Chapter Twelve
CHAPTER TWELVE
Everything changes with love .
For the better.
This is what I tell myself at the start, and this is how I feel as the years roll by.
Taio and I go back to New York. We sit down with Tess and tell her the truth.
Part of me expects that she will storm out, call me names, and decide she wants nothing more to do with Miravakia Investigations.
What she does instead is laugh.
“I knew it,” she cries. She waves her hand. “Oh, not the Luc Garnier part. That’s very Remington Steele, isn’t it? But I knew the two of you belonged together. It was obvious.”
To my astonishment, that’s the end of the matter. She takes on an even more expanded role, becoming in many ways the new Luc Garnier. She takes charge of the agency and sends out our new pool of investigators to work at her direction.
She loves every minute of it. She tells me so all the time.
As for me, I become a consultant on the really fun cases, the thorniest puzzles.
But mostly what I do is have babies.
Together, Taio and I make our own family.
Our first son is born in the spring and we know that he is magic from the start.
I know it before he comes into this world, because he brought me home to Taio.
I know it when I watched his father hold him in his hands first as the doctors check him, and then lay him on my chest. I know it as Taio and I become parents, lying down in that bed with the baby between us so we can share his first moments together.
I know it for sure when I watch the effect his flashing eyes and melting smile have on Francette.
She does not get less icy. But I learn not to take it personally. And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter, because she is the best grandmother imaginable.
Taio and I decide that there’s no such thing as too much love, or too much chaos, or maybe it’s simply that we’re not any good at impulse control or using appropriate protection.
“We can afford to be reckless,” he tells me, usually when he’s deep inside me. “I mean that literally.”
And he does.
But it’s only after our sixth child is born, the loudest of them all and our only girl, that we hold each other as we like to do—with our newborn between us—and understand that she is the last.
“It is a shame,” my beautiful husband tells me, “because the only time you are more beautiful than usual is when you are pregnant. Ripe and sweet.”
Just because it feels bittersweet, we find, it doesn’t make it any less the right decision, and we stick to it.
And our six children change more than just me, or him.
They bring laughter and hope to the stately old house and these ancient lands.
They make Salma laugh and play games with them.
They make their grandmother sing silly songs in French from her own childhood Taio claims she always told him she forgot.
She is the one who releases the results of her blood tests to the media.
In complete defiance of how she lived her life up until that moment, the Most Excellent Francette Arceneaux de Luz calls a press conference, and, in a voice dripping with aristocratic disdain, announces that she is descending to the revolting level of proving that she gave birth to her own child because she is revolted at the speculation.
“My own reputation is, I’m quite certain, impeccable,” she says icily.
So icily I am shocked that winter does not descend over Europe on the spot.
“My son is widely known as a paragon of virtue. These things alone should be enough. But in case anyone is inclined to believe the juvenile witterings of an individual who clearly feels overwhelmed in the presence of his betters, I give you this. Indisputable proof that the Eighteenth Marquess of Patrias is exactly who he says he is. As should have been obvious from the start.”
She takes no questions. She leaves no crumbs.
She is iconic, and I tell her—in time—that I want to be her when I grow up.
“Don’t be silly,” she says, and I think the ice has thawed by then, but she does like to pretend. “You are still an American, mi hija.”
I don’t know when she starts calling me daughter. I only know I love that she does.
And over time, that certain friend of Taio’s father suffers innumerable setbacks and lawsuits, until, by the time our sixth child is walking, he is of no importance or interest to anyone.
Which is only what he deserved.
But something far more beautiful comes out of that.
Because once I know the full story, I redouble my efforts to find Amara Mariana.
And one day I have the distinct pleasure of bringing her back to Spain, with her husband and family, so that she and her old friend can link arms in the gardens and walk together, their heads pressed close.
If I squint, I can almost see them as the girls they’d been once, clinging to each other in a sea of men’s choices.
As for my own father, I reach out to him once.
I tell him that I am happy. That I have all the things I am certain my own mother would have wished for me. Love. Support.
And a beautiful family that loves me back. Six complicated, delightful, gorgeous monsters—my children who never doubt for a single moment that they are adored.
Completely and utterly and always.
I do not expect the response some months later, long after I’ve stopped thinking about it. Or him.
It has two things written on it.
The first, you deserve it .
And then, at the bottom, I’m sorry .
And I realize that I don’t need anything more. Not from him.
Because I have everything. Almost more than my heart can bear.
But the best of these things is Taio.
And every year we take a holiday, away from the children and the estate that I take delight in running, and we go back to that little seaside cottage in Cap Ferrat.
We remind ourselves of who we are.
Thunder and light. Sweet heat.
Two hearts made one.
Every year we go back and love each other, without masks. And we stay tangled up together when the mornings come, remaining there until it’s hard to remember that we could ever be anything but this.
Us.
“Read me my favorite story,” he tells me on one such morning, a long way into our happy years. “The man who brought us together.”
I laugh and pull out the small book, white and red, with Pure Princess, Bartered Bride on the cover. Above a diamond solitaire set in gold, and a cameo that encircles a couple we like to tell each other looks like us.
And I read to my love, as I always do.
“Luc Garnier did not believe in love,” I read out loud into the warmth and sun of the cottage.
“Love was madness. Agony, despair, and crockery hurled against walls. Luc believed in facts. In proof. In ironclad contracts and the implacable truth of money. He had been relentless and focused all his life and as a result, wildly successful. He did not believe that this was a matter of luck or chance. Emotion played no part in it. Just—” And I stop, smiling at my husband the way I always do at this part.
“Just as emotion played no part in picking out his future bride.”
“Poor Luc,” Taio says with a grin, as he always does. “Love will claim him all the same.”
And we read the rest of the book together, until it does.
Because love doesn’t require belief to be true. It only requires love.
As we are living proof.