“What’s happened?” I asked.
“Nothing I wish to discuss before soup.” Her voice was firm but not unkind. “Tomorrow, I will burden you with my troubles. I will tell you everything, and we will make plans. I will ask things of you that I have no right to ask. But tonight—” She lifted her glass in a toast. “Tonight, I simply wish to enjoy a meal with dear friends. I wish to pretend, for a few hours, that the world is not quite so complicated as it has become. Will you grant me that?”
There was something almost desperate in the request.
The Baroness did not ask for things. She demanded, commanded, expected.
But this was asking.
This was a woman who needed to pretend that everything was normal.
“Of course,” I said.
Thomas nodded his agreement.
The Baroness smiled, and some of the tension eased from her shoulders.
“Excellent. Now eat your soup before it gets cold. And Thomas, tomorrow you will tell me about that business in Vienna. The skylight incident. I want every detail.”
Thomas nearly choked on his soup. “How do you know about that?”
“Darling, I know everything. It is both my greatest gift and my heaviest burden.” She smiled serenely and lifted another spoonful to her lips. “Now eat. We have an entire evening ahead of us, and I intend to enjoy every moment of it.”
The evening unfolded slowly, the way good evenings do. We finished the soup. We opened wine—a better bottle than the one Thomas had been cooking with—and moved to the small sitting area, where the Baroness claimed the most comfortable chair as though it had been reserved for her since the flat was built. She regaled us with stories of Swiss high society, each more absurd than the last. As the wine took hold and time passed, her laughter gradually lost its brittle edge.
But I watched her closely.
I couldn’t help it.
Years of training had made observation as natural as breathing, and the Baroness, for all her brilliance at deception, was not trying to deceive us. She wassimply trying to forget, if only for a few hours, whatever weight she carried.
She flinched, almost imperceptibly, when a car backfired in the street below.
Her eyes flicked to the door whenever footsteps passed in the hallway.
She had positioned herself with a clear view of both the entrance and the window—the instinctive choice of someone who had learned to always know where the exits were.
I knew those habits. They were deeply engrained in my being.
The Baroness was afraid.
I didn’t think she was panicked or paralyzed—she was too formidable for that—but she appeared afraid in the way of someone who had glimpsed something terrible and couldn’t quite look away.
“You’re staring, William,” she said.
“Just admiring the company.”
“Liar.” But there was affection in the word. “You are trying to read me. You have been doing it all evening. It is one of your more endearing qualities, even when it is also one of your most irritating.”
“I’m sorry, Baroness. I’m just worried about you.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she set down her wine glass and met my eyes. For just a moment, her mask slipped entirely. I saw exhaustion there. And fear. I saw a woman who had spentweeks—perhaps months—carrying something too heavy to bear alone.
“I know,” she said softly. “And I am grateful, more than you know.” She reached out and squeezed my hand, her fingers cold despite the warmth of the room. “Now. Thomas. You still have not told me about Vienna. I heard there was a chandelier involved as well as the skylight.”
Thomas groaned. “There was no chandelier.”
“That is not what my sources say.”
