19. Thomas

CHAPTER 19

Thomas

The day before the banquet is a quiet one for me. Too quiet, too full of time to fill with restless thoughts and doubts. I consider taking a drive to clear my thoughts, but what I really need to do is what I've been avoiding since I took her to the boutique- I need to have a conversation with Clara.

I've been going back and forth about how much I should tell her to expect from this banquet. On one hand, if she's prepared, I can avoid awkward questions coming out in front of the other guests. On the other, if she's prepared, it's possible her reaction to being more than just arm candy won't be genuine. And I need it to be genuine, because the perceived bond between us is the entire reason I'm bringing her.

Now that Clara isn't confined to her room, I have to search the main house for her. In my memory, I always saw her in the garden, either by herself or with Raleigh, drawing or playing or just talking. But that garden below my old bedroom window no longer exists. Just like the rest of the house, it was lost in the fire Morgan made of my old life.

But there is a new garden, a smaller one, tucked away on the side of the house. If Clara's been making use of the last couple days and done some exploring, I'd bet she's found it.

Sure enough, my first clue that I've found her is finding Iris lounging in a patio chair in the back of the house with her tablet. She doesn't normally enjoy working outside, preferring the climate control and lack of insects in her own office. But if she's keeping an eye on a certain guest of ours…

I follow a stone path off the patio and around the side of the house. Trees and shrubs close in around me, native flowers crowding in around my feet. In a small tiled clearing, a bench sits in sunshine, a low rattan table sitting beside it. Clara sits sideways on the bench, her knees pulled up so that her sketchbook can be propped up against them. She's sketching furiously, and for a moment I hang back behind a tree, just watching.

Watching her draw is different from watching her paint. When she paints, each stroke of her brush is precise, deliberate. It's obvious she's thought through what she wants to create, and knows how to make it happen.

But when Clara draws, her energy is almost manic. I can see the ideas crowding around in her head, and that her only outlet is the tip of her graphite scratching over the paper. She scribbles with her pencil and then smudges the tips of her fingers along the page, maybe blending shadows or softening lines. There are grey stains on the meat of her palm and each of her fingers, even her forehead and cheek, as if she swiped her hand over her face and forgot. I wish I could see what she was drawing with such frantic focus, but if I step any closer, she'll see me, and the moment will be broken.

Which reminds me. I came here with a purpose. Tomorrow is the banquet, and I'm running out of time to decide how exactly I should handle Clara's involvement in it. Trust her to be complicit in my deceit, or deceive her myself. It's a question I often have to ask myself when dealing with business partners and potential allies, but this time… it feels different.

"Oh!"

Clara startles violently in front of me, and I realize that while I was lost in my thoughts, she must have looked up and spotted me spying on her from behind the tree. Hardly the way I wanted to start this conversation.

Except, when I step into the little clearing, I don't say anything about the banquet coming tomorrow night. I don't ask her about her uncle, or even the boutique, or the sex we had in the car.

Instead, I ask, "Have you always wanted to own an art gallery?"

Clara stares up at me, her sketchbook forgotten in her lap. I steal a glance down at it. She's drawing a portrait of a woman, one who looks remarkably like her. Her mother? There are smears of graphite all over the page, and parts of the woman's face have been erased and redrawn several times, judging by the ghosts of old lines sitting underneath the current ones.

Has she… begun to forget what her mother looks like?

Again, I must have forgotten myself- a troubling habit that's been forming lately. Clara notices my look and quickly hugs her sketchbook to her stomach, hiding her work. "No," she says tightly. "Not always."

I stay silent, waiting for a deeper explanation. Clara was reluctant to talk about this before, and I wonder why. If it's such a precious wish, why keep it hidden?

Under my silent scrutiny, though, Clara relents. "As a kid I wanted it. It sounded so… surreal, to think of my work being framed and put up for hundreds of people to see. Maybe I wanted that much praise, or… maybe I just wanted to create a beau tiful gallery so my mom could see my drawings in their best light."

Her eyes drift down to the whorls in the wood of the bench. "So after she died, it stopped mattering that she got to see my work in a pretty frame in a pretty building." She rolls her eyes, but I can see the glassiness in them. "That sounds so shallow, doesn't it? My dream was just to get praise from my mother?"

I think about the last time I really cared about being praised by my father. It was a long time ago, before the schism even, back when I still considered him more a god than a man. "Shallow isn't the word I'd use," I say.

Clara blinks and looks away, and I realize I might have said something more offensive than reassuring. Quickly, I coax. "You still want an art gallery, though."

"I do," she says, her words clipped. She takes a deep breath, and I realize she's trying to keep herself from crying. "Paul helped me a lot."

That surprises me. Her uncle's enforcer? I wouldn't have suspected that he had a nurturing side.

"He encouraged me to keep drawing, if only because my mother would be upset if I stopped because of her. And the more I created, the more I realized that… it didn't matter who saw my work. I needed to make it."

I think I know the answer to this question, but I want to hear it from her. "Does your uncle like your artwork?"

Clara's fingers tighten, almost imperceptibly, around her sketchbook. "No, he… doesn't."

There are many, many more words hidden behind those three, and the flat tone in which she says them. "What did he do?" I ask, more sharply than I mean.

Clara is very determinedly not looking at me anymore. I fight the urge to go to her and grab her chin, forcing her to look at me like I did the night of the fire. I don't want to intimidate this answer out of her. I want to know it… for my own sake.

"He… He would destroy my sketchbooks if I ever made the mistake of leaving them lying around," Clara says, sounding like she's forcing the words out of her mouth. "He said I was too old to spend so much time daydreaming."

My own disgust and rage startles me. "Exactly why did it take you ten years to run away?"

Clara's head whips toward me. "I was a kid . Where was I supposed to go?" she demands. "It's not like I could come back here, where I'd be no better than a prisoner just because of what my uncle did."

I open my mouth to protest that, but how can I? Clara can wander the grounds, but she's no freer now than she was when I first brought her here, not really. Iris is right around the corner of the house, after all, probably eavesdropping on this entire conversation.

My silence is the only confirmation Clara seems to need. "Besides," she says, a little more softly, "I left with my mom. And my mom never left. Maybe she felt like she couldn't leave, because a life on the run isn't easy, especially with a kid. Or maybe she didn't want to leave, because she loved her brother and agreed with his choices, even if they hurt her. I don't know. I'll never know now."

She shrugs, and the helplessness of it feels so familiar, I almost have to step back from it.

One of the worst things about growing up is the moment you learn that your parents are mortal, flawed people, and that you will never truly know everything about them. I had that epiphany the day after the schism, when my father made the decision not to pursue Morgan.

He'd looked so, so tired. He looked tired for the rest of his life, after that .

"What about you?" Clara suddenly asks, speaking a little louder than necessary as if to clear the air of the sudden grimness. "Did you always want to be a mafia boss?"

I almost laugh , whether she meant for the question to be a joke or not. After all, comparing a whimsical life as an artist with the grueling role of a mafia boss sounds absurd. Surely she could choose whether or not she wants to turn her passion into a career, no matter how compulsively she creates? Meanwhile, I was raised to be my father's heir since I could walk. What use am I as anything else?

But Clara watches me with sincere anticipation. She wants to know what made me choose this life. Maybe that makes sense to her, someone who has so vehemently chosen to leave it. How different our worlds are, how disparate our personal cages.

"It doesn't matter what I want," I say frankly. "The empire needs ruling, and my family needs to be provided for."

For some inexplicable reason, Clara looks sad at this response. "So you never… wanted to take over the Warwick family?"

She doesn't understand, or maybe I don't understand her. I try to frame it another way. "When your mother died, you had the option to give up on art and find a different way to express yourself. If I had decided to ‘quit' after my father died, Morgan Speare would have rolled through the remains of my home with guns blazing, and I and everyone I knew would've died."

Clara looks as though I've slapped her, but I continue on. "Being the head of the Warwick family isn't an impulse, like art is for you. It's my job . And it suits me. I excel at it. I have no interest in anything else."

An awkward silence falls between us. I spoke harshly, perhaps, but I also spoke truths that she needs to understand about me. I'm not like her. I'm not romantic or creative or dreamy. I'm a born and bred businessman, soldier, and king all rolled into one. This is what I was trained to be, and so, it is what I am.

Clara bites her lip, apparently mulling over what I've said. I don't understand why, but I wait in silence to see whether she will accept or reject what I've told her so bluntly about myself. Finally, she nods. The tension in my chest loosens a little.

I've been judged and deemed sufficient.

"So," Clara starts, forming her mouth slowly around the word, "what do you like to do?"

I blink at her. "I like getting things done. I like when negotiations go well." I think for another moment. "I like coffee."

Clara smiles at that, bemused. "Okay, but- do you have any hobbies?"

"I don't have time for hobbies, Clara."

She actually snorts at that. "Imagine you had time!" she insists. "If you had the time for a hobby, what would it be?"

What is the point of this thought experiment? I want to tell her it's a pointless question, but she didn't shy away from my truth, so I'll humor her.

I consider my answer for a long moment. What would satisfy my circumspect mindset? What would I be satisfied spending hours on? It would have to be something I could prove my skill at, something with a clear end goal so that I could be sure I'd done the activity correctly .

"I would play chess," I decide. "Competitively."

Clara bursts out laughing. It's sudden and bright, startling some birds in the trees around us and sending them into the sky. Clara quickly stifles her laugh, clapping a hand over her mouth, but she's not quick enough to stop something from happening inside my chest. When she lowers her hand, Clara is still smiling, and it's so much better than seeing her sad .

"Well then, you should probably finish that set you've been collecting," she says.

I grin, and for the first time since Clara came back into my life, it isn't calculated.