"Noted. Coffee first. Linguistic crimes second."
Breakfast was paper cups of coffee from the snack car—better than the chocolate, which was faint praise—and a shared muffin of indeterminate fruit that might once have been blueberry in a previous life. They ate with the companionable messiness of people who had crossed an invisible line in the night and found the other side furnished. The obstacle returned with the caffeine, as obstacles do: Claire's aunt would be waiting in Burlington with questions and porcelain angels and a spare room that smelled of lavender sachets; Samuel's mother would be waiting in Rutland with a house that still smelled faintly of pipe tobacco in the curtains and an empty chair that was no longer theoretical. Between those destinations, the train would split their paths like a sentence with two endings. And Grant Ellison existed in the world like a finished piece of furniture—smooth, sanded, ready for a room Claire was not sure she wanted to live in, with a ring that was even now probably sitting in a drawer in an Upper East Side apartment, waiting for a yes that had been delayed into something sharper than no.
"I have to tell him," she said, staring into the coffee as if it might offer a script. "Not by letter. Not after the holidays as if courage were a January clearance item between the marked-down ornaments and the regret. I have to tell him I can't marry a résumé, even a kind one. Even one that alphabetizes its ties and remembers my mother's birthday."
"That'll hurt," Samuel said. He did not pretend otherwise. Pretending was veneer.
"Yes. He's not a villain. Villains would be easier. I'd get a speech and a slammed door and the moral high ground as a parting gift. This will be quieter. Worse." She looked up. In the morning light her makeup had softened—not ruined, she was too skilled for ruin, but lived-in, the winged liner slightly less sharp, the lashes still heavy, the mouth still that careful duet of dark pink and light. "And you? Chicago?"