The Man Who Can't Let Go novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Fastened

Virginia sets her terms and moves into the VanAlstyne townhouse. Tobias fastens her locket, and at his mother's Sunday lunch Sisi tells her the family has already announced her engagement to Tobias.

Virginia said yes in the lobby, and she did it on her own terms.

"Separate rooms," she said. "You don't touch me. You don't come through my door without knocking."

"Agreed."

"You sign on day thirty-one, in front of my lawyer, with a pen I hand you."

"Agreed." He took a hotel notepad from the front desk and wrote it out, all four lines, in the square handwriting she had once known better than her own.

He signed it and dated it and held it out.

She read it twice before she took it.

"Why would you want me in your house?" she asked.

"Because for three years it's been too empty," Tobias said.

She didn't answer that, and he didn't ask her to.

The townhouse on Marrow Hill was exactly as she had left it, down to the brass lamp in the hall and the crack in the third stair.

He carried her suitcase up himself and set it down in the blue guest room across from his.

"The sheets are clean," he said from the doorway. "The housekeeper airs this room every week."

"Every week?"

"She airs all of them," he said, and went down the hall.

Virginia closed the door, sat on the edge of the bed and listened to him walk away.

At ten the next morning she stood in front of the mirror in a green wool dress, trying to close the clasp of her mother's locket.

It was a small gold clasp, and her fingers were not working.

She opened the door a hand's width.

Tobias was in the hall in shirtsleeves with a coffee, and he stopped halfway through a sip.

"The clasp," she said. "It sticks. I don't want to be late for your mother's lunch."

"It's Sunday. Mother is always late for her own lunch."

"Tobias."

He put the cup down on the hall table.

She turned her back to him and lifted her hair, and the hall went quiet.

His fingers were cold on the nape of her neck, and then they weren't.

He took a long time over the clasp.

It was a very small clasp.

His thumb moved once along the top of her spine, so lightly it could have been the chain.

She did not move, and neither did he.

Behind her she heard him breathe in and not breathe out.

"Done," he said, and his voice had gone rough.

Virginia let her hair fall and turned around.

His hand was still up in the air where her neck had been, and he looked at it and put it in his pocket.

"The hall is cold," she said.

"Yes," Tobias said. "It's very cold."

Lunch was in the long dining room at one, and Greta was on time after all.

There were five places at the table, and a bouquet of white roses that had not been there the night before.

Abel was there in a clean shirt with his arms folded.

Saskia was there too, in yellow this time, and she jumped up the second she saw Virginia.

"You came," she said. "I wasn't sure you would."

"I wasn't sure either."

"Sit by me," Sisi said. "Please. Greta says I always talk too much, and you can be my excuse."

Greta watched the two of them from the head of the table and smiled at her soup.

The meal was easy, because Greta made it easy.

She asked about Maine and the book restoration. She laughed in the right places.

She said, "Tobias, pass Virginia the bread, she's been starving herself up there," and Tobias passed it and their fingers did not meet.

After the dessert plates were cleared, Greta went to take a call and Tobias went with Abel to find a file.

Sisi caught Virginia's wrist very lightly in the doorway of the sunroom.

"I need to tell you something, and I'm sorry to be the one," she said. "You're going to hear it on the street, and I'd rather you hear it from someone who likes you."

"What is it?"

Sisi's eyes were wet and wide.

"Greta told the Empire Tribune last month that Tobias and I are engaged," she said. "It was in the Sunday paper. They've printed a ring size and everything."

"Engaged," Virginia said.

"I never said yes," Sisi said quickly. "I never said anything. She just said it, and nobody told her to stop."

Down the hall a door opened, and Greta's heels came clicking back across the marble.

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