Chapter Thirty-Four
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I N THE DARKNESS AROUND HER, CHAOS TOOK HOLD.
But Evelyn did not breathe. Or speak. Or move except to withdraw her hand from Betsy’s.
You will lose everything .
No. It was nonsense. Betsy’s conviction must have been faked. Its ring of truth fabricated.
Evelyn would not lose everything. Betsy was no prophet. And—
A more troubling thought occurred.
Most women in Betsy’s profession used deductive vagaries to make their predictions. The same way she knew that Evelyn had a rough, poor, fatherless childhood—by sheer probability given what Betsy did know about her past and her present—she might be able to deduce other things, too.
Perhaps Betsy was just cold reading. Maybe she knew that her love for Tom was doomed the same way Jules and Bea did.
The past was the greatest predictor of the future. Love stories like Tom and Evelyn’s never worked out. They had no happily ever after s. It was a safe bet, then, that this one was destined for destruction too.
No. She rejected that. She would not allow herself to fall prey to such obvious parlor tricks and fancy. Evelyn Cross had never fallen in love and never let her life tumble into romantic turmoil.
She could leave Tom any time she liked.
She could.
And she would.
Eventually.
Yes. Yes, she would.
But for the moment, with the chaotic darkness all around her, all she wanted was to go to him.
Her cast had escaped through the stage door and into the bright sunlight of the street outside. She could follow, or she could direct her steps elsewhere. Why shouldn’t she?
As quickly as the shadows and her skirts would allow, she retreated to Tom’s office, and once her eyes adjusted, she lit the oil lamps, blushing the room in a glow of golden light. Tom was nowhere to be found; surely, he was helping the electricians bring the power back on. She resolved to entertain herself and wait for him, even as Betsy’s and Beatrice’s warnings wrapped around her like a winter chill.
Distraction. She needed a distraction. The stack of fresh newspapers—the afternoon edition—seemed as good a place to start as any. She picked the first up, grimacing when she spotted The Manhattan Daily across the banner, skipped the stock market news dominating the front page, and dove into the lowbrow pages beyond.
What she found there … it shocked her so thoroughly she wondered if she might have been dreaming it. If the oil fumes had gotten to her brain.
But no, when she stepped closer to the flame to inspect the pages by its light, she knew she was not imagining things.
Because there on the society page was a nearly half-page photo of the lovely, slender society damette Miss Constance Alban extending her hand to one Mr. Thomas Gallier in front of a positively picturesque flower shop. The headline above that chestnut of an image?
WEDDING BELLS FOR THE EMPEROR?
Evelyn didn’t know how long she stared at the photo, committing every detail of it to memory and cursing herself for being such a fool.
A fool for believing him when he said he’d chosen her. A fool for feeling so betrayed by this flimsy piece of paper.
All she knew was that one moment, she was considering how best to rid herself of this terrible emptiness inside her, and the next, a set of strong, familiarly warm hands were reaching for her waist.
“There you are. My man says the power should be back on by tomorrow morning. Are you alright?”
“What is this?”
Shrugging off his touch, she spun and flashed the paper for his inspection. Thomas’s face blanched, then reconstructed itself in a mask of casual indifference. He even had the gall to roll his eyes.
“Nonsense, that’s what it is. Put it in the bin where it belongs.”
No. This could not be happening. She could not have been lied to by him. She couldn’t have fallen for this. “You told me that you chose me. That’s why you rescued me that night. That’s why you came for me—”
“I did. Of course I did.”
“Then what the hell is this? If it’s in Alban’s papers, it might as well be a goddamned wedding announcement.”
“Miss Cross … Are you jealous?”
Yes. Jealous enough to kick the teeth of his smug smile in .
But just as he had the moment before, she bottled her emotions, corked them tight, and threw them into the depths of her heart’s ocean, never (she hoped) to resurface.
“Jealous? Why should I be jealous? We’re not anything to each other. Just an affair. This dalliance of ours always had an inevitable Armageddon.”
“You don’t mean that. Not anymore.”
This time, when he placed his hands around her waist, she didn’t twist away. Nor did she reply to his obvious attempts to coax some sort of romantic confession out of her.
“Alban cornered me. Took the picture. Constance Alban is a fine girl, but I am here with you and that will not change. No one controls my fate but me. Not anymore.”
For so long, Evelyn had known which feelings were safe and which were decidedly not. Friendship and affairs gave her access to a whole host of delightful emotions—joy and thrills and affinity and affection.
But this? Whatever it was she was feeling for Thomas? Whatever risks and vulnerabilities it exposed in her tender heart?
She hated it.
So she did her damndest to expunge it.
“We should go somewhere,” she said, slapping on a grin as if the last few moments hadn’t passed between them, as if Constance Alban wasn’t staring at her from Thomas’s desk. “The rest of the cast has decided to take the afternoon off. I don’t see a clear way to get them back. It’s no use rehearsing without the full lights, anyhow.”
Thomas started, but clearly decided it wasn’t worth arguing. “Where would you like to go?”
“Back to bed. Or we can stay here and fulfill a fantasy of mine.”
His eyebrows knit. “You’re upset. We should talk about this—”
“Fine then,” she said, abandoning his embrace to collect her shawl and hat. “If you’re not in the mood, then I want to dance.”