Shades of Twilight

"What time did you get home?" Webb asked.

"I didn’t hear you come in." His eyes were narrowed on her just the way he’d looked at her when she was a kid and he’d caught her trying to slip in unnoticed. "About five-thirty, I think." She hadn’t noted the exact time, because she had still been so upset.

"I went straight upstairs to take a shower before supper."

"The heat is so sticky, I have to shower twice a day," Lanette agreed.

"Greg’s company wanted to transfer him to Tampa. Can you imagine how much worse the humidity is down there? I simply couldn’t face it."

Greg glanced briefly at his wife, then returned his attention to his plate. He was a tall, spare man who seldom spoke, wore his graying hair in a crew cut, and to Roanna’s

knowledge did nothing for fun or relaxation. Greg went to work, came home with more work in his bulging briefcase, and spent the hours between supper and bedtime hunched over paperwork. So far as she knew, he was one of a horde of pencil pushers in middle management, but suddenly she realized that she didn’t really know what he did at work. Greg never talked about his job, never related funny stories about his co-workers. He was simply there, a dinghy dragged along in Lanette’s wake.

"A lateral transfer?" Webb asked, his cool green gaze flicking from Greg to Lanette and back again.

"Or a promotion?"

"Promotion," Greg said briefly.

"But it meant moving," Lanette explained.

"And the living expenses would be so much higher that we’d have been losing money on that so-called promotion. He turned it down, of course."

Meaning she had flatly refused to move, Roanna thought as she methodically applied herself to the chore of eating. Living here at Davencourt, they had no housing expenses, and Lanette used the extra money to swan around in the best social circles. If they moved, they would then have to provide their own roof, and Lanette’s standard of living would suffer.

Greg should have gone and left Lanette to follow or not, Roanna thought. Like herself, he needed to break away from Davencourt and have a place of his own. Maybe Davencourt was too beautiful; it was more than just a house to the people who lived here, it was almost a being in and of itself. They wanted to possess it, and instead it possessed them, holding them captive with the knowledge that, after Davencourt, no other home could be as grand.

But she would break away, she promised herself. She had never thought she could possess Davencourt, so she wasn’t bound here by envy’s chains. Fear had held her here, and duty, and love. The fast reason was already gone, and the remaining two would soon follow, and she would be free.

After supper, Webb said to Lucinda, "If you aren’t too tired, I want to talk to you about an investment I’ve been considering." "Of course," she said, and they walked together to the dining room door.

Roanna remained at the table, her expression blank. She forked up one last bite of the strawberry shortcake Tansy had served for dessert, forcing herself to eat that one even though she wanted it no more than she had the ones preceding it.

Webb paused at the door and looked around, a slight frown pulling his dark brows together as if he’d just realized she wasn’t with them.

"Aren’t you coming?"

Silently she got up and followed them, wondering if he’d really expected her to automatically assume she was included, or if she was an afterthought. Probably the latter; Webb had always been accustomed to discussing his business decisions with Lucinda, but for all the things he’d said about wanting Roanna to continue with her present responsibilities, he didn’t think of her as having any authority.

He was right, she thought, ruthlessly facing the truth. She had no authority beyond what either he or Lucinda granted her, which wasn’t true authority. Either of them could pull her up short at any time, divest her of even the semblance of power.

They entered the study and took their accustomed seats: Webb at the desk that had so recently been hers, Roanna in one of the wing chairs, Lucinda on the sofa. Roanna felt jittery inside, as if everything had been jostled, switched around. The past couple of hours had been filled with a series of insights into her own character, nothing great and dramatic but nevertheless small explosions that left her feeling as if nothing was the same, and hadn’t even been as she had always perceived it.

Webb was talking, but for the first time in her life Roanna wasn’t hanging on his every word as if it came from the lips of God Almighty himself. She barely even heard him. Today she had faced down a brute, and realized that people liked her for herself. She had made a decision concerning the rest e23

of her life. As a child she had been helpless to control her life, and for the past ten long years she had let life pass her by, withdrawing to a safe place where she couldn’t be hurt. But now she could control her life; she didn’t have to let things happen as other people dictated, she could set her own course, make her own rules. The feeling of power was both heady and frightening, but the excitement of it was undeniable.

11 -a sizable investment on our part," Webb was saying, "but Mayfield has always been reliable."

Roanna’s interest suddenly focused, caught by the name Webb had just mentioned, and she remembered the gossip she had heard just that afternoon.

Lucinda nodded.

"It sounds interesting, though of course-" "No," Roanna said. Silence settled over the room, complete except for the muted ticking of the old mantel clock.

It was difficult to tell who was the most startled, Lucinda, Webb, or Roanna herself. She had sometimes thought Lucinda should rethink a decision, and quietly given her reasoning, but she had never openly, flatly disagreed. The no had just popped out. She hadn’t even couched it in let’s think-it-over terms, but stated it definitely, firmly.