The Second Vow

Chapter 3: What My Face Wouldn't Say

Griffin's POV

My grip found the stem of my wineglass before my face caught up to the room.

Too tight. I eased it before the glass could crack, one finger at a time, and by the time I looked up, my expression had already gone back to the one I wore for elders and cameras and every room that expected me to be steady.

Vivienne Lark walked through those doors like she'd been invited.

Nobody had invited her.

I counted the exits before I counted anything else. Old habit. Two doors, one window, Josephine three feet to my left with her fork set down and her whole body gone quiet in the way that meant she was paying closer attention than anyone else at this table.

Too close attention. That was the problem tonight.

An elder near the head of the table half rose out of his chair, and I put a hand out, flat, no words needed. Sit. He sat.

"Vivienne." My own voice came out level. I'd had years of practice making it come out level. "You weren't on the guest list."

"I'm aware." She crossed the room slowly, unhurried, the kind of walk that made every eye in the place follow her whether they wanted to or not. "I came to offer my congratulations. Is that a crime now?"

"No."

"Then we're fine."

We were not fine. I refilled my water glass so my hands had something to do that wasn't clenching again, and beside me Vivienne reset a place setting nobody had prepared for her, moving the fork half an inch, then the knife, small precise adjustments that meant nothing and everything.

"You look well," I said.

"You look like you're bracing for something." Her eyes didn't move off mine. "Are you?"

"Should I be?"

"That's not an answer."

"Wasn't meant to be."

Two lines each. That was as far as either of us would go with witnesses in the room, and she knew it as well as I did. I poured wine I didn't want into a glass I wasn't going to drink from, because my hands needed a job and the room needed to see nothing on my face.

Here was the thing nobody at this table understood.

I'd braced for worse than this. For months I'd braced for worse than this, watched every hallway a beat too long, read every letter from her father twice, and some ugly, tired corner of me went almost quiet with relief that whatever she'd come to do tonight, she'd done it in front of forty witnesses instead of somewhere I couldn't see it coming.

Relief. Not the reaction I should have had, watching the woman I rejected walk into my wedding week uninvited. I knew that much. I filed it away to examine later, the way I filed away everything I didn't have time to feel properly in the moment.

My eyes went to Josephine.

She was watching the two of us the way she'd watch a fence line for a break in it, sharp, unreadable, cataloguing something I couldn't name. It rattled me more than Vivienne standing three feet away.

I wanted, for one strange second, to lean over and tell her the truth. Not the version I gave the council. The real one. I didn't examine why. I just noticed the wanting was there, sitting in my chest like it had a right to be, and I put it away with everything else.

"Sit with us," I said to Vivienne, because leaving her standing was worse than having her seated.

"I won't stay long."

"Wasn't asking you to."

She sat anyway, two seats down, and made small talk with an elder about territory lines like she hadn't just walked into a room that went quiet the second she entered it. I watched her hands instead of listening. Steady. Too steady, maybe, for a woman who'd shown up somewhere she wasn't wanted.

The dinner went on the way dinners do when everyone at the table is performing something. Course after course, a toast about mergers that made my jaw tighten, Josephine quiet beside me in a way I hadn't fully clocked as unusual until tonight. I used to think her quiet meant nothing was wrong. I was starting to think it meant the opposite.

When Vivienne rose to leave, I stood too, out of habit, out of the manners my mother beat into me before I could walk. She didn't look at me on her way out.

She looked at Josephine.

She stopped beside her chair. Leaned down. Said something too quiet for the table to catch, words I couldn't make out from three feet away no matter how hard I strained for them.

Josephine's face went still.

Not the kind of still that means nothing happened. The kind that means something happened and the person is working hard not to show it, which I would know, because it had been my own face for the last ten years.

Vivienne straightened, unhurried, and walked out the same way she walked in.

"What did she say to you," I said.

Josephine didn't answer right away. She reached for her water glass and her hand wasn't quite steady around it, which was the first crack I'd seen in her all week, and somewhere under my own ribs something went cold and certain at the same time.

Whatever Vivienne had just said to my wife, it wasn't nothing.