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“And what else do you know?”
The question, so simple, made her breath catch. Perhaps it was because she had never really conversed with a stranger—not freely anyway—or perhaps it was simply him, but speaking to him without having him in the room didn’t seem as strange as it should.
And even more strange it felt...good to have him ask. About her. About her life.
He wasn’t really asking. She knew that.
But she felt connected to him all of a sudden in the strangest way.
“I know how to smile prettily through all of it.” She grinned then, looking up, though she had no idea where his cameras were.
“An interesting skill, I should think.”
“No one has ever found it particularly interesting before.”
“No?”
“Someone would have had to realize it was a skill. My mother never much considered me, not as myself. It was always...me as compared to someone else. My father barely ever looked at me at all.”
“Many people grow up in isolation,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I assume so.”
“Your father was having you marry a business associate of his?”
“A kind way to describe him. He’s a man my father owed money to. And he was selling me.”
“I see. Not an ideal situation.”
“No.”
She walked into the dining room, and saw that there was a meal set out for her. “Did you do this?”
“Just enjoy the magic,” he responded.
She looked around the cavernous room, candles in gold candelabras all lit, the chandelier above the expansive table glittering. The place setting was fine china and silver, the chair elegant and finely carved. It made a mockery of this idea that she was a prisoner. Or it tried.
She was well familiar already with gilded cages.
“This is very strange,” she said.
“It’s normal to me.”
“I’m not sure that that means anything. But then, I’m not sure that strange to me means anything either.”
“Perhaps it doesn’t.”
She stared out at the spread before her. “Why don’t you join me?”
“I do not join people. In anything.”
He was hiding himself, and yet it was hard to imagine such an authoritative-sounding man would hide.
“Why?”
“You are not in a position to ask questions.”
“I never am.” She sighed. “Is this because if I see your face, you’ll have to kill me?”
