Part Nine: The Rest of the Night
The dessert course was served. The cake was cut. The dancing began at ten, which was when Isabelle had scheduled it, because even in the middle of everything, the schedule was the schedule.
Thomas and Claire danced.
She had been right about the dancing — she had wanted to dance, and dancing was good, and the music was the right kind of music for a late autumn wedding, and the floor was the right kind of floor, and Thomas danced in the somewhat careful but committed way of a man who was not a natural dancer but had decided this was worth doing properly.
“You were very calm,” Claire said.
“Was I?”
“When she said it. When you walked up there.” She looked at him. “You didn’t look angry.”
“I wasn’t angry,” he said.
“Not at all?”
He thought about it. “I was — aware of the weight of it, I think. What she was saying and what it was going to do.” He paused. “I wanted to be careful with that.”
She looked at him.
“Most people would have said something,” she said. “Made her feel it.”
“She was going to feel it without my help,” he said simply. “That seemed like enough.”
She thought about this.
“It is,” she said. “It was.”
They danced for a while without speaking.
“When are you going to tell my parents?” Claire asked.
“About?”
“The company. Everything.” She paused. “They still think you’re — they have a version of you that’s Isabelle’s version.”
“When it comes up,” he said. “Or when you want. It doesn’t need to be an event.”
“It’ll be an event,” she said.
“Then when you’re ready for that event.”
She looked at him — the man she had chosen, who had walked across a room with dignity when he had every reason to be angry, who had said nice to meet you and meant it, who had not required the revelation of what he was to be a moment of triumph.
“I’m ready,” she said. “We can tell them this week.”
He nodded.
They kept dancing.
At a table nearby, Isabelle sat with Renaud and did not talk about what had happened, because it was still too close to talk about. But she watched her sister on the dance floor and she was quiet in a way that was different from her ordinary quiet — not the quiet of someone managing the next thing, but the quiet of someone sitting with something they needed to sit with.
Renaud put his hand over hers on the table.
She looked at him.
“I didn’t know,” she said again.
“I know,” he said.
“Not just about his company.” She paused. “About any of it. About how it was going to—” She stopped. “I thought I was being honest.”
“I know,” he said.
“Honesty is not—” She tried to find the sentence. “Honesty that is also cruelty is not a virtue.”
He looked at her.
“No,” he said. “It’s not.”
They sat together in the venue that had been so carefully arranged, with the white flowers and the formal garden beyond the windows and the lanterns that had come into their own when the light changed.
The evening continued around them.
