She dressed early, in a startlingly pink 1960s Miss Dior minidress with a high-buttoned neckline and elbow-length sleeves, and sat alone in the folly with her thoughts for half an hour before Josh arrived at the appointed time.

“Thank you for coming,” she said with a smile that wasn’t teasing or flirtatious or anything other than just plain old D’Arcy. She poured him a wine, and refilled her own glass, already long since drunk.

“Will I need to catch up to you?” he asked, nodding at her glass.

Her stomach flipped and her heart squeezed at both the gentle humor and the note of worry she could hear in his words, at the way she could interpret him so much better than just last week when she’d have thought he was issuing a reprimand. “I don’t think so,” she said as Célie brought out plates of steaming, buttery dorade once more, along with crazily shaped, garden-fresh honeyed carrots and leaves of salad so green that even fine arts–trained D’Arcy couldn’t name their precise shade.

D’Arcy waited until Célie had left before she began. “I asked Jess this morning if she would come to the exhibition in Sydney.”

“What did she say?” he asked, thankfully not pointing out that, as Jess’s agent, he really should have been involved in the conversation.

“I want her to see Victorine, my mother, again. Jess wants to as well. But she said she’d have to ask you to accompany her; that while she’s done a lot of uncomfortable traveling in her life, age was rather limiting her adventuring now.”

“And you asked me to dinner to see if I would?” He sipped his wine.

As D’Arcy sat across the table from Josh, surrounded by beauty, the air between them thickset with something else entirely, she gathered her courage to her like a favorite dress. “No,” she replied.

Josh frowned.

“Sorry!” she stuttered. “I did mean what I just said but it came out wrong. God, I’m shit at this,” she added with a wry smile and he finally looked at her as if she’d piqued his interest and perhaps he didn’t despise her.

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” D’Arcy said, choosing her words carefully, very aware that he might say no and go back to the chateau, “but could we go for a walk? I want to say something but it’s hard enough with us both just sitting here…” It was hard enough just to say that, to admit she felt vulnerable and awkward and unwilling to resort to witty repartee.

Josh nodded and stood. They walked toward the canal, the last frantic rustlings of small animals and the buzzing of insects gathering their last supper agitating the air. In D’Arcy’s muddled thoughts, one clamored more loudly than the rest: that choosing what seemed to be the path of least hurt did not always have the intended consequences, if Jess and Dan and her mother were anything to go by.

She could just say that it was important for Jess to come to the exhibition, that it would only be possible for Jess to come if Josh came too; to put him in a position where he couldn’t say no. But he needed to choose and she needed to ask. But first, she needed to explain.