Page 12 of Charlotte

He did not answer, but his right hand shifted inside his coat.

There it was again. The hidden thing. The question he would not let her ask.

“Before I came?” she asked.

“Before I understood some matters better.”

“That is a very inconvenient sentence, Mr. Peterson. It sounds important while explaining nothing.”

His gaze returned to her with something almost like surprise.

“I am accustomed to inconvenient sentences,” she said. “Delly raised me on them.”

That almost-smile threatened again and lost its nerve.

“You ought to enjoy the evening,” he said. “Eat your cake. Meet the others.”

“I am meeting you.”

“No,” he said, not unkindly. “You are meeting what the Bees arranged. Those are not always the same article.”

The words landed harder than she had expected. For the first time all evening, Lottie did not know what to say. Mr. Peterson seemed to take her silence as agreement. He stepped back, but he did not leave. Not quite yet.

She looked at him, really looked at him, the way she had learned to look at a damaged book before deciding whether the spine could be saved.

He was not old, though weather and beard made him seem older from a distance. There were fine lines near his eyes, not from laughter, she thought, but from squinting into the weather. One cheek bore a faint scar or pale mark near the jaw, something the beard did not fully hide. His coat was clean and brushed, but old on the cuffs. His boots had been polished for the evening by a man who rarely polished boots and had done the work thoroughly once he started.

There was care in him. There was fear, too.

That combination made no sense to her, which made it very hard to leave alone.

“What does the C stand for?” she asked.

His face shut completely. Too late, Lottie knew she had stepped wrong. Her fingers slipped from the edge of the book, and it began to fall. Mr. Peterson reached out with his left hand and caught the book before it landed on the floor.

He steadied it, then let go at once. Lottie tucked it close against her chest, her knuckles whitening on the spine.

“Peterson will do,” he said.

Lottie swallowed. “I did not mean to pry.”

“I know.”

That small mercy nearly undid her. He knew she had not meant harm, and still the harm had found him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His expression changed. A flicker only, but she saw it. As if an apology were not something he had expected from her.

“You needn’t be.”

“I do. I think a person should apologize when she has stepped where she did not know the ground was soft.”

He stared at her for a long moment.

In the parlor, laughter rose around Delly and Mr. Simms. Someone said pie again, and Mrs. Hanford made a noise of deep concern. The hotel reception rolled on, warm and crowded and absurd.

Mr. Peterson looked like a man standing outside a window.