Chapter Five — The Truth

"—so I really would just find somewhere to sit down for a minute," Cecily was saying, kind and oblivious, and Gwen made herself smile at her, made herself say something — thank you, I'm fine, you're very sweet — while every nerve in her body strained across the room toward Samuel and the change she could not stop.

"Excuse me," she managed. "I have to—" and she didn't finish, she just went, leaving Cecily blinking after her, because there was no version of the next sixty seconds she could survive standing still.

She was across the floor before she'd fully decided to move.

She'd tried, first — one more desperate time, standing frozen by Cecily with her whole will bearing down into the rings, to shove the change back the way she had all night. It hadn't answered. It wouldn't; not there, not with her nerve in pieces and two hundred people between her and a clear thought. So if she couldn't stop it, she had to hide it, and there was only one place in the hall private enough to do that, and only one way to get him there without the whole room watching a man come apart.

"There you are," she said, too brightly, arriving at Samuel's side and sliding her arm through his, and to Hugh, with a smile she dredged up from somewhere below the panic: "Forgive me, I'm stealing him — I promised him the gallery before the speeches and I always keep my promises." Hugh said something gracious. She didn't hear it. She was already steering Samuel away by the arm, away from the candlelight and the long table and the two hundred pairs of eyes, her hand pressed flat over the back of his to keep his own hands down, away from his chest, away from what the whole room would read in a heartbeat if he kept clutching at himself like a man who'd been shot.

"Gwen." His voice was low and wrong — climbing, she realized, half a register up from where it had started the night, and he hadn't noticed that either. "Gwen, something's — there's something—"

"I know. Walk. Smile. Walk."

It was the longest thirty feet of her life. A man clutching at his own chest is a man in distress, and a man in distress at the Founders' dinner is a story that travels the length of that table before he's reached the door — so she kept his hands down, one pinned under her arm and the other trapped in her own, and talked, fast and bright and meaningless, a girl pulling her date off to steal a private moment before the speeches, nothing to see, nothing at all. A Whitmore aunt smiled indulgently at them. Constance Ashworth's gaze passed over them once, weighing, and moved on. Gwen kept the smile welded to her face and her grip locked on Samuel's hands and steered him past every watchful eye in the Compact by sheer force of performance, and did not let herself breathe until the candlelight was behind them.

She got him through the arch at the cold end of the hall, into the long stone gallery that ran the length of the building — portraits and shadow and a single sconce burning low, nobody here, the noise of the dinner dropping to a murmur behind them — and the moment they were out of sight she let go of his hand, and he clapped both of them to his chest, and his face came apart.

"What is happening to me." It wasn't quite a question. He was looking down at himself, at the front of the dress shirt where the starched flat plane of it had begun, unmistakably, to rise — to strain against the studs in a way no amount of confusion could explain away. His hands went to it, pressing, searching, and then, needing to see, he fumbled the top studs open with shaking fingers and pulled the shirt wide and looked down at his own bare chest, and went white. "Gwen." The climbing voice cracked clean through the middle. "Gwen, why do I — why do I have breasts? Why do I—" He pressed both hands flat over the soft new fullness that hadn't been there an hour ago, as if he could push it back in, as if covering it might make it not real, and he made a sound she'd never heard him make in two years, thin and frightened — the sound, she thought, of a person whose own body had stopped being his. "What did you do to me?"

And there it was. The question she'd been outrunning all night, finally asked, in the one voice she could not bear to hear ask it.

She could have lied. Even now, some reflex offered her the lie — I don't know, it's the ring malfunctioning, I'll fix it, don't worry — and she heard her grandmother's voice, cold and exact: do not stand there and lie with that ring on your hand. She was so tired of lying. She had been lying for eleven years, in every room like this one, and tonight she had lied with her friend's whole body, and she found, standing in the dark gallery with Sam's frightened eyes on her, that she did not have one more lie left in her.

"I have to tell you the truth," she said. "All of it. And it's worse than you think, and it's my fault, and I need you to let me get through it before you — just let me get through it."

He went still. He took his hands down from his chest, slowly, and folded them at his sides, and stood there in the rented tuxedo, waiting, and he said, quietly, "Okay."

That okay nearly broke her. He didn't even know what he was agreeing to — didn't even know, standing there with a stranger's grey-green eyes she'd given him, how much of him was already hers — and he gave it to her anyway, the way he gave her everything.

"The rings don't work the way I thought," she said. "When I put yours on in the car, I thought I understood them. I needed a date — a suitable date, the kind the Covenant expects, a young man no one could place — and I pictured him, and the ring made you him. That's what we set out to do, and that part worked exactly the way it was supposed to." She made herself keep looking at him. "But that's not all they do, Sam. It turned out they don't just hold a shape I choose. They respond to me. To what I want — what my eye catches on, the instant it catches — and they don't ask, they just give it to me. Out of you." She watched the words land on a face that had no idea what was coming. "So the suitable date was the thing I asked for on purpose. But all night, every time I looked a second too long at something else I wanted, the ring reached into you and started making you into that too, and I caught it and shoved it back down before anyone could see. When I went pale earlier — that was because your hand had turned into a copy of a girl's hand I'd seen across the room. I looked at her too long, and it gave her hands to you. Your hair, when I leaned in and laughed. Your height, between courses. Half a dozen times, maybe more, an inch from your skin, and you never felt one of them, and I never told you, because telling you meant telling you why."

He was staring at her, at his own hands, at the shirt he still held open. "How much," he said. "How much of me isn't—"

"Let me show you one." She couldn't say it; she had to show him. There was a tall old mirror set into the paneling between two of the portraits, dark and spotted with age, and she drew him to it by the sleeve and made him look. "Your eyes, Sam. Look at your eyes."

He looked. And she watched him understand, slowly, that the grey-green eyes looking back out of the stranger's face were not, had never been, his own.

"They were brown this morning," she said, very quietly, to his reflection. "I made them that color. An hour ago. Because it was a color I loved once, on a girl I never even spoke to, and I let myself want it, and the ring gave it to me — off you — and you smiled at Hugh the whole time and never knew your own eyes had changed." Her voice was breaking. "That's what I've been doing to you all night. That's what your chest is. It's me, wanting, and you paying for it."

She watched him take it in — watched the enormity of it settle over him, that everything about tonight, the smooth confidence, the borrowed ease he'd marveled at, had been running the whole time alongside a quiet war an inch from his skin that no one had told him about.

"Every time you pulled me close," he said slowly. "The laughing, the leaning in. I thought you were selling it for the room. You were putting me back." He looked down at his own hands, turned them over, as if to check they were the ones he'd come in with.

Something moved across his face and settled. She braced for the anger; he'd have been within his rights to all of it, every degree, she'd taken his body, the one thing that was entirely his, and used it as a surface for wanting she had never even named to him.

"Why couldn't you tell me why," he said.

Not angry. Just — asking. Steady, the way he'd been steady on a stairwell step two years ago. And that steadiness was the thing that finally undid the last knot in her, because of course it was going to be Sam who made it safe to say the unsayable, Sam who had never once made anything harder for her than it had to be.

So she said it. The sentence she had never said aloud, not to her family, not to Della, not to a single soul in twenty-one years.

"Because what the ring keeps reaching for is a woman," she said. "Because that's what I want. Because I'm gay, Sam. I've always been gay. The whole — the suitable boys they push at me, the arriving every year with a smile and an excuse, tonight, this, all of it — it's to hide that there is no boy, there was never going to be a boy, and the ring doesn't care about my performance, it only knows the truth, and the truth is I want a girl, and it's turning you into one because that's what it found when it went looking inside me."

The words hung in the cold gallery air. She'd said them. Out loud, to another person, for the first time in her life, and the saying of it left her hollow and ringing and braced for whatever came next — the recoil, the careful blank face, the oh, the recalibration of two years of friendship into something managed and distant.

It didn't come.

Sam looked at her, in the low sconce-light, the truth finally between them, and what crossed his face was not shock. That was the thing she would turn over for a long time afterward. It was not shock. It was something gentler and much sadder and strangely unsurprised, the expression of a person who has just heard, at last, a thing he already knew and had been waiting a long time to be trusted with.

"Gwen," he said softly. "I know."

"You—"

"I've known for a while. I don't know how — the way you'd watch the room, maybe, or never the boys, or just — knowing you." He shrugged, helpless and kind. "I never said anything because it wasn't mine to say. It was always yours. I figured you'd tell me when you wanted me to know, and if you never did, that was all right too." A small, crooked smile. "And honestly — I made my peace with where I stood with you a long time ago, Gwen. All of it. A while back now." He said it lightly, but something moved under it, there and gone, and then he let it go. "So no. It's not a shock. I'm just glad you finally wanted me to know. I only wish it hadn't taken—" he glanced down at himself, at his own changed chest under the open shirt, and the smile went crookeder still—"all this."

She started to cry then, standing in the gallery, two hundred people murmuring through the wall, eleven years of held breath going out of her all at once. Not because she was sad. Because someone knew, and hadn't flinched, and it was Sam, and she had spent so long certain that being known was the thing that would end her, and here was the proof, holding still and steady in a borrowed face, that it might also be the thing that saved her.

"We have to fix this," she said, when she could speak. She scrubbed at her eyes, smearing what was left of her composure. "I'll push it back. The chest, all of it — I'll put you back to the suitable version and then we leave, we just go, I'll take the rings off in the car and you'll be you and this never—"

"We can't leave." Sam said it gently but flatly, and she stopped. "Gwen. Think. Look at you — you're terrified of this room, of every person in it. Whatever it costs you to be found out here, it's everything, or you wouldn't have gone to all this to hide. So if we bolt now, an hour before the speeches, both of us white as sheets? That's the thing people remember. That's the story that gets told. We'd be handing this room the exact catastrophe you came here to prevent." He was right, and she hated that he was right, and she could see him being right with the same clear unbothered steadiness he brought to everything. "And there's the — whatever the thing is. The reason you came. The presentation, the receiving, you said the whole evening builds to it. We haven't done it. If we run before that, the year you're buying — you don't get it. It's all for nothing."

"I don't care about the year. I care about you, I did this to you, I'm not going to make you walk back in there and—"

"You're not making me do anything." He said it quietly, and it stopped her cold, because it was true, and because of how he said it. "I know now. That's the difference. Before, you were doing this to me. Now I'm — " he searched for it, found it — "now I'm doing it with you. Eyes open. That's not nothing, Gwen. That changes the whole shape of it."

She stared at him. At her best friend, in a stranger's body she'd reshaped a dozen times without his knowing, who had just learned the worst of it and the truest of it in the same five minutes, and whose first instinct — his first instinct — was to figure out how to help her finish what she'd started.

"Put me back," he said. "Enough to get through the speeches. We'll do the thing you came to do. And then we'll deal with the rest of it after, together, when there aren't two hundred Whitmores in the next room." He squared his shoulders inside the rented jacket, the change still on him under the open shirt, and gave her a smile that was pure Sam underneath the borrowed face. "Come on. Fix me up. I make an excellent suitable date, you said so yourself."

And Gwen, who had walked into this gallery certain she had ruined everything, put her hands lightly to his chest one more time — but this time he knew, this time he'd asked, this time it was the first thing they had ever done on the same side of the secret — and she bent down into the warm circuit of the rings, and began, gently, to put him back together.

It was different, doing it with his knowledge. All night the changes had been something she did to him in stolen seconds, hidden, guilty, her attention split between the work and the fear of being caught — and in the crush of the room, at the very end, with her attention in shreds, the ring had stopped answering her altogether and simply run on without her. But here it was quiet. Here there was no one to perform for, no watching hall, no split in her attention, only Sam standing still and letting her, his eyes on her face. And the ring answered. She felt the difference travel down the thread between the bands like warmth — less sullen, somehow, less like something she was wrestling and more like something she was simply asking. She drew the soft new fullness back down out of his chest until the shirtfront lay flat and male and correct again. She steadied his voice back toward its borrowed pitch. She smoothed the last of the night's slips out of him, one by one, while he watched her do it and didn't look away, and when she'd finished he was Samuel again, the suitable date, whole and unremarkable and ready for a room.

Except that he wasn't, not really, and they both knew it now. Underneath the restored face was Sam, who knew everything, and underneath the suitable performance was something that had changed between them in the dark of the gallery and would not be changing back.

"There," she said softly, lowering her hands. "You'll do."

He did the loose studs back up, one by one, with steady hands, and squared the jacket on his shoulders. "I always do." He offered her his arm, the grey-green eyes steady — and there was something new in how he wore them now, now that he knew whose they weren't. "Come on, Gwendolyn. Let's go make this your year."

And together — truly together now, for the first time all night — they walked back toward the candlelight.

[End of Chapter Five]