Chapter 5 – GRANT
GRANT
The coffee had gone cold twenty minutes ago. I hadn't touched it since Marc sat down across from me at the corner booth of Le Comptoir, the place we used when we didn't want to have conversations at the office—which meant it was where we had most of our real ones.
Marc Desrosiers had been with me since before the succession, back when I was running the Marseille portfolio and nobody outside the family knew my name.
Security first, then operations, now a title that said "Director of Strategic Affairs" on his business card and meant "the man who handles what Grant needs handled" in practice.
He was built like a dock worker and thought like an accountant, and he was the only person on my payroll I'd trust to sit across from me and not sell the conversation to someone else.
Marc studied it without picking it up. "Same week?"
"Different night. Different woman."
He slid it back. "And?"
"I want someone on him. Not tight—he can't feel it. But I want to know where he goes, who he's with, what he's spending. Credit movement if you can get it. Cash withdrawals."
Marc leaned back. The booth's leather creaked under his shoulders.
He folded his arms and looked at me with the particular expression he reserved for requests that fell outside the neat boundaries of corporate security—half patience, half something that could have been concern if Marc traded in concern, which he didn't.
"That's a surveillance package, Grant. Not a favor."
"I know what it is."
"On your brother-in-law."
"On a man who's burning through his family's money at a rate that will put him on the front pages again inside a month. The Fontaine name touches ours through the marriage. If he implodes publicly, it splashes."
Marc was quiet for a beat. He picked up his espresso, drained it, and set the cup back in its saucer with the deliberate precision of someone choosing their next words.
"You want me to track Lucien Fontaine's movements, spending, and associations on a rolling basis."
"Weekly reports. Digital only, encrypted folder, my access and yours."
"For how long?"
"Until I say otherwise."
Another pause. Marc's thumb ran along the edge of the saucer, a slow half-circle. He didn't fidget—this was his version of thinking out loud.
"He's family," I said.
"Right." Marc's gaze didn't move. "He's family. Which is why you want surveillance on him instead of a conversation with him."
"A conversation with Lucien achieves nothing. He'd promise reform and be back at a table the same night."
"Probably." Marc nodded once, conceding the point. Then he tilted his head, just slightly, the way he did when he was about to step over a line he'd drawn for himself. "Can I say something?"
"You're going to say it regardless."
"I've worked for you six years. I've watched you build this company into something your old man wouldn't recognize, and I say that with respect for the dead.
You work harder than anyone I know. You have discipline most men would trade a limb for.
" He stopped. Picked a crumb of sugar off the table and pressed it between his fingers.
"But you're pointing the telescope the wrong direction. "
I set my jaw. "Meaning?"
"Meaning Lucien Fontaine is a drunk with a wandering eye and a gambling problem, and none of that is new, and none of it requires a security detail.
You want eyes on him because of who he married, not because of what he does.
" Marc held my gaze. Steady. Unblinking.
"If you're worried about someone in that family, Grant, the person you should be watching is your wife.
Not what she's doing wrong. What she's doing right that you're not seeing. "
The air between us changed. I could feel it—the temperature drop that happens when someone steps onto ground they haven't been invited to.
"That's not your area."
"No, it's not." He didn't flinch. "But I've seen what happens when a man builds a perimeter around the wrong person. I saw it with your father. I was on his detail the last two years, before you hired me. He spent a lot of energy watching doors that didn't matter."
"You're comparing me to my father."
"I'm saying the pattern's familiar."
The noise of the café filled the silence between us—the hiss of the machine, cutlery against plates, a woman laughing somewhere near the window. I looked at Marc and he looked back and neither of us moved.
"Set up the surveillance on Lucien," I said. "Weekly reports. Encrypted folder."
Marc held my gaze for one more second. Then he reached across the table, picked up the photograph, and slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
"Done."
He stood. Buttoned his jacket. Paused with his hand on the back of the booth.
"For what it's worth," he said, "your wife ran a dinner last night with two hours' notice of extra guests, a fistfight at the table, and her husband walking out the front door to comfort another woman on the pavement. And she served dessert."
He left.
I sat there with my cold coffee and the space where the photograph had been. The waiter came. I waved him off. He retreated.
Marc was wrong about the comparison to my father. My father watched the wrong doors because he was walking through them. I wasn't walking through any doors. I was standing in front of them, hands at my sides, every lock engaged, and the discipline of that should count for something.
It should.
The café's espresso machine screamed through another cycle. A couple at the next table argued in low voices about whose mother was coming for the weekend. Ordinary stakes. Ordinary grievances. The kind of fight where both people are still inside the same room because they want to be.
I thought about the pavement last night.
Camille's face tilted up, her voice breaking over Lucien's name, the shape of her distress so familiar I could have drawn it from memory.
She'd pressed her forehead against my shoulder for three seconds—I'd counted—and I'd stood there with my hand on her back and felt the old pull, the deep-grooved ache of wanting something I'd trained myself not to reach for.
Three seconds. Then I'd stepped back. I'd told her to go inside. She'd gone.
And I'd come back to the dining room and Noelle was slicing a tart.
Precise, even cuts. The good plates, the ones I didn't remember buying.
She'd looked up when I came in and her face was perfectly composed and she'd said "do you want cream with yours?
" and the question had no accusation in it, no grief, nothing but the practical machinery of a woman who had already absorbed the blow and reorganized around it.
I hadn't answered. Or I had—I'd said "no, thank you"—and taken a plate and eaten the tart and it was good. It was very good. I'd never asked where she learned to bake.
Marc was wrong. He had to be. Because if he was right—if the thing I should be watching was already inside my own house, already sitting across from me at breakfast, already pressing my suits and sending my mother's favorite pastries and slicing tarts while I stood outside with another woman's forehead on my shoulder—then the wall I'd built wasn't protecting anyone.
It was just a wall.
I picked up the phone. Opened my contacts. Scrolled past Camille's name to Noelle's. My thumb hovered.
I put the phone down. Paid the bill. Went to work.