“Not in front of your sister,” Calpurnia interjected. Sabina’s stepmother had grown comfortably plump from her string of babies, but her fair hair was still bright and her unlined mouth as quick to laugh as ever. “I don’t want to discourage Faustina from marriage altogether.”

“I’m not discouraged,” Faustina said. “In fact, Sabina, you can tell Mother to let me get married now instead of making me wait another two years.”

“Sixteen! Far too young. Sabina was nineteen when she married.”

“But doing plenty before that,” Sabina agreed, thinking of Vix.

“Were you really?” Faustina looked speculative: a tall girl now, with their father’s dark eyes and Calpurnia’s fair hair. A beauty too—after just a few years of absence, Sabina still had to adjust from the memory of a skinny little girl to this statuesque young Venus. Just yesterday she was trying on my dresses and praying she would grow as tall as me.

“I can see you girls are going to gossip no matter what I have to say about it,” Calpurnia announced. “Try not to get yourselves too overheated. For myself, I think I’ll take a splash in the natatio pool.”

Faustina pounced the minute her mother was out of earshot. “Tell me everything,” she begged. “Your husband is trying to whore you out to his friends—did I mention I never liked him? Now, tell me every detail.”

“Aren’t you even a little bit shocked?”

“Oh, tremendously. But can’t I still be curious? The most interesting things always happen to you, and nothing exciting ever happens to me.”

“Having your husband try to whore you out is not exciting, Faustina!” Sabina looked at her little sister—little no longer, really, though she still wore the heart-shaped gold amulet of unmarried girls about her neck. That amulet would come off on the morning Faustina married. Maybe she should know, before that day, that there was more to husbands than a red veil and a few vows.

“Hadrian worries me,” Sabina admitted, gazing through the billows of steam. At one end of the caldarium, a cluster of naked elderly matrons gossipped over cups of rose wine. At the other end, a pair of girls whispered about their lovers. More secrets got traded in the hot confidential steam of the bathhouse, Sabina thought, than anywhere else in Rome. “He’s changed.”

“How?” Faustina lifted the damp blond curls off her neck.

Such small things. Saying them out loud made them absurd. “He doesn’t talk to me anymore,” Sabina said slowly. “And all he used to want to do was read philosophy and sketch architectural designs and travel to Athens, but now he’s scheming to be governor of Syria. Empress Plotina has been pushing that kind of post on him for years, but now—now he’s letting her push him.”