Two weeks passed.
Livia filled them with every useful and virtuous activity available to a woman of her station. She reviewed the estate accounts until she understood them perfectly. She tutored Gaius in rhetoric, applying her father's methods with a rigor that left her brother both improved and exhausted. She visited the three families on their street who struggled, bringing grain and remedies and the particular form of assistance that did not require acknowledgment because acknowledgment would undo the dignity of it.
She did not think about Lucian.
She thought about him constantly, in the way you are not thinking about something when every room you walk into seems briefly emptied by its absence.
On the fourteenth day, Portia came for dinner.
Portia had a talent for timing arrivals that suggested she possessed some internal sense for when her presence would be both most useful and most intrusive. She arrived with wine and the expression of someone who has been patient long enough.
"You look," she said, surveying Livia across the dinner table, "like a woman who has made a very sensible decision and is enjoying it not at all."
"I look perfectly well."
"You look like the Stoic philosophers you were so fond of quoting at eighteen, just before you gave that up because it was boring." Portia poured the wine. "Severa came to see you."
It was not a question. Portia's network of information had always been extraordinary.
"Yes," Livia said.
"And she threatened you with your father's case."
"She — outlined certain realities."
"Mm." Portia turned her wine cup slowly in her hands. "I want to tell you something, and I want you to listen to all of it before you respond with whatever reasonable argument you've been practicing."
"I haven't been—"
"Livia."
She stopped. Portia rarely used that tone. It was the tone that meant something real was coming.
"Severa is not wrong about the risks," Portia said. "That is the first thing. She is entirely correct, and you were wise to put distance between yourself and the situation." She paused. "The second thing is that I have known you since you were twelve years old, and I have never, in all that time, seen you look at anyone the way you looked at him at the Cornelius reading."
The room was very quiet.
"Portia—"
"I'm not encouraging you. I am not discouraging you. I am simply telling you what I observed, because you deserve to have someone speak to you plainly instead of treating you like a piece on a game board." Portia met her eyes steadily. "You are managing this situation with great discipline and very little honesty. I thought you should know that someone has noticed."
Livia looked down at her wine cup.
"He is engaged," she said.
"Yes."
"His engagement secures a provincial alliance that keeps three border regions stable."
"Yes."
"Any connection between us would put my family at risk, his political position at risk, and whatever peace those provinces currently enjoy at risk."
"All of that is true."
"Then there is nothing to discuss."
"No," Portia agreed. "There isn't." She reached across the table and briefly touched Livia's hand. "I just wanted you to know that you're not imagining it. Whatever this is — you are not imagining it."
They finished dinner without speaking of it again, which was its own kind of kindness.
After Portia left, Livia sat in the garden in the dark, listening to the night sounds of Rome — the carts on the cobblestones, the distant laughter from a taberna, the patient persistence of the fountain — and allowed herself, just for a moment, to feel all of the things she had been carefully not feeling.
It was not as disastrous as she had expected.
She went to bed. She slept, finally, properly.
And in the morning, the first small sign of spring showed in the garden: a single rose, white and entirely unreasonable, blooming two weeks early as though it had somewhere urgently to be.
Livia looked at it for a long time.
Then she went inside and wrote a letter.