Page 44 of Faceless

His hand found hers — she had put hers out when she started speaking, and it did not find her at once. His knuckles came against her sleeve above the wrist, lightly. She shifted her hand, and he took it. Not warmly, not coldly, just firmly, as he had missed once and had no wish to miss again.

She put her hand on his arm. His arm was thick and solid through the sleeve, and she did not want to think about that, so she did not. She was inconveniently aware of how close he was, how strong his arm felt, of how little of him she had managed to assemble into anything like a picture.

He drew out her chair. She sat. “Four steps from the door,” he said. “For me. Your steps are shorter — perhaps five.”

“Thank you.”

He moved to his own chair. She tracked the sound of him — the evenness of his footsteps, nothing that sounded like a man carrying an injury.

“I am sorry,” he said some minutes later. They had been eating in silence. It came quietly, without preamble. “For the inconvenience of this. The arrangements. It is not what I would have wished, for you.”

She set her fork down. “What would you have wished?”

He took a moment with it — she could hear the honesty of the attempt. “Something better.”

Not something different. Something better. As though the shape of the thing might have been the same, but the circumstances were a failure he owned. She considered it from every side and found it did not simplify. She picked her fork back up.

She had been composing questions all day.

“How long have you been at Auchengray?”

“Since the spring.”

Spring could be counted anywhere from March to early June. He might have been here two weeks before he wrote the offer that had come south to her. He might have been here twelve.

“And before that?”

“Elsewhere.”

Concise enough not to invite a challenge, vague enough to say nothing. Well answered. She changed angle.

“I noticed there are some recently published books in the library. Were they here when you arrived?”

“Some were. Some I sent for.”

“From where?”

“Edinburgh, largely.”

True, yet incomplete in the way all his answers were. “As you are lately come here, I must assume it has recently fallen to you. What connection has your family with the estate?”

“A very old one.”

“That is not an answer.” She heard the edge in her own voice and let it stand. He was not the only one being asked to live on fragments.

“No,” he agreed. “It is not.”

She took a sip of her wine. “You are going to tell me as little as possible.”

“I am going to tell you what I can.”

She thought about how strange it was to argue with someone she could not see — to direct her frustration at a voice, a chair, the warmth that reached her from two feet away across the table.

“How old are you?”

“How old are you?” He gave it back in a bluntness that matched hers.

She would not have laughed at that yesterday. She almost laughed at it now. “You will have had that in your solicitor’s report. You know that and a great deal else about me. I hardly see that I owe you the same question twice.”