“Do what?” I asked.

Silence.

“Victoria and Vincent,” he finally said, not turning around. “They are more than passing fond of you. And Marc, well, I didn’t think there was anything that could breathe life back into him, but you seem to have managed. And given the amount of time you spend with all three, I can only assume the fondness is mutual. Avail yourself of them, and perhaps you will find the warmth you’re lacking.”

Before I could think of anything to say to that, he was gone, the door left swinging from the force of his departure.

Chapter 16

Cécile

“Cécile, I thought you said this would be fun.”

I glanced up from my contemplation of the swirling water of the river. “I said no such thing, Vincent. You asked how ‘we human folk went about catching fish’ and I said that I would show you. You said that it sounded like fun.”

“That’s true,” Victoria declared, looking up from the worms she had lined up on a rock in an attempt to get them to race. “Although I must say, Cécile, this technique of fish-catching seems flawed, as we have caught none. What we have done is sit in a row for nearly an hour, listening to Marc’s dreadful conversation and watching you stare pensively at the water.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Fishing is better done at dawn and dusk.” I squinted up at rock above. “Although I’m not certain that matters as much here.”

“I find it rather relaxing,” Marc said from where he lounged across a rock on my right. “It would be the perfect activity if you two could stand to be quiet for more than a minute.”

“I expect no more from you, Marc,” Victoria replied. “But Cécile is usually far more entertaining than this.” She poked me in the ribs. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Tristan and I quarreled at breakfast,” I muttered. “I’m afraid he put me in a poor mood.”

“About what?”

“Apparently I chew too loudly.”

“That is a very annoying habit,” Victoria said. “So is this.” She threw a handful of worms at me. I tried to dodge, but the wriggling mass landed square on my skirts.

“What happened to the farm girl I once knew?” she teased. In response, I picked one up and pretended to eat it. Then I tossed it on Marc’s sleeve.

“Can a day go by without you and Tristan shouting at each other across the dinner table?” Marc asked, picking the offending worm off his sleeve and setting it in a crevice between two rocks. “Do you ever have a civil conversation?”

“No.” I pushed away the worms, then reached down to the water to rinse my hands. It had been weeks since the necklace debacle, but I had not once seen Tristan alone. We were together often enough in public – at parties and dinners, sometimes in audiences with his father – but he always treated me with either cold civility or picked cruel little arguments that sent rumors swirling through the city. I had no choice but to play along – and I played my part well – but every argument left a sour taste in my mouth and a cold emptiness in my heart. I slept alone in our rooms every night, although he kept up the pretense that he was making at least some attempt at fathering a child by ensuring he was seen stopping in at odd hours of the night. But he arrived when I was sleeping, was gone again by the time I awoke. The only evidence that he had been there at all would be a rumpled shirt tossed over a chair back or objects rearranged on a table – enough that I would notice and know to come up with another version of the same lie about what passed between us in the night.