The treaty review's final session was scheduled for a Tuesday. On the Monday evening before it, Livia sat in her garden until the stars came out and the city went quiet and she had nothing left to do but wait.
It was, she reflected, a strange feeling for a woman who had spent the past two months doing almost nothing but act. She had moved pieces, built alliances, written documents and letters and careful arguments. She had sat with Daria and Senator Corvus and her father and Portia and had done the work of turning an impossible situation into a merely difficult one. There was nothing left, now, that she could do before tomorrow.
She was not good at waiting. She had never been.
Gaius came and sat beside her.
He was eighteen now — had turned eighteen quietly, in the middle of everything else, in the way that significant things happen when you are busy with other significant things. He had his rhetoric scholarship secured, arranged through Corvus's connections following the debate, and he was going to Rome's finest school of argument in the autumn. His future, which had seemed foreclosed, was opening.
He sat beside her in the garden and did not ask questions, which she appreciated. He had developed this quality over the past months — the ability to simply be present without demanding anything from the presence. It was a quality she had helped teach him and she was glad to see it land.
"Whatever happens tomorrow," he said finally, "I want you to know something."
"Gaius—"
"Just let me say it." He looked at her with his mother's eyes, quick and missing nothing. "You gave up three years. Not just for me — I know you'd say you did it for us, for the family — but a lot of it was for me specifically. So that I would have something to go to when I was old enough." He paused. "I see that. I have always seen that. I didn't always know how to say it."
She looked at her brother and felt the full weight of those three years and also, for the first time, their full value.
"You were worth it," she said. "You were always worth it."
He leaned over and hugged her briefly, awkwardly, in the way of young men who are still learning how to use affection. Then he went back inside.
She sat alone with the stars.
She thought about what she wanted from tomorrow and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that it was simpler than she had been treating it. She wanted justice for her father. She wanted the treaty to resolve honestly. She wanted — she permitted herself the full sentence of it, here in the dark, with no one to be careful for — to be with Lucian, in whatever form a future could contain them.
Not as a scandal. Not in secret. Not as the dangerous alternative to the proper thing.
As the proper thing.
She was thirty years old and had survived disgrace and three years of careful diminishment and had come out the other side with her mind intact and her capacity for love intact and a father she could look in the eye and a brother with a future and, against every reasonable expectation, a man who had looked at her across a crowded hall and needed to know her name.
She was not asking for perfection. She was asking for possibility.
Tomorrow would tell her whether she had built enough, moved enough pieces, made enough right choices in enough right moments.
She went inside at midnight and slept, this time, without difficulty.
Across the city, in the palace, Lucian was awake. He sat at his desk with a lamp and a blank piece of paper, trying to write something and finding that every version came out either too formal or too much. He sat for an hour. Then he wrote three sentences:
Tomorrow is the last day of waiting. Whatever happens in that room, I want you to know that the past months have been the most genuinely alive I have felt in my adult life. That is because of you, and regardless of what tomorrow brings, that will remain true.
He sealed it and gave it to a messenger with instructions to deliver at first light.
Livia found it on her doorstep when she woke.
She read it standing in the doorway in the early morning, still in her sleeping clothes, with Rome beginning its daily noise around her and the summer light coming in low and golden over the rooftops.
She held the letter for a moment. Then she went inside to get dressed for what came next.