Chapter Six #2
I hear the tapping of keys, but all I can see is the face of a man who is certainly not Luc Garnier.
The Luc Garnier who Tess asks me about every morning.
As if she thinks I might have gone off to France with him for the express purpose of chopping him up and leaving him by the side of the road somewhere.
Luc Garnier, who everyone seems to believe in even more now than they did before.
Just because of the hint of his presence.
Just because it was whispered in the right ears and passed on by the right sources that he was actually at that party.
That people met him and interacted with him, so any concern about his identity or indeed his existence is gone as if it never was.
Whispers of his presence, his prowess, are everywhere these days.
That I was also at that party is never mentioned.
“Luc Garnier,” the voice with that French accent says on the other side of the phone.
My heart thumps in my chest again, so jagged and so hard it hurts. “Excuse me?”
“Your boss,” the woman says with a laugh. “He has been looking for this woman, who was a client of our firm, for many years. He was not certain of her name, or how to track her. It took him some time to come along and find us. Did he not tell you this?”
“He doesn’t tell me anything,” I say, hoping I sound like every overwhelmed intern who ever lived.
She makes a clucking sound that I interpret as victory.
“So I see this is the same everywhere, t’sais?
Well. Apparently he heard the story at the beginning of his career and always wanted to get to the bottom of it.
So, finally, he found our firm and they were able to tell him not only her full name, but the sad news that she passed away not long after she left Spain. ”
But I looked up that name. I tracked her here. “I don’t think I realized she was from Spain,” I say, making myself sound bewildered. “I’m sure that we were talking about his French projects.”
“ C’est vrai, mais she went from Spain to Nice, and then from Nice to the United States.” The woman sighs. “I suppose the mystery will endure forever.”
“I will tell my boss that,” I say.
“He is a very nice man, your boss,” the woman tells me, but this is not exactly what I wish to hear about the man in question.
“When Monsieur Du Hamel came back to the office after meeting him, he was filled with praise. Too many people have been chasing Amara Mariana Vizcaya over the years, but none were as thoughtful as Luc Garnier. He told Monsieur Du Hamel that he became interested in the case because he could not believe the story as he heard it.”
She lets out that sigh again, as if she is being swept away in some sort of romantic daydream, and while I am pleased that she’s the one I reached, I find myself doubtful that she has a long career ahead of her in her law firm.
Not that I stop her when she continues. “I think it’s a shame that he could not definitively conclude one way or the other that she did not, in fact, give birth to the marquess.”
Everything in me shifts a bit at that. I sit a little straighter in my chair. I’m used to this feeling by now. It’s what happens when a set of hunches and theories come together, and I just know.
If I could tell you the reasons I am here, I would, he told me once.
There are matters at play here that you cannot understand, he told me.
And, I am not the sort of man who indulges in parties like this, or nights like this…
She says that word, Marquess, and I feel it. I know .
“Then again, no one can prove that she didn’t,” my new contact says merrily. “So I suppose we will never know.”
“Thank you so much for telling me,” I gush at her. “Now I will sound knowledgeable in the extreme when he calls me on the carpet. I can’t thank you enough.”
We exchange pleasantries and bond over the baffling behavior of our superiors, and then after the calls end, I sit there for a long moment. I stare at the computer screen before me.
My heart is thumping and thumping, as if it’s trying to batter its own hole through my ribs.
My stomach hurts. I feel on the verge of pale and clammy—likely because it’s been all feelings and very little fitness these last few months. My clothes don’t even fit well any longer.
But I type the words into the search bar. The name, and then the key bit of new information. That title. Marquess .
Just to make certain, I add Spain, too.
And the screen fills with his face.
I feel the contents of my stomach decide that it’s high time to vacate, and I only manage to grab my wastebasket at the last minute. I think I’m about to be thoroughly sick, but all I do is heave, which feels like a final indignity.
When I swivel back to the screen I see that I have neither woken up from this nightmare nor hallucinated the face I see on my screen.
It’s him.
I wait to see if there will be any more heaving, but there isn’t. I feel fine. So fine that any thought that I might be coming down with a stomach flu deserts me immediately.
Apparently, my reaction to him has not waned. I fish out the Goldfish crackers that have always been soothing to me and are basically comfort food at this point, and then, at last, I turn back to the screen.
To him.
The man who was inside my body.
Who had his mouth…everywhere.
The man who I knew perfectly well was never Luc Garnier.
But I see that my other suspicions about him were correct. He is no circus carney on the loose, some two-bit con man.
That isn’t to say he isn’t a con man, given that he did, in fact, run a con.
Yet what the screen tells me, after I hit the translate button, is that he is also Taio de Luz, Eighteenth Marquess of Patrias, an ancient bit of land in Spain.
My throat feels tight. I feel frozen solid, but I make myself scroll past the picture of Taio—not Luc, because he was never Luc—and read the article.
It takes me longer than it should to realize that it is not exactly a piece of high-quality journalism. It is a tabloid and it is reveling in what it calls The great scandal of the once noble house of de Luz.
There’s no reason at all that I should be holding my breath.
I read on.
It appears that some ten years ago, following the death of the Seventeenth Marquess, an unnamed source released a purported diary that made the bombshell claim that the current Marquess was, in fact, illegitimate.
That rather than being the product of his father and supposed mother, he had instead been gotten as a by-blow on a serving girl who had been banished for her trouble.
And the rules of inheritance for this ancient title stated that the Marquess could not be illegitimate.
The diary could not be proven to be real. It could not be proven to be false, either.
So the Marquess had existed ever since with a cloud over his name that was matched only by the scrupulous excellence of his behavior.
Even the tabloid lauded him for it. He was a study in excellence of character, the article gushed. As if he had decided that the only way to combat the things said about him was to set an example of hereditary perfection that no one could argue against.
Except, of course, I know all too well that he’s a liar.
I sit back in my chair, panting as if I’ve run some kind of marathon. He came here for information, I understand. But not from us. Not from me.
He wanted to use the persona of Luc Garnier so that he could find out once and for all if he was actually illegitimate.
And it was a brilliant plan. It would have worked either way.
So what I don’t understand is why that night happened.
I don’t understand why he acted as if he was swept up in it as I was, when that can’t be true.
I knew from the start that he had that kind of regal bearing about him.
I shouldn’t have let myself be swept away in all that magic that I tell myself I can barely remember now.
It must have been the champagne, and anyway, he should have moved right on, disappeared into the ether, and never, ever touched me.
Maybe someday he can be a funny story I tell at parties. One regrettable night with the gentry.
But nothing about this seems funny just now. I feel something like hollow. And I find myself going over every single interaction I had with Taio de Luz over the course of those two weeks.
As I think back, I find myself rubbing my belly again. The way I do a lot these days.
And something else occurs to me. Like a concrete block falling on me.
Something that should have occurred to me a long time ago.
I count back, one month, another. All the way back to that night in Cap Ferrat.
And then, with a dawning sense of something like horror, I think about how many times I’ve eaten my feelings in these months and kept thinking I was about to feel better when my period came.
But it never did.
And I was so busy I forgot about it.
I can hear my own breathing now. Because in all my years, I have never, ever missed a period. I’ve never been so much as a day late. If it weren’t for that night, and that man, and how lost I was in him, I would have realized this sooner.
Wouldn’t I?
I stand up abruptly, gather my things, and stride toward the front office. I smile at Tess, mouthing that I have to go do something. She waves me off, clearly talking to some kind of salesperson on the phone. I can tell because her Jersey accent is even more prominent than usual.
My mind is whirling on the elevator down and I practically sprint out the front of the building, then down a few blocks until I find a drugstore.
I give thanks for the total disinterest of cashiers in New York City, purchase the test, and then make myself walk all the way home, to see if that calms me.
It does not.
I love my little apartment not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I happily pay for the neighborhood and not anything like space. But then, I’m rarely here. I’ve made sure that when I am, it’s as welcoming as possible.
Though today it doesn’t feel welcoming at all. I’m not sure what would.
I throw my bag on the counter in my kitchen and tear open the box, scowling at the instructions. It suggests first thing in the morning for the best results—well. I’m not waiting.
I perform the necessary tasks, set up the test, and set a timer on my phone.
Then I wait through the longest few minutes of my entire life.
When my phone starts bleating at me, I blow out a breath. I walk back into my tiny bathroom with its prewar black and white tiles.
Then I stare down at the two blue lines that blaze there on my test.
Unmistakably.
For a long time, I do nothing.
I simply stand there. Maybe breathing, maybe not.
I straighten, rub my eyes, and look again, but nothing changes.
The truth is as unmistakable as those two blue lines.
I’m pregnant.
With his child.
With the Marquess of Patrias’s baby.
“I can’t wait to go to Spain and tell him,” I tell my reflection in the mirror, when I can speak. Though I have to hold myself up against the sink. “I hope he’s pleased. Right before I kill him.”