She's smiling. She's glad to see him, she says, seeming like she means it, and Gleb only finds himself more confused for it. Moments ago, when she had looked every inch the Grand Duchess she was born to be rather than this strange approximation of casual, she'd been gentle, but not this. There would be no reason for her to be happy to see him now. While she must have known as well as he did that, when he turned and left, they would never see each other again, that she would stay where she was with her family in Paris and he would go back to Russia and meet his fate there, this doesn't seem like the reaction of someone for whom that was only just the case, as it was for him.

It leaves him with even more questions, none of which he knows how to put into words for how little sense this makes. There has to be some logic to this somewhere, some reason; he's just waiting for the moment it clicks and he understands what's in front of him. Sooner or later, it has to come, and this uncertainty will wane. Gleb doesn't think he could say the same about the instinct he has to repress to reach for her, to take her hand again, to set both of his on her shoulders or her jaw — far more than he's ever dared, except to consider it in fleeting moments of fantasy, quickly shut down, but what would be a way now of proving that she's here and this is real, no matter how much it doesn't seem like it could be.

"I think you must know something here that I don't," he finally says, though the unmasked confusion in his expression speaks to more than that. "Why would you think that?" He wonders about the two con men who'd been with her, their names and faces ones he remembers from the orders for their arrest, but asking about that, he thinks, can wait.