39. CHAPTER 36
Léonie
My husband was avoiding me.
Thinking it felt stupid, saying it out loud felt pathetic. You'd think a man like Orion Kade didn't avoid things with the way he handled business, dealt with threats, or destroyed whatever stood in his way…
But there was no other word for the stranger he’d become in the days after we’d slept together. Phantom footsteps in the hallway. The sound of his car entering the estate past midnight, when there was no chance of running into me.
And then, as if avoidance needed a formal excuse, he’d conjured a business trip out of thin air and vanished. When he texted to say he was leaving, I typed my reply three times, my thumbs shaking, before settling on something that looked like it didn’t hurt.
Okay. Safe travels.
No emojis. No extra punctuation. No letting him see how wrecked my heart felt, because two could play at the game of pretending nothing had changed.
But I wasn’t fooling myself. Three weeks had passed without his eyes on me. When we did speak, the conversations were so curated, so sterile, that we might as well have been strangers having a random conversation.
Did he regret it?
Was that it?
I replayed those hours in my head until the memories faded in my mind’s eye.
It hadn’t felt like regret. He'd been warmer than I thought possible.
Afterwards, he looked at me as though I'd become the centre of his universe.
He'd carried me to the bath and kissed me with startling tenderness.
He'd held me close through the night and spoken words that felt more binding than any promise.
No one could fake that level of tenderness. Right? Even if they were made of ice, it'd be impossible to fake what I'd seen in his eyes.
Still… he was gone.
The more I replayed it, the more dangerous it felt to admit the truth: I was falling in love with my husband. Maybe I was already there, drowning in the deep end while he watched from the shore.
Every stupid little thing betrayed me. My heart hammering when his name lit up my phone.
The way I stood in front of the closet, picking out dresses he might notice if he ever came home.
How much I craved the weight of him, even after I’d given him the one thing I’d refused to give any man before him.
It was terrifying to be this full of a person who seemed so determined to be empty. Some part of me was still hoping the silence was just a temporary wall, a defensive reflex from a man who didn't know how to handle being happy.
Yet, every day that passed felt like another brick being laid between us. More silence. More distance. The harrowing realisation that I had opened the door to my heart, and he had used it as an exit.
“You’re doing that thing again,” Isolde said, her lips tipped to the side.
“What thing?” I pretended to focus on the sketch in front of me. The House of Vassier inner studio smelled of fabric, coffee, and Céleste’s expensive floral perfume.
“The thing where your pencil is moving but your soul is somewhere else,” she said, nudging my hip with hers. “Spill.”
Céleste didn’t even look up from the pattern notes she was checking. “She’s been sighing in triplicate since I got here. That’s not fabric stress. That’s man stress.”
I ran the pencil down the page, drawing a meaningless line. “We… slept together.”
Utter silence. Then Isolde made a noise that sounded like a strangled scream.
“You what?”
Céleste finally looked up, her eyes narrowing. “With Orion.”
“No, with the chef,” I snapped. “Yes, with Orion. Obviously with Orion.”
Isolde gaped like I’d just announced I kissed my celebrity crush. “And you waited this long to tell us?”
“Because there’s nothing to tell.” I dropped the pencil.
“He was… perfect. Gentle. Very careful. It was—” My throat constricted around the memory of his hands, his voice, the way he’d said I didn’t disappoint him.
“Then he slept beside me, and in the morning he kissed my forehead and acted like I’d rewired his bloodstream and then… vanished.”
Céleste’s eyes turned sympathetic. “How long has he been gone?”
“Three weeks,” I said. “He left after a day of pretending everything was normal and now he’s somewhere in Singapore fighting with containers and dealing with logistics mess, while I’m here trying to remember how to breathe like my heart isn’t in his stupid carry-on luggage.”
Isolde folded her arms. “Maybe he’s just busy.”
“Busy men still find ways to give their wives attention,” I snapped back, tossing my pencil aside.
“Busy men call and say ‘I miss you’ or ‘that thing we did has been haunting my sleep’ or even ‘hey, thanks for ruining my expensive sheets or whatever.’ Anything but this polite silence.” That’s draining me.
Céleste’s mouth twisted. “Have you told him how you feel?”
I laughed once, humourless. “I barely know how I feel. All I know is that I smell him everywhere. His presence haunts me…everywhere. It’s in the steam of the shower and the empty side of my bed.
I wake up reaching for nothing every morning, and knowing he’s not there ruins my day before it even begins. ”
They exchanged a look that said you’re in deep without saying it out loud.
“He doesn’t seem like the type to disappear after sex,” Isolde offered, her voice uncharacteristically gentle and comforting. “Maybe there’s something else going on. Something internal.”
“I wish I knew what it was,” I whispered, looking down at my tea. “I wish I knew if I was waiting for him to come home, or if I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
It was torturous.
Three weeks of functioning on nothing but muscle memory.
I checked on his father, like always. Read to him in that sterile room, his fingers twitching on the blanket when I did voices for the historical figures.
I talked to him about nothing and everything.
Fabrics, sketches, how the gardeners had planted new roses, how seriously I was taking my gardening lessons, even though Jean-Luc refused to let me near the roses yet.
He tolerated my involvement with the hydrangeas but only trusted me unsupervised with the lavender because, as he liked to remind me, “even you cannot kill lavender, madame.”
Orion’s mother, however, remained a storm I had to navigate.
Her eyes always had that calculating look, perpetually measuring and watching my every move.
My posture, my dress choices, even the way I breathed when I wasn’t saying anything at all.
She catalogued all of it, like a hobby. I still pretended not to care.
On one particularly unfortunate afternoon, she pulled me into one of her society functions.
A charity luncheon I had no interest in.
With Orion in Singapore, there was no one to swoop in with a convenient we have plans.
I didn’t even bother texting him for an out; I knew the message would just sit unread in the void of his busy day.
So I gave her the treatment I’d always given my mother. I wore rebel neutrals. Plain nude dress, nude heels. Not a single color in sight. I needed, more than anything, to blend into the wallpaper.
She looked me over from head to toe, regarding me as a miscalculation she couldn’t quite correct, then said nothing the entire drive. I could tell she hated it, just as my mother did.
Good enough for me.
The ballroom of the Salon étoile at the Maison d’Or was full of women sipping expensive wine, laughing, their expressions laced with poison. It was the usual at every aristocratic gathering.
They compared jewellery and traded stories about their husbands’ mistresses as if they were swapping recipes for berry tart.
Suddenly, the mood in the room changed and the conversation took a different turn. That's when I heard the whispers.
“Lady Kade is very determined,” one of the women said, lifting her glass. “She thinks Madame Lavigne’s niece would be a perfect match for her son. If he must have a mistress, at least let the woman bring something valuable to the table, hmm?”
The group of young women around me tittered. One of them, beautiful in a polished, empty way—terrifyingly young too, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and smiled demurely toward where Lady Kade sat.
A mistress aspirant.
I’d seen her before in passing; I just hadn't realized she had a job description.
“Apparently Baron Lavigne has a foothold in the logistics business,” another chimed in. “It would be mutually beneficial.”
“Lady Kade always has great vision.” One of the women chuckled.
“Poor wife,” someone whispered, casting a sideways glance at me as if I were a piece of furniture that might have ears. “But then, these arrangements are the only way men like that stay sane.”
Normal. They were calling it normal.
I sat there, swallowing champagne that tasted like acid, while they discussed my husband’s hypothetical mistress in front of me like I was part of the décor.
He belongs to me, I told myself. My fingers pressed in around the stem of my glass. On paper, at least.
But did he?
Would a man who belonged to me disappear for twenty-one days after shattering every defense I owned? Would he let his mother shop for his future mistresses like she was picking out cufflinks, while he stayed silent in a different time zone?
My heart hurt so much I had to press my hand over my sternum just to keep the pieces together.
Was this it? The slow, elegant descent into being a Kade Wife?
I remembered my dating rule number one and how I adhered to it strictly just to protect my heart from exactly this, but still failed.
When girls came back pale and broken from relationships with men in this circle, was this how it started?
Tenderness that meant nothing. Nights that felt like promises and days that proved you were a complete fool.
I understood then that I wasn't just afraid of losing Orion. I was afraid that the man I’d seen that night—the one who whispered ma déraison—didn’t really exist. He was just a figment of my imagination that I was delusional enough to hold on to.