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We did not speak immediately. It wasn’t the silence of two people with nothing to say. It was the silence of two people deciding whether to say it.

“The Vivaldi earlier,” he said eventually, low enough that the words were held just between the two of us. “You looked as though you’d forgotten where you were.”

“My mother used to play it,” I said. “Sunday mornings.”

He turned us slightly with the movement of the music. “Something about rain beneath glass.”

I stilled. I had used those words once. Only once. In the conservatory. His hand was still at my back, and I was suddenly aware of exactly where it rested.

“What did you say?”

He held my gaze before looking away. “I forgot myself.” He inclined his head slightly. “Forgive the interruption.”

“No,” I said. “I only meant—how did you know that?”

“I imagine it came up,” he said.

It had. Once. I looked at him carefully. “With whom?”

He offered nothing further. The music turned and the moment passed with it. I spent the remainder of the dance trying to make sense of it. I had only ever used those words once.

With Alexander.

The possibility entered my mind before I could stop it. I looked at the man in front of me more carefully, searching the visible half of his face for something familiar. There wasn’t enough to be certain. But there wasn’t enough to dismiss it either.

When the music ended, he released my hand as precisely as he had taken it. I felt its absence more than I had felt his touch.

“Thank you,” he said.

“My pleasure,” I said.

He stepped back, and the room moved between us. He was gone before I had finished deciding what to say next.

I saw him twice more in the early part of the evening.

The first time, he was in conversation near the gallery with a woman whose mask I recognized as belonging to one of the senior physicists. She was speaking. He listened with the same focused attention I remembered from the dance. I wondered what she had said that held him so completely.

The second time, he was at the edge of the balcony corridor, alone, regarding the room below from a slight distance. I did not approach. He never seemed to notice me. When I looked away from the balcony, I found Charlotte beside me.

“The man in the white mask,” I said before she could ask what I was looking at.

She followed my gaze. “Hmm,” she said.

“Do you know who he is?”

“Half the room is unidentifiable this evening by design, Emilia. That is, historically, the point of a masquerade.”

“Yes, thank you.”

Charlotte’s face held the diplomatic blankness of someone who has decided not to say what they are thinking. I was beginning to recognize it.

“I saw him dance with you,” she said.

I looked at her. “You were watching?”

“I’m a novelist. I watch everything,” she said.

“Did you recognize him?” I asked.