His To Take (The Sanctuary #3)

Chapter 1

CHELSEA

The bread basket arrived before I'd asked for it, which at home in London would have been thoughtful and in Paris was, I was learning, simply how things worked. You got what they decided you needed. You ate it gratefully and didn't make requests.

I made a request. I asked the waiter, in my French, which still had the quality of someone reading from a card they'd memorised on the Eurostar, whether they had English Breakfast tea.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

He brought me an Earl Grey without answering the question, which I felt was a sophisticated form of no. I drank it because the alternative was admitting defeat before ten in the morning, and I had a policy about that.

I’d been in Paris for three weeks, and the city and I were still in the early, tense phase of a relationship where both parties were being polite while privately reserving judgment. I found Paris bewildering and slightly confrontational. I suspect Paris found me exhausting. We were managing.

I grew up in Kensington. My uncle Robert's house, to be precise—a Georgian townhouse on a square where the communal gardens were maintained by a trust and required a key to enter, which I had always privately thought said something about the neighbourhood, though I'd never fully worked out what.

It was the sort of detail you absorbed as a child without examining and then spent the rest of your life discovering the implications of.

Before that, briefly, there had been a house in Oxfordshire, two parents who drove a reliable car and listened to Radio 4 and took me to the Cotswolds in August. And then there hadn't been, because they died on the M40 one Sunday evening when I was nine, in the sort of accident the papers call tragic and that simply is.

Robert had taken me in without any visible hesitation, which I'd always been grateful for and had only recently started to examine more carefully.

He was my mother's older brother, a private equity man with strong opinions about wine and almost no opinions about anything he couldn't quantify. He had never planned on raising a child. He had decided, in the way he decided everything, to simply be very good at it. Which he was, mostly.

What he hadn't anticipated, was that being very good at removing obstacles from someone's path was not entirely the same thing as raising them.

I had wanted for nothing. That was true. It was also, I was beginning to understand, a more complicated truth than it appeared.

He'd told me this himself. That was the thing—he hadn't made me figure it out on my own, hadn't let the consequences of my comfortable purposelessness accumulate until something collapsed.

He'd folded his napkin with the careful deliberateness of a man who'd been preparing the conversation for some time, and he'd told me directly.

It was perhaps the kindest thing he'd ever done and had felt, in the moment, like being handed a diagnosis you'd vaguely suspected but were not prepared to receive.

What he'd said was: I love you, and I am going to stop making things easy.

What he meant was that the allowance ended at the close of the year unless I produced something—a direction, a plan, employment, enrollment, any evidence at all that I was building a life rather than occupying one that had been arranged on my behalf.

He'd apologised, briefly, for waiting so long. He'd meant it. Robert did not apologise as a social ritual. It cost him something, and the cost showed, which made it worse to receive and harder to dismiss.

I had sat across the table and felt the ceiling come down approximately two feet and then I'd gone home to my flat in Notting Hill—his flat, technically, which I had lived in for three years without ever quite letting that register.

I had spent the better part of a fortnight being furious, and then frightened, and then, at some point in the small hours of a Tuesday, something in me had gone very quiet and very clear.

I needed somewhere that didn't already know what I was.

Paris had been my idea. That was the part I came back to, because it mattered.

Not Robert's suggestion, not something arranged from a list — mine.

I'd walked into breakfast ten days later and said it, and he'd set down the Financial Times and asked why.

I'd said because I needed to be somewhere new.

He'd looked at me across the table for a long moment and then said all right and that had been that.

Thomas Thornton had done the rest.

Thomas always did the rest. He had run Robert's household since before I had properly conscious memories, quietly efficient and perceptive in the way of someone who has chosen to understand people as a professional obligation and has gotten rather good at it.

He produced a folder of emergency contacts, the name of a woman who maintained the apartment, the details for a private doctor, the address of a pharmacy near the Madeleine where they spoke English.

And at the airport, without ceremony, he'd pressed a set of keys into my hand for a small Peugeot he'd arranged in a car park off the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and he'd said: Some days, Miss Chelsea, you'll want to go somewhere without explaining yourself first.

I'd put the keys in my bag without a word.

Thomas had known me since I was nine years old and had no remaining illusions to maintain.

The kindness of it—the simple, practical kindness, the implication that he understood something about what I was going to need before I understood it myself—had made my throat tight.

I had not used the car. It sat in the car park beneath the apartment building, presumably waiting with more patience than I deserved.

The apartment was extraordinary, which was its own sort of problem. Uncle Robert's pied-à-terre in the eighth occupied the top two floors of a pale stone building on a street so quiet and so correctly maintained it seemed to take the business of being expensive quite seriously.

The rooms were high-ceilinged and dressed in the restrained manner of serious, long-established money. Not the kind that announced itself, the kind that simply existed and expected to be understood.

Silk curtains in a grey that cost more per metre than most furniture.

Parquet floors that gleamed with the conviction of something polished weekly for decades.

A kitchen that had clearly never been used for anything as unglamorous as an actual meal made by hand.

A terrace overlooking a stone courtyard where a very old wisteria grew up one wall and nothing much else happened except, occasionally, light.

It was a place designed to be arrived at. Admired, perhaps. Photographed.

I was living in it, trying to locate myself, and the gap between those two things had not narrowed in three weeks.

I'd arranged my things carefully on the first day—unpacking into the right drawers, standing back to assess, moving things half an inch and assessing again.

I'd bought anemones from a stall near the Madeleine because that was what you did in Paris, and they'd died in five days, and the vase had been sitting empty on the windowsill as a small, unintentional monument to intention without follow-through.

I hadn't replaced them, partly because I kept meaning to and partly because there was something in looking at the empty vase that felt honest in a way the rest of the apartment didn't.

Each evening, I took a corner of the sofa where the light came in at an angle that made the room look like somewhere someone interesting lived, and I sat with a glass of something good that I'd chosen because the label was pretty, and I stared out at the courtyard and thought about what I was supposed to be doing here.

Not in Paris in general. In this particular life.

The question wasn't new. I'd been half-aware of it for years, the way you're half-aware of a sound you've been ignoring for so long you're no longer sure if you're actually hearing it or have simply learned to manufacture it. Robert's dinner had made it loud.

The Earl Grey had gone tepid. I drank what remained and looked out at the street.

There was a woman at the table beside me who had been writing in a notebook for the past forty minutes without looking up once.

Long, uninterrupted focus. The kind that suggested she knew what she was doing and why and wasn't wasting energy on either question.

I'd been watching her in the way you watch people who seem to have a quality you can't identify but feel the absence of, trying to work out what it was.

Purposefulness, I decided eventually. Not happiness, not ease—just the settled quality of someone pointed in a direction.

Even if the direction was simply a notebook in a café on a grey morning, it was more than I currently had.

This was what Robert had seen, presumably. What Dr. Liliane Devereaux was being paid to help me examine.

Dr. Devereaux was his addition to the arrangement. Twice weekly, non-negotiable, a condition I'd agreed to because the alternative was arguing and losing and then not getting the apartment.

She was a quiet Frenchwoman in her mid-fifties with excellent posture and shoes that managed to be both sensible and covetable.

She had the professional patience of someone who had watched people talk themselves in circles for decades and had made a private peace with how long it took.

Our sessions so far had the quality of a chess game in which she was playing several moves ahead and waiting for me to catch up.

She had said, in our last session, that I was skilled at performing self-awareness without actually practising it.

I had opened my mouth and then closed it again, which she had noted with a small, unsurprised look and which was, of course, its own kind of note.

The problem was that she wasn't wrong. I was very good at sounding as though I'd examined myself. I had the vocabulary. I could produce, on short notice, a fluent account of my emotional landscape that sounded like genuine insight and was, on reflection, mostly a very well-constructed surface.

I'd learned this somewhere in my twenties, in the years of dinner parties and gallery openings and the social circuitry of the world Robert moved in, where you were expected to be engaging and self-possessed and interesting, and where the fastest way to be all three things was to be a version of yourself that was slightly more coherent than the reality.

I was charming. I knew how to be charming. I had mistaken that, for longer than was comfortable to admit, for something more substantial.

There was also the decorative arts course.

Robert had suggested it, which should have been my first warning.

It met three mornings a week at a private atelier near the Palais Royal, in a room with beautiful light and original boiserie panelling, attended by women who had found their sense of purpose somewhere around their first serious piece of jewellery and hadn't had cause to revisit the question since.

They were perfectly gracious. The instructor, a tiny, intense woman named Madame Fontenay, had a passion for eighteenth-century French cabinetry and marquetry that I respected enormously and did not share.

I sat for two hours, three times a week, and learned about dovetail joints and ebony inlay and the significance of the menuisiers guilds. I took notes in a notebook I would never reread, and I felt, with increasing clarity, the discomfort of someone occupying a room they have no business being in.

It wasn't that the course was beneath me. It wasn't beneath me. It was simply irrelevant to anything I was, and sitting in it three mornings a week was beginning to feel less like finding purpose and more like avoiding the question of what purpose might actually look like for someone like me.

What was someone like me, anyway? That was the part I kept snagging on.

I was not stupid. I knew that. I was perceptive—good at reading rooms, reading people, identifying what a situation needed and supplying it.

I'd spent my adult life being useful in ways that didn't require a title or a salary: managing Robert's social obligations with a competence he'd never had to acknowledge out loud because it was simply there, mediating the occasional delicate situation among his circle with a lightness that left everyone feeling the outcome had been their own idea.

I was good at people. I knew how to make someone feel seen without exposing anything of myself in the exchange, which had seemed like a skill for most of my life and felt, sitting in Paris three weeks into an assignment to find myself, more like a very elegant defence mechanism.

The woman with the notebook looked up, caught me watching, and gave me a brief, neutral look before returning to her page.

I felt my face warm slightly. Caught.

I paid the bill, then stood and put on my coat, which was a very good coat, a dark camel that I'd bought on Sloane Street two autumns ago.

I stepped outside.

The morning received me with complete indifference, which was its own kind of relief.

No one on this street knew me as Robert Sterling’s niece, or as the girl who'd lost her parents on the M40.

I was just a woman in a good coat, standing on a pavement in the eighth arrondissement, slightly at a loss, which was humbling and also—underneath the humbling, somewhere further down—cautiously adjacent to a feeling I didn't want to name too quickly in case it left.

The sensible thing was to go back to the apartment. I had nothing until Dr. Devereaux at four. The course had ended an hour ago—I'd left early again, a habit I was developing—and the apartment was a fifteen-minute walk in the other direction.

I thought about the empty vase on the windowsill.

I thought about the corner of the sofa and the angle of the light and the glass of wine I'd pour at six and the question that would be waiting for me there, the way it was always waiting, settled in like a tenant.

I turned away from the apartment and walked in the other direction.

It wasn't a decision, precisely. More like the absence of one.

The street ahead of me was narrower and less grand than the one I'd come from, the buildings shading towards something lived-in, the stone slightly less pristine.

A boulangerie with a handwritten board and a queue of people who looked like they had somewhere to be.

A woman on a first-floor balcony shaking out a cloth with personal conviction.

Somewhere, the sound of children—high and random and surprisingly carrying—from a courtyard I couldn't see.

I walked toward the sound without thinking, which was perhaps the first unplanned thing I'd done since I arrived.

Interesting.