Part Six: Claire
She had not moved from table seven.
Through the speech, through the silence, through Renaud’s words and the room’s shift and Thomas’s walk to the front and back to where she was — she had not moved, which was not a failure of response but a specific kind of response: the response of someone who had known, for years, that a moment like this might come, who had prepared for it without knowing when, who was now receiving it and processing it while the rest of her held still.
When Thomas sat back down beside her, he did not look triumphant.
He looked at her.
“All right?” he said. His voice was quiet, meant only for her.
She looked back at him.
She was not crying — she had been very determined not to cry, had decided this somewhere in the thirty seconds between Isabelle’s toast and Thomas standing up, and she was holding to that decision.
“You knew she would do something like that,” Claire said. It was not quite a question.
“I thought she might say something.”
“And you weren’t going to—”
“It wasn’t my speech,” he said. “It wasn’t my night.” He paused. “It still isn’t. We can leave whenever you want.”
She looked at him.
There were things she could have said about the years leading to this moment — the ways Isabelle had positioned herself above Claire since childhood, the particular form their family’s love had taken, the dinners and the gatherings and the accumulation of small signals that had communicated, clearly and consistently, that Claire’s choices were lesser. The jobs, the apartments, the men she had dated who had never been quite right by Isabelle’s measure.
And Thomas, whom Isabelle had met twice and dismissed in the way she dismissed things that didn’t fit her categories.
She thought about the first time she had visited his office — not to see the office, which she had not known was his, but to have lunch with a colleague who worked nearby. She had seen him in the lobby, coming out of a meeting, and he had seen her, and they had said hello, and then he had walked her to her lunch and then he had called her that evening, and that had been two years ago.
She had not told Isabelle immediately.
She had not told her family about his company.
Not as a strategy. Simply because she had not wanted the information to become the thing — had wanted to be known for the right reasons, had wanted the relationship to exist for the right reasons, had been wary, from early on, of what the information would do to the people around her.
She had been right to be wary.
She reached under the table and took his hand.
“I don’t want to leave,” she said.
“No?”
“No. It’s a beautiful venue and the food was excellent and I would like another glass of wine.” She looked at him. “And I would like to dance. We haven’t danced yet.”
He looked at her for a moment.
He smiled.
“Then we’ll dance,” he said.
