Chapter Five #2
Taddeo watched her while turning the base of his wineglass slowly between his fingers.
“So you leave the damage.”
“You stabilize it.”
“Same thing.”
“No.” Isolde leaned forward slightly. “If a tear is going to keep spreading, you support it. If mold is active, you stop it. If something is chemically unstable, you intervene. But you don't pretend nothing happened. That's dishonest, and it can destroy the original material.”
His gaze shifted briefly toward her hands.
“Damage changes an object,” she added. “It doesn't erase what it was before.”
The words sounded more personal after she said them than she intended.
Taddeo seemed to hear it too.
Neither of them addressed it.
He lifted his glass and took a drink.
“Do people argue with you?”
“Constantly.”
“Because they want things to look new.”
“Mostly because they think paying means they get the outcome they imagined.” Isolde picked up her fork again. “There was a donor last year who wanted us to replace a missing corner of a ship's log because he thought the page looked unfinished. The missing corner had been gone since at least 1904.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That the page was finished in 1904.”
Taddeo's mouth curved.
It was the first time she'd seen him smile without the expression appearing at someone else's expense.
It changed his face more than she expected.
She looked back at her plate.
That was also irritating.
He asked, “Did the donor like that answer?”
“No. Donors rarely like answers that include the phrase we aren't doing that.”
“I understand the problem.”
“I imagine people don't tell you that often.”
“More often than you'd think.”
“Do they survive?”
Taddeo cut another piece of chicken.
“Usually.”
Isolde glanced up.
He was definitely amused now.
“That's not funny.”
“I didn't say it was.”
“You look like you think it is.”
“That's different.”
The conversation moved strangely after that, slipping into ordinary territory in a way she hadn't prepared for.
He asked how long she'd worked at the museum.
She told him six years. He asked whether she'd always wanted conservation, and she explained that she'd started as an art-history student before discovering she preferred the objects to the people writing about them.
He told her he had no patience for museums that forced visitors through predetermined routes.
She told him that was because he apparently had authority problems when the authority wasn't his.
“You've known me two days,” he murmured.
“It's been an educational two days.”
He looked at her over his glass.
The repetition from the car made her almost smile.
Almost.
When he rolled his sleeves higher while reaching for the bread, Isolde's attention dropped before she could stop it.
The scars were clearer under the dining-room light.
The one near his forearm was old and slightly jagged, not the clean line of surgery. Another faint mark crossed two knuckles. His hands looked controlled rather than delicate, large enough to remind her too easily how little effort it had taken for him to stop her elbow on Mercer Street.
She looked away.
Taddeo's hand paused over the bread basket.
He had seen her looking.
He didn't mention it.
That somehow made the awareness between them worse.
Isolde reached for her wine instead and found the glass suddenly more interesting than it had been thirty seconds earlier.
“You're not what I expected,” she murmured.
Taddeo raised an eyebrow. “From organized crime?”
“From kidnapping.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don't know. More shouting.”
“Would that help?”
“No.”
“Then why do it?”
She traced one thumb along the condensation near the stem of her glass. “Most people who want control like making sure everyone knows they have it.”
“That sounds inefficient.”
“Does it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Taddeo leaned back, one arm resting across the back of his chair. “If people need you to keep reminding them you're in control, you're probably not.”
The answer was so thoroughly him that Isolde had to look away to hide the reaction it produced.
It wasn't fear.
That would have been easier.
Rain struck harder against the glass.
For several minutes they ate without talking.
The quiet didn't feel comfortable exactly, but it also wasn't tense enough to require filling, and Isolde hated that more than open hostility.
She had spent less than forty-eight hours inside this man's house.
She should not have been able to sit across from him and discuss historical documents while rain moved against the windows as if this were dinner between two ordinary people.
The thought pulled Corwin back into her mind.
Her brother had always been good at creating similar distortions.