Part Eight: The Conversation
She stopped at table seven.
Several people at nearby tables watched.
Claire looked up. Her expression when she saw Isabelle was — complicated. Not hostile. Not the triumphant expression that Isabelle might have worn, had the positions been reversed. Just careful, and waiting, and underneath the waiting, something that had been hurt recently and was not yet sure whether to trust what was coming.
Thomas looked at Isabelle without any particular expression.
“I need to say something,” Isabelle said.
The table quieted.
“I said something terrible,” she said. She did not look away from her sister while she said it, which cost her something. “In front of everyone. I said it like it was a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. It was — I wanted to be right about something, and I made you the proof of it, in front of people who are supposed to love you. And that was wrong.”
Claire said nothing.
“I have been wrong about — ” She stopped. “I’ve been deciding what things meant without understanding them. And I’ve been saying what I decided, as if deciding made it true.” She looked at Thomas briefly. “I’m sorry.”
The apology was not dramatic. It did not resolve everything. An apology given at a table at a wedding in front of witnesses was not going to close the gap that had been opened by years of smaller things that had accumulated into the large thing she had said into a microphone.
Thomas stood up.
He extended his hand to Isabelle.
“Thomas Lefebvre,” he said, in exactly the tone he had used with Renaud — simple, uncomplicated, the tone of a person meeting someone for the first time.
She looked at his hand.
She took it.
“I know who you are,” she said.
“Now you do,” he said. There was nothing unkind in it. “I hope we have the chance to actually meet.”
He sat back down.
Isabelle looked at her sister.
Claire looked at her.
In the space between them was the whole history of it — the childhood and the years and the comparisons and the Sunday dinners and the accumulation of every small moment that had built toward the microphone. None of it dissolved because of what had happened tonight. It was still all there.
But something else was there now too.
“I love you,” Isabelle said. She said it quietly, without performance. “I’ve been doing it wrong, but I do.”
Claire looked at her for a long time.
“I know,” she said finally.
It was not forgiveness yet.
But it was the beginning of a door that had not been open before.
