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Would he treat me the same if he knew?
After all, who would worship a broken goddess?
“Who do you think will win the prize at the end of the programme?” Zachary asks, his voice piercing through my thoughts. “The Apostles programme?”
His question is arch, but it makes my heart sink in my chest. I drop my gaze, not daring to look at him.
Because I don’t have the courage to tell him I’ve not yet decided whether to accept Mr Ambrose’s invitation. Because I don’t have the strength to tell him the path of my life has been redirected, rerouted, into a direction I never chose.
Because I don’t have a way of explaining to Zachary—because I can’t yet quite accept—that he and I won’t always remain Marvell’s perfect parallels.
Soon, I’ll go spinning off at a sharp angle, drawing forever away from him, until his presence in my life becomes little more than a memory, a distant dream.
“Iwill,” I answer him. “Obviously.”
Chapter 21
Fear & Fate
Theodora
Imanagetoeatalmost half of what’s on my plate, and I finish the cup of wine, which makes me feel warm and drowsy.
When we’re finished, Zachary clears everything away, and we walk together to the empty dining hall, where he returns the plates, cutlery and bottle of wine to the kitchens. Then Zachary offers me his arm to walk me back to the sixth form girls’ building.
The sun has long set, and the campus is deserted. A cold wind chases the remnants of summer away, the fragrance of honeysuckle carried into the night air. The lamp light dots the azure darkness of early evening with spills of gold. The night is peaceful and still, a cocoon wrapping itself around Zachary and me.
“Did something happen during the summer holiday?” Zachary finally asks.
The question has been balanced on his tongue all evening. I watched him try to swallow it back, worry it with the tip of his tongue like poking a sore spot. I watched him debate whether to let it loose or swallow it back.
But Zachary has never been one to shy away from questions—no matter how difficult.
The philosopher in him would never allow him to.
I shake my head slowly. “No.”
It’s not quite a lie. Nothing happened over the holidays, not really. A conversation with my father doesn’t count as something. Finding out that I won’t be going to university and will be moving to Russia to live with him and be thrown like a rack of meat onto a stall at the marriage market—well, that counts, maybe, but how could I possibly tell Zachary?
Will I ever be able to tell him?
He’s worried about me, and if our positions were reversed, I’d worry about him too.
I hesitate and add, “The atmosphere in my family home is… a little tense.”
He squeezes his arm around mine in silent acknowledgement. “I can relate to that, trust me.”
“Tense summer at Castle Blackwood?” I ask.
“Tense summer at the BlackwoodManor,” he corrects me with a half-grin.
The relationship between Zachary and me has never permitted such sharing of information before. In the past, the boundaries between us were always clear. We could discuss any topic so long as it wasn’t personal. We avoided anything that might tip our rivalry into the territory of friendship.
But all we managed to do, it seems, is bypass friendship and land straight into something else—something far murkier and complex.
“Tense in general or tense for you?” I ask.
“Both,” he answers.
