He knocked over a bowl of grapes.

“Careful, there.” Marcus caught the bowl before it could slide off the table. “Are you feeling all right, Paulinus? You don’t look well.”

“They keep him so busy at the barracks, darling.” Lepida stretched to refill her husband’s wine cup. “I’ve hardly seen hide or hair of him for two months. Sabina is quite desolate at the way he’s been neglecting her.”

“I’m—I’m asking for a transfer,” Paulinus blurted out. “There’s a company of Praetorians with the Emperor in Dacia—”

“Just when I’ve come back?” Marcus protested.

“Surely there’s no rush.” Lepida gave her slow white smile.

Paulinus rose, nearly upsetting the grapes again. “I should get back to the barracks.” He grabbed the bowl just in time.

“Stay.” Marcus rose, too. “I’ll put Sabina to bed and catalogue those new scrolls, and you can entertain Lepida with all your tales of valor.”

Paulinus’s heart dropped into the pit of his stomach.

“You’ll do all that cataloguing this evening, Marcus?” Lepida’s eyes never shifted from Paulinus. “It will take all night.”

“Better get it done now. If I leave the scrolls out the slaves will insist on putting them away, and then I’ll never be able to find anything.”

“I have to go.” Paulinus hated the note of entreaty in his voice.

“Stay.” Lepida’s soft hand descended on his arm.

Go. Go before you wish you were dead.

He followed her.

MARCUS only meant to take a moment organizing his scrolls—his first evening home, after all, and he should spend it with his wife and son. But he sat down for a moment to look at the new copy of Martial’s verses, and that reminded him of a line he’d read in Catullus so he went rummaging to find that . . .

“Father?” a little voice piped from the door. Marcus smiled at his daughter, already dressed for bed in a little white robe.

“Don’t worry, Vibia Sabina, I’ll come to kiss you good night.”

“No, Mother sent me. She took me aside today and said she had a surprise for you after supper, so”—he could hear Lepida’s voice through his daughter’s—“if you weren’t out of your library an hour after dinner, I had to come fetch you to her chamber immed’ately.”

Marcus laughed. “Then I abandon Catullus and surrender to the ladies of the house.”

Sabina tugged him by the hand through the library doors, little bare feet pattering the mosaics, and up the stairs toward her mother’s chamber. “I like Mother’s room. It’s all blue an’ silvery an’ it has a bed like a shell. She let me play on the bed today, with her jewels. When she was telling me how to bring you down.”

“Did she?” He’d been right, bringing them all to Brundisium—he’d never seen Lepida play with her daughter like that before. But she’d been hardly more than a child herself when she bore Sabina. Now she was growing up.

They halted outside Lepida’s chamber door. “To bed now, little one,” said Marcus. “I’ll come tell you a story later.” He smiled, watching Sabina’s nursemaid tug her away down the hall, and pushed open the door of Lepida’s chamber. Her bed did look like a shell, all veiled in white and silver—he always thought Lepida could have been a pretty mermaid inside it, curled shyly inside her hair.