Thom glanced at his cards, hoping she would say something beyond a greeting, but of course she didn't. He was too much of an established society member to just sit here in silence for the few minutes it would take for the tables to rotate again, though; he could already feel the burden of not saying anything weighing heavily on him, distracting from his cards. He'd have to come up with some small talk, then, just to get them through. Neither of them had to actually invest in it — it just had to be something.

"You're looking well," he said. It was a lie. She looked awful: pale skin, bags under her eyes, a general gauntness. He could have said she was looking well for someone who was supposed to have died last month, but adding that caveat would be acknowledging the letter that she'd sent him, and he absolutely refused to do that.

This was going to be a dead end, he realized, because she wasn't going to want to talk about herself and he didn't particularly want to ask. What else fell under the umbrella of small talk? He could ask after her husband, but to be honest he suspected that he already knew as much as she did; Phineas spent the majority of his time away at the school, and he had never been a particularly caring or affectionate husband. One of her children, then — but after having read her letter even that subject felt tainted, as though he could not bring up Sirius or Phineas without implicitly bringing up their possibly bastard heritage by association. He certainly could not ask after Belvina.

"Is your new son faring well?" he finally decided. That baby, at least, he knew nothing about, so she could not possibly read any malice into this line of questioning.