Chapter Five #2
Pearl closed her eyes, letting the question linger in the dark behind her lids.
She remembered the garden, the riot of delphiniums along the path, the honey-thick air, the muffled noise of the orchestra pouring through the open doors and windows.
She remembered the way Victor’s hand had hovered near hers, not touching, not daring, as if any contact would collapse the entire edifice of their friendship.
She remembered, too, the flutter in her chest—a sensation that was, in retrospect, both terror and exhilaration.
“I think,” she said, choosing each word with care, “I was afraid.”
He made a sound, something between a sigh and a laugh. “Of me?”
“Of myself,” she answered, almost in a whisper.
Victor’s hand, still resting along the crest of the settee, curled slightly, his knuckles whitening.
He seemed on the verge of saying something, something reckless, perhaps, or irrevocable, but then he drew back, the movement so subtle Pearl almost missed it.
“I’ve always wondered why you chose Percy. ”
Pearl’s grip on the cushion tightened. It was a question she had rehearsed privately, so many times that it ought to have been easy to answer. And yet, faced with it in the hush of the drawing room, with the ghosts of memory crowding the corners, she found herself speechless.
“I don’t know,” she admitted at last. “He was… safe, I suppose. Kind. He made the world smaller, and that felt like a comfort.” She stared at her hands, ashamed of the meagerness of her explanation.
Victor didn’t flinch. “I envied him, you know. Not for winning, but for deserving you.”
Pearl’s heart thudded in her chest—a warning, or maybe a summons. She forced herself to look up, to meet his gaze.
He was closer now than she’d realized, close enough that she could see the faint crescent of an old scar along his jaw, the stray silver threading through his hair, the depth of intent in his eyes.
She inhaled, steadying herself. “You are not what I expected, Victor,” she repeated, softer this time.
He tilted his head. “And what did you expect?”
She almost smiled. “Someone harder. Someone who would judge.”
“Someone who would make you pay for not choosing him?”
The words, so baldly spoken, sent a flash of heat through her cheeks. She shook her head, a gesture halfway between denial and surrender. “Something like that.”
Victor was silent, but the set of his jaw betrayed more than words. The clock on the mantel ticked out another minute.
Pearl felt the urge to speak, to fill the space with something, anything, that would lessen the weight of what hovered between them. But all she could manage was, “Does it ever go away? The feeling of having chosen… wrongly?”
Victor seemed to consider this with the gravity of a judge and the tenderness of a confessor. “I don’t believe in wrong choices,” he said at last. “Only in what we do with the ones we make.”
She let the words settle. They were more comfort than she deserved.
Her hand, which had been worrying at the edge of the cushion, now lay still. She was acutely aware of the heat from his body radiating through the air between them. Her pulse stuttered, then steadied, then ran a little faster.
His hand moved slowly closer to hers, stopping just shy of contact. His palm hovered there, waiting, as if to say, you may have all the time you need, but I am here, and I will not move until you do.
Pearl stared at the space between their hands, a gap narrower than the width of a teacup, and felt the old wall inside her—the one constructed in the weeks after Percy’s death—begin to fracture.
She hadn’t realized until this moment how much effort it had taken to keep it standing, or how badly she wanted it gone.
She swallowed, then slid her hand a fraction forward. The distance was nothing. The distance was everything.
Victor’s hand met hers, not with a grasp but a touch, his fingers grazing the back of her own with the lightest possible pressure. It wasn’t a lover’s caress, not yet, but the promise of one. A signal fire, burning quietly and inextinguishably at the center of the room.
She exhaled, and the sound was half sob, half laughter.
He didn’t move away. Nor did she.
After a long moment, he drew back, reclaiming the exact, correct space, and reached instead for her glass. He took it from her with care, his fingers lingering just long enough for her to notice. When he set it aside, she could still feel the echo of his touch, the place where their hands had met.
The clock chimed the half-hour. Somewhere belowstairs, the girls’ voices lifted in a brief, jubilant quarrel, then faded. The house was once again quiet, save for the heartbeat in Pearl’s ears.
She realized, with a kind of giddy terror, that she was no longer afraid.
She looked at Victor, who regarded her with the unblinking patience of someone who had waited half a lifetime for the chance to wait a little longer.
She smiled, this time without reservation.
The wall was gone. The space between them was nothing at all.