‘What are you trying to tell me?’ She tilted her chin up towards him. ‘That your father was right?’
Something flickered in his expression – a hairline crack in glass. ‘Don’t be blind, Miss Adams. You cannot sit here and tell me, in good conscience, that those who do bad things are good people. Noble people.’
‘I don’t believe I said “noble”.’
He shook his head. ‘I know your kind,’ he said – his voice low. ‘You shape the world into the place you wish to see. You twist it – contort it – until it fits the shape you want. But that’s not how lifeworks.’
It felt as though his words raked across her skin – but she kept her gaze fixed firmly upon him. ‘You know I stole something, once? When I was a child. My mother had taken me to her dressmaker’s, and I saw this yellow ribbon. I thought it was beautiful. The colour of buttercups in spring. But Ma told me it wouldn’t suit me – wouldn’t suit my colouring – and besides, she’d already spent all her money on the stage gown.’ Her mouth twitched upwards at the memory. ‘So I pocketed it.’
‘Miss Adams …’ Damien said quietly. ‘I don’t think this is quite the same thing.’
‘Do you know what my mother did, when she discovered it?’ Ava looked at him, her gaze steady.
He shook his head.
‘She took me back to Miss Drinkwater’s shop, and she made me apologize. Made me return it.Thatwas my punishment. She made me see I’ddonesomething bad, not that Iwassomething bad. And that’s the difference, Damien. That’s why your father was wrong.’
His expression softened a little. ‘So says the ribbon thief.’
‘I’m serious,’ she countered, pulling the chair around to sit beside him – for her legs had begun to ache, sitting like that upon the floor. ‘I don’t believe it. Not for a second.’
He scoffed. ‘Well, then you are the only one in this world who doesn’t.’
‘Then believe it with me,’ she said – reaching to place a hand upon his forearm. ‘And I won’t be alone.’
He looked down at her hand, and then up at her – and there was a quiet depth to his gaze. As though she’d drawn a wire between them, and now he tugged it taut. And she couldfeelit.
‘Ava …’ he said – his voice low in his throat.
Her lips parted, as though to answer him – though she couldn’t think of a single thing to say. His gaze fell there – to her lips – and she watched him swallow. Watched his throat move with it, and when he looked back at her there was a question in his eyes that she couldn’t read – though she could feel it.
‘I should go,’ he said, standing quickly, turning to pull his coat from the chair.
‘Wait—’
‘I’ll see you next week,’ he said, and – before she could ask him to stay, to wait just a moment – he was gone.
Chapter Thirty
Ava thought of their session as she walked to the theatre the following day. Thought of Damien as a child, scratching those words over and over, until they’d fastened there. She supposed that was the trouble with words – with their power. For when people tell you something over and again – you start to believe it. You stop questioning it. Instead, you let it sink beneath your skin. Let it define you.
She thought of the review – of the words that she’d scorched into her mind. Words likehollowandfalse, and wondered if that was what she had done, too. If she had taken that handful of words, and let them mark her. And perhaps she’d been wrong in that, just as Damien had been wrong to believe what his father had taught him. Perhaps she’d been too quick to let the words of others shape her.
She supposed it didn’t matter now. She wouldn’t go back on that stage – no matter what she proved to herself in that dusty room. What happened between those walls was forher, not for Miss Lillian. It wasn’t to fill seats in the theatre, nor to garner applause.
It was to prove to herself that whatever had been broken could be fixed.
That she could fix it.
‘You’re introuble,’ said Miss Fairchild in a sing-song voice as Ava stepped through the door on Houghton Street. Her tone was bright and cheery, though the look in her eyes was dark, and it took all of the learned stage confidence within Ava to keep walking.
‘I know, I know,’ said Ava, sidling past her. ‘I’m late.’
Ava wasneverlate – but she’d barely slept last night. She hadn’t slept soundly since stepping through the doors of Foster’s Apothecary – though when she’d pulled out her sketch book to try and calm her roiling thoughts, it wasn’t Jem’s face she traced upon its pages.
It was Damien’s.
She’d drawn him outside the theatre – leaning against the wall, one foot resting upon the brick. She’d drawn him upon her doorstep, his face masked in the darkness. She’d drawn him in that alleyway, his hand resting above her shoulder, the space between them but a small, sliver of white upon the page.
