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“So you…I don’t understand, Sedric. You had it made? You had it made to give to me? But Hest must have known of it. He sat for the portrait, didn’t he? It’s so like him that he must have!”

Boldly he pressed the catch on the locket and opened it. Hest looked out at both of them, sardonically pleased at the mess he had made of their lives, at the friendship of years that was now crumbling away at his touch. He looked into Hest’s eyes as he spoke. “Oh, yes, he sat for it. I commissioned Rolleigh to paint it. It was very expensive and Rolleigh was justifiably insulted by Hest’s cavalier attitude toward the sittings and the finished portrait. He was supposed to come six times, in the evenings after dark, to a very private place for the sittings. He only came twice. And Rolleigh wanted to show him the miniature before it was put into the locket. Hest did not even come to see it and thank the painter for the likeness. That fell to me. And if Rolleigh was ungracious, well, I can scarcely blame him. Hest was unpleasant and condescending about the whole thing. And he told Rolleigh that if he knew what was good for him, he’d keep the matter of both the sitting and the portrait secret.”Advertisement

From time to time as he spoke, he glanced over at her. She sat there, freckled and unlovely, her wild red hair abandoned to its own inclinations. It had danced free of the pins she had put in it, to curl loosely around her windburned brow and cheeks. Her clothing was clean, but worn. Her blouse was just beginning to fray at the seam. She looked like what she had been when Hest married her; a member of Bingtown’s genteel but down-at-the heel middle class. And in her eyes there was only confusion, with not even the slightest flicker of suspicion of what he was actually telling her.

“I don’t understand why you paid to have him sit for a portrait, Sedric, let alone a miniature to put in a locket. If you wished to give—”

“Alise, can you be so unaware, even at your age? Let me speak plainly. I love your husband. I loved him for years, even before he thought to marry someone to put a respectable façade on his household. Now do you understand?”

She was beginning to. Pink had started to suffuse her face, and her eyes were widening in shock and horror. He didn’t wait for her inevitable questions.

“Yes. He is my lover. When we travel by sea, when we are abroad, even after you are asleep at night in your own home, we share a bed. For me, there has never been anyone else. Only Hest. Forever, I thought, when I so foolishly had this damned locket created for myself. Here. Have it, if you wish, Always and all. I wish I could give you Hest along with it. But somehow I doubt that he was ever mine, to keep or to give away.”

She stared at the locket as if he held a tiny coiled snake in his hand rather than a piece of jewelry. He tipped his hand and let it slither onto the bed between them. He was trembling slightly. Over the years, he’d imagined this moment of revelation in so many ways, but never like this, with them sitting side by side on a bed in a dim room, both frozen in agony. He had thought Hest would be present, that they might tell Alise together before he stole her husband out of her life. He had thought there would be shrieking, hurled threats and thrown objects, slaps and hysteria. But as she sat there, absorbing the betrayal and deception of years, reordering her perception of him and her life, she was silent. She swayed a tiny bit, like a tree in a high wind, and he feared for an instant that she would faint.

“You and Hest,” she said awkwardly, at last. “You love each other. He holds you, kisses you, touches you. That’s what this means?” She touched the coiled chain of the locket and then drew her finger back as if the cold metal had burned her. Her question had burned him.

He’d been so strangely calm up to now. He’d been able to tell her his life’s largest secret, without any display of emotion. But now the tears seeped up, flooding his eyes, and his throat closed as if distant hands were choking him. “I’ve loved him. I don’t think he loves me anymore. If he ever truly did.” He bowed his face into his hands and the tears came. Had he thought he’d told Alise his most private secret? He’d been wrong. The deepest secret in his life was the one he had just uttered aloud for the first time, the deception he had hidden from himself.

He felt her stand. She would hit him now, she’d call him the names he had feared ever since he was a boy. He waited.

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Instead, he felt one of her hands hesitantly touch his head and then smooth his hair, just as his mother had stroked him when he was a small boy. “I’m so sorry for you, Sedric. I’m angry and I’m hurt; I never thought you capable of such deception and betrayal of our friendship. But mostly I’m so sorry for both of us. Especially you. How could you love such a man? What a worthless waste of your heart. Look how it has destroyed both our lives. With Hest, there is no chance of happiness for either of us. But I don’t think he’d care about that at all.” pqdm.com