Page 32 of Under Her Protection

Vivienne looked at her own reflection in the window above the kettle.

Vivienne looked, at last, at Leo.

Her grey-blue eyes, across the length of the counter, did a thing Leo was not going to permit her own body to respond to. They did not warm. They did not soften. They acknowledged her. That was all. That was more than Vivienne had given her all week. Leo took it the way it had been offered and did not press for more.

"I will think," Vivienne said, "about what you have said."

"That is not a yes."

"It is not a no."

"I will take it."

A silence sat in the kitchen, and the kettle clicked, and neither of them reached for it, and the silence went on a beat past the moment a polite silence would have ended.

Vivienne looked away.

Leo did not.

By now, four days in, the chemistry in any room the two of them were in was operating like an actual variable in her work. It was an inconvenience. It was not a problem she was going to let be a problem. It was also not a problem she was going to pretend was not there.

Leo watched her for another breath. The grey turtleneck against the pale line of Vivienne's throat. The signet ring against the porcelain of the cup. The hair, as ever, up. Leo's cedar had been on her all morning from the shower, and she was aware of it now in a room that otherwise smelled only of Vivienne's vetiver. Two scents in a kitchen where there had usually only been one. An inconvenience of a kind Leo had not allowed herself in years.

"I will be in the library," Leo said. "Beaumont at the lodge until seven. Rotation at seven."

"Yes."

"Tea was good."

"It is always good."

"I know."

Vivienne's mouth, for the smallest part of a breath, moved in a thing that was almost, almost, a smile.

Leo took her cup and left the kitchen.

In the corridor outside she permitted herself one exhale, which was more than she had permitted herself in the kitchen, and then she went to work.

Whoever was behind this was personal to Vivienne. Vivienne had not said so, which was itself the saying. Tonight, Leo thought, she would let Vivienne come to the sentence on her own. Tomorrow she would make Vivienne say it aloud.

She spent the rest of the afternoon on the camera feeds. She walked the upstairs corridor twice. She watched, at sixteen-forty, a delivery of flowers arrive at the service gate and be processed by the Blackthorn man now stationed there, and she approved the flowers and watched Guérin arrange them in the hall, white lilies, no card, and she pulled the delivery docket herself and ran the florist. The florist was the same one Vivienne had used for eleven years. The flowers were a standing order for Fridays. Vivienne did not, as far as Leo had seen, ever look at them.

At eighteen hundred Avery messaged: in place at the lodge. Leo acknowledged.

At nineteen-thirty Beaumont left his shift. Leo watched him go. She walked the courtyard once more. She came back in through the service door to avoid the main hall.

In the library, alone, she sat down in a leather chair facing the window and did not turn on a lamp. She had a view of the garden in the dusk and, through the open door, of the stretch of the hall that led to the stairs. She could hear, from two rooms away, the small sound of Vivienne moving through the first-floor corridor.

Vivienne did not come into the library.

Leo did not go to her.

They spent the evening on opposite ends of the same house, each of them aware of where the other was, and Leo understood, sometime around ten o'clock, sitting in a dark leather chair in a library that did not belong to her, watching the garden turn black in the windows, that the shape of the coming week was not going to be the shape of the last one, and that she was not yet willing to say out loud, even to herself in an empty room, what that shape was going to be.

Somewhere inside the week, a line she had drawn had moved, and she had been the one who moved it.

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