The morning after the banquet, Livia woke to the sound of birds and the ghost of a voice she could not quite silence.
I will find you again, Livia.
She lay still for a long moment, staring at the painted ceiling of her chamber — blue sky, white birds, the optimistic artistry of a previous age — and told herself, firmly and without room for argument, that last night had been a mistake. A lapse. A momentary failure of the careful architecture she had spent three years constructing around herself.
She rose, bathed, dressed, and went to breakfast with her brother.
Gaius was seventeen and possessed of the exhausting enthusiasm peculiar to young men who have just discovered philosophy. He was already at the table when she arrived, a scroll in one hand and a piece of bread in the other, reading with the intensity of someone who has recently been told that reading intensely makes one appear intelligent.
"You came home late," he said, without looking up.
"I was at the imperial banquet."
"Portia's people said you left early."
Livia reached for an olive. "Portia's people have remarkably little to occupy their time."
Gaius finally looked up. He had their mother's eyes — light brown, quick, missing very little. "You look strange."
"Thank you, Gaius. The bread is good today."
He watched her for another moment, then returned to his scroll with the air of someone filing information away for later. Livia exhaled slowly and looked out at the garden, where the morning light was doing something annoyingly beautiful to the roses.
She had almost convinced herself that she was fine — that the encounter in the moonlit garden was sealed away cleanly in the past where it belonged — when the slave girl appeared in the doorway.
"A message for you, domina." She held out a small, folded piece of papyrus, sealed with plain wax. No crest. No identifying mark.
Livia took it. Waited until Gaius's attention returned to his scroll. Then broke the seal.
A single line, in an unfamiliar but precise hand:
The east garden of the Porcian library. The third hour after midday. I find I am not as patient as I believed myself to be.
No signature. None was needed.
Livia sat with the note in her hand for three full breaths. Then she folded it twice, tucked it into the sleeve of her stola, and returned her attention to her breakfast with a steadiness she did not entirely feel.
She did not go to the library.
She told herself this firmly all morning, while she reviewed the household accounts and corrected the steward's arithmetic and arranged a delivery of grain to the three families on their street who had fallen into hardship. She was Livia Varro. She had responsibilities. She had survived the ruin of her family's name through discipline and careful invisibility, and she was not going to throw that away for—
She was at the library by the second hour after midday.
The east garden was quiet at this time of day, tucked behind the main reading rooms and screened from the street by a colonnade draped in climbing roses. Livia arrived first, which was some small comfort to her pride. She stood among the roses and told herself she would wait no longer than it took to convince herself she was making an informed choice, and then she would leave.
Lucian arrived twelve minutes later.
He was dressed plainly today — a simple dark tunic, no imperial insignia, the kind of clothes that might belong to a prosperous merchant or a junior senator. He had clearly made some effort to be unremarkable. On him, it failed entirely.
"You came," he said, and the relief in his voice was so unguarded that it briefly disarmed every argument Livia had prepared.
"I came," she said carefully, "to tell you that this cannot continue."
"You came in person to tell me that."
"I thought it merited—" She stopped. She could see from his expression that he was aware of exactly how that sentence ended, and that it was not doing her case any favors. "I came because ignoring the message seemed cowardly."
"That," Lucian said, "is the most honest thing anyone has said to me in a considerable time." He came to stand beside her among the roses, not too close, hands clasped behind his back in the way she was already beginning to recognize as habitual. "Will you walk with me? Just walk. Nothing more."
"That is what you said last night."
"And last night I kept my word."
He had. That was the inconvenient truth of it. He had said nothing he should not have said, done nothing improper. He had simply talked to her — really talked, the way people so rarely did in rooms full of politics and performance — and that, she was beginning to understand, was by far the more dangerous thing.
She fell into step beside him.
They walked the colonnade slowly, the roses nodding around them in the afternoon breeze, and Lucian told her about the border negotiations he had just returned from — the endless careful work of keeping peace between provinces that remembered being enemies — and she found herself responding with more than she intended, drawing on her father's old lessons about diplomacy, watching Lucian's eyes sharpen with interest each time she said something unexpected.
It was only when she heard the library bells mark the fourth hour that she realized how long they had been talking.
"I have to go," she said.
"I know." He stopped walking. "Tomorrow, there is a private reading at the house of Senator Cornelius. A poet from Alexandria. You were not invited." A pause. "You should be."
Livia looked at him steadily. "Are you inviting me to an event at someone else's house?"
"I am informing you," Lucian said, with perfect composure, "that the invitation will arrive this evening."
She should have said no. She thought about saying no all the way home, through the golden afternoon streets of Rome, with the warm scent of roses still faintly on her skin.
The invitation arrived before she reached her door.