Ties that Bind
Rathe had begun to think of excuses to leave the party and go home when the woman began to talk to him. He had seen her throughout the evening, her lowered eyes and clenched fingers around the wine glass seeming to echo Rathe’s own discomfort at his presence there, but she had made no previous attempt to attract his attention until she approached him as he stood in the corner of the room, forming half-hearted pretexts to escape.
Rathe recognised that he was being churlish. After all, the invitation from Cook hadn’t been offered with any trace of insistence that Rathe accept, which meant he might easily have declined without causing offence, and so the fact that he had accepted surely meant that his present discomfort was, if anything, more of his own making than Cook’s. Th
