What followed was not a romance, Livia told herself. It was a correspondence.
This distinction mattered. Correspondence was civilized and contained. Correspondence was something two people of intelligence could maintain without it constituting anything imprudent. Philosophers corresponded. Senators corresponded. There was nothing — inherently — imprudent about the written exchange of ideas between a prince and a private citizen of Rome.
She was aware that this argument had significant weaknesses.
They wrote every three days. Then every two. Then, by the third week, every day — though by unspoken agreement they kept the letters brief, as though brevity might contain what they were really doing.
Lucian wrote about governance — the actual mechanics of it, the grinding daily work that no one outside of palaces ever saw: the competing demands of provinces, the delicate management of the Senate, the exhausting business of keeping Rome peaceful when peace was, fundamentally, the most expensive thing in the world. He wrote without self-importance and without self-pity, which Livia found rare and valuable.
Livia wrote about books. About the families she helped on her street and what their situations revealed about the larger failures of the grain distribution system. About Gaius, who had discovered Stoicism, abandoned it for Epicureanism, and was now reconsidering Stoicism with the intensity of a seventeen-year-old who wanted to believe his intellectual life had consequences. She wrote without apology and without performance, which Lucian later told her was the rarest thing he had encountered.
In the fourth week, they argued.
It began over a small matter of philosophy — Livia had made a comment about the nature of duty, and Lucian had responded with something she found reductive — and spiraled, across three days and six letters, into a genuine and energizing disagreement about the relationship between obligation and choice. Lucian argued that certain obligations were foundational: without them, the structures that protected ordinary lives collapsed. Livia argued that obligation without understanding was just obedience in better clothing.
Neither of them capitulated. Both of them changed their position slightly. Neither acknowledged this.
It was, Livia thought, the best argument she'd had since her father was well.
In the fifth week, Lucian did something she had not expected.
He invited her brother to a debate at the palace.
The invitation came not to Livia but directly to Gaius — a formal, dignified summons to join a small gathering of young scholars who were to present arguments on a chosen philosophical topic before a panel of senators and imperial advisors. It was exactly the kind of opportunity that could reshape a young man's future. It made no mention of Livia at all.
Gaius came to her with the letter, shaking slightly with excitement and trying not to show it.
"Do you know anything about this?" he asked.
"Nothing," Livia said truthfully. She knew the cause of it. That was a different thing.
She wrote to Lucian that night:
You did not have to do that.
He wrote back:
He has the makings of a genuinely original mind. Wasting it because of his father's scandal and his sister's caution would be a loss to Rome, not a kindness to it.
And then, after a pause that she could somehow feel even through papyrus:
Also, I wanted you to know that the things that matter to you matter to me. That is all.
Livia sat with that sentence for a very long time.
In the sixth week, they made a bargain. She was not sure which of them proposed it first — it seemed to emerge from the letters themselves, as though the correspondence had been working toward it all along.
They would meet once more. Openly, in a public place, with purpose. She would come to the debate as Gaius's family. He would be there in his official capacity. They would speak, briefly, in company with others. Nothing that could be remarked upon.
And then they would know whether this was something they could live with, or something they could not.
It was, Livia thought, a sensible plan.
She knew already, in the secret part of herself that she had spent three years trying to discipline into silence, that sensible plans were not going to be sufficient here.
But she would make it anyway, because she was Livia Varro and making sensible plans was what she did.
Even when her hands were shaking as she wrote.