Chapter 7 – GRANT
GRANT
Marc's report arrived at eleven, encrypted folder, two pages. I read it at my desk with the door shut and the coffee turning to acid in my stomach.
I closed the file. Opened it again. Read the credit summary a second time, as if the numbers might rearrange into something manageable.
They didn't.
The question was what to do with it. Tell Camille—but tell her what, exactly?
That her husband's decline had numbers now?
She already lived inside the wreckage; she didn't need the blueprints.
Or handle it quietly. Pay down the Bellamy debt through an intermediary, restructure the credit facilities through someone I trusted, put a floor under Lucien's freefall before it reached the tabloids again.
It would cost me. Not the money—the money was rounding error on the quarterly.
It would cost me the clean line I'd maintained between the Calvelli accounts and the Fontaine mess, the careful distance that let me say their problems are not our problems at board meetings when someone brought up the connection through marriage.
Through Noelle's marriage to me. Through Camille's marriage to him.
I picked up my phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
The responsible thing was to speak to Camille first. She deserved to know the scope. She deserved to have a say in what happened next, even if her say would be tears and gratitude and the particular tilt of her face that made it difficult to think about anything else.
I left the office at six. The drive home took forty minutes through traffic I barely registered, Marc's numbers still scrolling behind my eyes. Two hundred and forty thousand. The Bellamys. September.
I came through the side entrance. Heard voices before I reached the kitchen.
Three of them. Noelle's, steady and low, running through what sounded like a catering estimate. Celeste's, cutting in with a question about wine quantities. And a third—warm, unhurried, taking up more space than the words required.
Camille was sitting on one of the kitchen stools with her legs crossed, her chin propped on her hand.
She held a glass of sparkling water and looked like she'd been there for hours, though the coat draped over the stool beside her still carried the cold.
Celeste and Noelle stood at the island across from her, papers and fabric swatches spread between them.
A laptop showed the Lefèvre courtyard from several angles.
"Grant." Camille turned first. She always turned first. "We've been drowning in linen samples. Save us."
Celeste didn't look up from her laptop. "Nobody's drowning. We're deciding between ivory and ecru."
"That's the same color."
"It is absolutely not the same color." Celeste tapped a swatch against another. "Noelle, tell her."
Noelle held up two squares of fabric, angling them toward the overhead light. "Ivory pulls warm. Ecru pulls flat under candlelight. For an evening event you want the ivory."
"Ivory it is." Celeste typed something.
Camille swivelled on the stool to face me fully. Her expression was bright, attentive, the social beam she turned on like a lamp. "How was your day?"
"Long. Board follow-ups."
I set my briefcase down. Looked at the spread of papers, the swatches, the photos.
Celeste and Noelle had clearly been at this for a while.
Noelle had a pencil tucked behind her ear and a small crease between her brows that meant she was deep in logistics.
Camille had nothing in front of her—no notes, no lists, no pencil.
Just the sparkling water and the elegant posture of a woman observing an activity she had no intention of joining.
"You should see Noelle's table plan," Celeste said. "She's worked out how to seat Charles's rugby friends so they can't form a bloc and commandeer the bar."
"Strategic thinking." I meant it as a compliment. It landed somewhere in the air between Noelle and the counter and stayed there.
Camille stood. Her hand found my arm—wrapped around it, casual, proprietary, the way she'd done a hundred times before she married Lucien and the way she still did after, as if the intervening years were a parenthetical she could close at will.
"I'm bored with all this girly stuff." She leaned in, conspiratorial. "Tell me about the new hotel. The one in Lyon, is it? I heard you're doing something completely different with the ground floor."
I looked at Celeste. She was watching us, her hand frozen over the keyboard, her face very still. Not angry. Worse than angry. She looked like someone cataloguing evidence.
Noelle picked up a fabric swatch and held it against a photograph of the courtyard wall.
She didn't look up. She didn't shift her posture.
She continued working with the absolute, practised ease of a woman who had trained herself not to react to this particular scene, and the smoothness of the non-reaction was its own indictment.
"I need to talk to Camille about something," I said. "A business question. We'll be in the study."
Celeste's eyebrows rose a millimeter.
I walked out of the kitchen. Camille followed, her heels marking a neat rhythm on the hallway tile. I closed the study door behind us and stood by the window and didn't sit down because sitting down would make this a conversation and I needed it to be a briefing.
"Lucien's in trouble."
Her face changed. The social brightness dropped away and something raw moved underneath, the openness she showed when it was just the two of us, or when she wanted me to believe it was just the two of us.
"What kind of trouble?"
"Debt. Significant. He's borrowed against everything accessible and he's into private lenders now. The kind who don't renegotiate."
"How much?"
"Enough that it can't wait until September."
She sank into the chair by the bookshelf. Her hands clasped between her knees. She stared at the rug for a long moment, and when she looked up her eyes were wet and her mouth was compressed into a hard line that trembled at the edges.
"I asked him. Last week. I asked him directly if the gambling had started again and he looked me in the face and said no."
"He lied."
"Of course he lied. He always—" Her voice broke. She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye socket, hard, the gesture of someone trying to push tears back inside. "How bad is it, Grant? Really."
"Two hundred and forty thousand to the worst creditor alone."
The number hung in the room. She made a small sound, not a word, just an exhalation that carried the weight of something collapsing internally.
"I don't know what to do." She stood. Crossed the space between us. Her arms came around me before I could step back, her face buried against my chest, her fingers gripping the fabric of my shirt at the shoulder blades. "I can't do this alone. I can't keep?—"
I stood rigid. My arms stayed at my sides for one second, two, and then her shoulders shook and the sound she made was small and desperate and I brought one hand up to the back of her head because I couldn't not.
I held her and I knew it was wrong, not wrong in the way my father had been wrong, not that, never that, but wrong in the softer, subtler way of a man holding the woman he wanted in the house he shared with the woman he'd married.
"I'll handle it," I said. "The Bellamy debt. I'll clear it through an intermediary and restructure the rest. He won't know it came from me."
She pulled back. Her mascara hadn't run—it never did—but her cheeks were flushed and her eyes held something that looked like gratitude and something that looked like more than gratitude, and I let her look at me like that for too long before I stepped away.
"Thank you." She said it quietly. "You're the only person who?—"
Movement at the door.
Noelle stood in the doorway holding a ceramic pitcher of flowers—peonies, the ones from the kitchen island. Water had sloshed over the rim and darkened the front of her shirt. She looked at us. At the space between us, which was not enough space. At Camille's hand still resting on my forearm.
"The flowers needed changing," she said. Her voice was level. Perfectly level.
She crossed to the sideboard, tipped the old water into the pitcher, and carried it to the small sink in the study's wet bar. Dumped the water out. Refilled it. Arranged the stems with two efficient movements. Set the pitcher back on the sideboard.
She left.
No door slam. No lingering look. Just the quiet withdrawal of a woman who had seen what she'd seen and filed it in the same place she filed everything else—behind the composure, beneath the competence, in the locked room where all the things she wouldn't say lived in rows as neat and ordered as Waterford stems in a cabinet.
Camille touched her own collarbone. "She didn't?—"
"I'll handle Lucien," I said. "You should go back to the kitchen. Celeste will wonder."
She went. I stood at the wet bar with my hands braced on the counter and the faint smell of peonies in the air and the weight of a promise I'd just made to the wrong woman settling across my shoulders like a yoke.