me.” She glared at Camille. “Isn’t that what a girl is supposed to say? Besides, I am far too young to marry.”
Only a few months ago Sophie had insisted she was of marrying age. “If you wished, you might have a long engagement. Or do you not like d’Auvernay enough?”
“What is enough? D’Auvernay is everything a man is supposed to be. Everything I wanted.”
“But?”
Sophie sighed. “Then I think of you and Lazare, how you are together.”
How they had been, once. Now she fretted about Lazare, cynical at the revolutionary dinner. Talking about pretending in a way that made her worry he knew she was pretending not to have anything to do with magic. Uneasy that she might never be able to tell the truth. “You overestimate us, I think.”
“Oh?” Sophie said, suddenly interested. “Has something happened?”
“I fear—” In her mind she saw a road with a fork in it, the one path dividing into two, each of which ran away from the another. Like the branches of the carefully tended pear tree, growing apart. “I fear we will go our separate ways.”
“You, part? You are made for each another!” A V of worry appeared between Sophie’s pale brows. “Aren’t you?”
“What happens when people don’t tell each other things, because they’re afraid the other person won’t like them anymore? Or because they fear they’re becoming a different person, one the person won’t like—”
“Hush! You always fret when he’s away and imagine awful things. You are prone to imagining, you know. When Lazare looks at you, it’s as if his whole being looks at you. And when you look at him, I see that you love him.” Sophie poked at the gravel with what was left of the stick. “I know d’Auvernay cares for me.”
“Which is not the same as you loving him, is it?”
Sophie shook her head.
“And Rosier?” To hide whatever her face might reveal, Camille bent and plucked a dandelion growing up through the stones.
“He’s not the kind of young man I planned to marry.”
“And what kind was that?”
“Someone like d’Auvernay, of course.”
“But why? I understand you felt that way when we were poor, and trying to keep our apartment, and we needed a way out. Now you have your own business—”
“What if that’s not enough?” Sophie’s voice wobbled. “What if something comes to take it away? If you heard the rumors the seamstresses and the customers tell … sometimes I wake in the night, alone in my bed, and I am so afraid, Camille.”
She clasped her sister’s small hand. “Tell me.”
“My fingers are ice, my heart beating hard in my chest, and all I can think is that I will never be truly safe. That the hunger and the uncertainty will come back. And whatever my heart says, my head says d’Auvernay is safe.”
Safety was both blessing and curse. “Perhaps there is no safe, not any longer.” Camille plucked a yellow petal from the flower and let it drift away in the cool wind. “What if we have to learn to live with the feeling that the walls around us could crumble at any time, the rug whisked out from beneath our shoes? What if we cannot find safety in another person, but in ourselves?”
Sophie gave her a canny look. “But you feel safe with Lazare, don’t you? That is what I want.”
Did she feel safe with him? As she pulled off another petal, she wondered: What if the paths they were taking didn’t curve back to meet again, but like the pear tree’s branches, grew apart forever, never crossing? What if the plans they’d hatched in the restaurant’s dreamy glow could never come true, because each choice they made was taking them farther away from each other—but unlike the gardener who pruned the tree, they did not know it?
It chilled her to think of it.
“And d’Auvernay will give you safety?”
Sophie made an impatient sound. “More than Rosier will!”
“Are you certain? What about everything you’ve done together on the circus—”
“It’s not a circus.”
“Les Merveilleux,” Camille said, exasperated. “I thought it made you happy. Not just the costumes, and the performance itself, but being with—”
“No!” Sophie stood up. “I’ve no wish to talk about it any longer. I should have guessed you would take his side, since he is your friend and Lazare’s. If he wished to marry me, he would have asked!”
All the hope and joy had gone out of Sophie’s face. She did love Rosier. But for whatever reason, he had not proposed. “Oh, Sophie! I do think