CHAPTER 6
Sebastian
I woke at four, as I always did, and reached across the bed before I was awake enough to remember it would be empty.
The sheets on her side were cold in the way that means no one has been there for days, not hours.
I lay in the dark and told myself the thing I’d been telling myself since the gala: that Ada had gone to ground the way she did everything, quietly and with control.
This was a punishment. She’d let me stew, let the silence do the work a scene never could, and then, when I’d been made to feel it, she would come home, and I would be gracious, and we would find the shape of the marriage on the other side of tonight.
That was the story. I ran an empire on stories. I knew a good one when I was inside it.
By seven I was at the tower, because the tower did not care whether my wife was speaking to me.
éternel had launched into the most oversubscribed pre-order in the company’s history (forty million in the first eighteen hours, Paris and Dubai and the whole glittering circuit lit up like a switchboard), and an empire in that state does not pause for a man’s private weather.
I chaired the eight o’clock. I signed off on the second production run.
I did what I am famed for doing, which is to be a blade: clean, decisive, unbothered.
And everywhere I turned, Chloe was there before me.
She’d had the campaign proofs couriered to my office before I asked.
She’d smoothed the retailer in Milan who’d balked at the allocation.
She sat in on the marketing call and finished my sentences, and the room warmed toward her, and I let it, because it was easier to let it.
She made herself indispensable the way water makes itself indispensable: by finding every empty place and filling it.
By noon I could not have told you where the fragrance house ended and Chloe Beaumont began.
Legal came up at two with the launch binder, tabbed and flagged.
“Formalizing the creative structure,” Marchetti said, sliding it across. “The face of the house needs a title with legal weight. Endorsement rights, likeness, the licensing chain. It all has to hang on a named officer.”
The tab said CREATIVE DIRECTOR, MAISON éTERNEL. Below it, a signature block. Below that, a name already typed: Chloe Beaumont.
I want to say the pen was heavy in my hand.
It wasn’t. That’s the part I keep coming back to.
I signed the crown of the thing my wife had built molecule by molecule in a lab keyed to her thumbprint alone, signed it over to a woman who had never once set foot in that room, and it took four seconds and cost me nothing at all, and that should have frightened me more than it did.
My mother came for dinner uninvited, which is the only way she comes.
“You’ve heard nothing,” she said. Not a question.
She turned her wine and watched the light in it.
“Sebastian. A woman who loved you would be screaming down the phone. A woman who loved the name goes silent and lets the lawyers do the shouting. Mark how she’s chosen.
” She set the glass down. “She’s calculating a number.
That’s all this quiet is. The size of what she’ll ask for. ”
“That’s exactly it,” Chloe said softly from the other end of the table. She’d come with my mother, or my mother had come with her; I no longer knew which. “It was always going to come to money. It always does, with people who marry up. I’m sorry, Seb. I know you didn’t want to see it.”
And I let them say it. That is the confession, if I’m making one. I let the two of them lay the story down over my wife like a sheet over furniture, and I did not lift it, because underneath it was a shape I did not want to look at.
Because here is the thread I would not pull, sitting at my own table with my own mother telling me my marriage had a price tag:
I did not know where Ada was sleeping tonight.
Not the abstraction of it. The fact. Somewhere in a city, or out of it, in a bed I couldn’t picture, under a roof I couldn’t name, was the woman I had stood in a field and promised to spend my life failing to deserve, and I, who could tell you the coordinates of a container ship in the Malacca Strait, did not know the room she was breathing in.
I had traced everything I’d ever wanted to own.
I had never once needed to trace her, because she had always, always been where I left her.
I picked up my phone under the table and looked at the last message. Come home so we can talk like adults. The little grey word beneath it that would not turn to Delivered.
I put the phone away before either of them could see my face do something I couldn’t sign off on.
Marchetti caught me at the door on the way out, apologetic, a single sheet in his hand. “One more, sir. For the campaign: spousal disclosure. Standard. Conflict of interest, given the household name on the paperwork. Just needs your countersignature and your wife’s particulars for the file.”
He held out the pen.
And I stood in the doorway of my own house with the whole roaring machine behind me, and I lowered the nib to the blank where her name should go.
And stopped.