “Sebastian.”
“Violet.” He didn’t move any closer. “I expected you to arrive almost forty-five minutes past. I’m shocked it took you so long to come and debate with me.”
Her fingers twitched. She thought of objecting on principle, but that was what she had come to do. “I was trying to figure out my best arguments. I made a list of everything I might say.”
He raised an eyebrow. “A list? I must see this. You did write it down, didn’t you?”
She thought about denying it, but he knew her too well. She drew the paper from her skirt pocket and handed it over. He unfolded the page and flattened it between his palms.
“Money,” he read. “Land. Your mother’s influence.” He looked up. “These aren’t arguments, Violet. They’re bribes. Excepting, of course, that line about your mother. She’s a threat.”
“Yes. Well.” She couldn’t let him see her unease. She looked him in the eye. “I will give you five thousand pounds, if—”
“I don’t need five thousand pounds,” he interrupted, “and it’s hardly just compensation in any event. Let me explain what I want: I want to never again lie to the people I care about.” He held up her paper. “That’s not on your list.”
She snatched the paper from him. “As I said, I was still contemplating.” The page crumpled ruthlessly between her fingers; she crunched it into a hard, dense ball of sharp corners, one that dug into her palms. “There has to be something.”
A bird sang overhead. Blue sky shone brilliantly above the clipped shrubbery. It wasn’t weather for giving up, and Violet didn’t intend to do so. But by the look on Sebastian’s face, he wasn’t about to surrender easily, either.
“My brother,” Sebastian said, “is dying, and when he told me what he planned to do with his son, he said…” He looked away. “He said he’d send Harry to his grandmother because I was too busy to look after him. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t do all the work. I could only stand there mutely, wondering how to respond without giving away all our secrets.”
Violet dug her fingers into the ball of paper.
“My friends are worrying about me,” Sebastian continued. “That’s completely backward. I’m supposed to take care of them. But I can’t even explain to them that I’m thirty-two and I’m disappearing—that I’m being praised for work that is not mine, and reviled for thoughts I didn’t think.”
Her throat felt scratchy. She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how she could make any of this better.
“And then last night,” he said, “you complimented me on my talk, when we both know that you wrote it.”
Violet bowed her head. “That was a mistake. I know. It was just—”
“When the two of us begin to forget that this is a lie, it’s time to stop. I can’t tell anyone the truth any longer, and every little lie piles up. I’m feeling irritable. I meant what I said: I’m done telling lies for you. I don’t like the person I’m becoming.”
If he walked away now, he’d leave an empty hole in her life. But what did that signify, next to his complaints? She stuffed the balled-up paper into her pocket.