CHAPTER 28
Ada
I got Theo behind me before Sebastian took his first step, one hand flat on my son’s shoulder, steering him back through the studio door toward Delphine.
“Go color the lion’s mane,” I said, light as I could make it.
“The orange one. I’ll be right there.” He went, because he trusted me, and that trust was the last soft thing in the room before the door clicked and left the two of us alone in the corridor with four years standing between us like a wall of glass.
Sebastian didn’t move for a long moment.
He just looked at the place my hand had been on Theo’s shoulder as though it had burned him.
When he lifted his eyes to mine they weren’t the Blade’s eyes, the ones that gutted boardrooms. They were wrecked.
“His eyes,” he said. His voice came apart on it.
“They’re mine. Ada. Tell me they’re not mine. ”
“They’re his,” I said. “Everything about him is his own.”
“How old is he.” Not a question. A man reaching for the edge of a cliff to be sure it was really there.
“Three.” I let it land. “Four in the spring. Do the arithmetic, Sebastian. You were always good at counting what belonged to you.”
I watched it hit him the way it had hit me on a marble bathroom floor four years ago. The color drained out of his face, all the way to grey. “Vienna,” he whispered.
“Vienna,” I agreed. “Five weeks along the night you kissed Chloe’s knuckles in front of six hundred people.
I found out that morning. In your building.
I had the test in my clutch when you told me I was a nose in a white coat who married up.
” I heard my own voice, and it frightened me how calm it stayed, how surgical.
“I stood in that gallery deciding whether to tell you. And then you told me exactly who you were, and I decided my son would never learn it from the inside.”
“You should have…” He stopped himself. Even he heard how obscene it was going to sound.
“Should have what? Told you?” I stepped closer, because I wanted to be near enough to watch.
“I was pregnant and alone in a rented flat in the Marais with forty euros and no papers in my own name. I collapsed in the lab at seven months and Delphine found me on the floor. I went into labor at three in the morning with no one, Sebastian. No one. I bit down on a towel so I wouldn’t scream and wake the neighbors, and when they put him on my chest the first thing I did was check his hands for all his fingers because there was no one else in the world to check them for him.
” My breath finally shook, once, and I let it.
“And the whole time, do you know what I could smell? Jasmine. Sandalwood. The field. You built me a scent memory that good, and it followed me into the worst night of my life like a ghost that wouldn’t leave. ”
His hand had come up to his mouth. Behind it his jaw was working and nothing was coming out.
“You want to know where you were,” I said. “That night. You were at a gala. You had chosen Chloe. You’d already chosen her before I ever left the building.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You did this.” I said it quietly, and it was worse quiet.
“Not the family. Not Chloe’s lie. You. You had a wife who bottled the whole of her heart for you and you handed the credit and the cameras and your own arm to someone who photographed better, because you believed a story about me that made you feel taller.
You did this, Sebastian, and there is no version of the truth where you didn’t. ”
He didn’t defend it. That was the thing that finally undid me: he’d argued me down in that gallery with a champagne flute in his hand, and now he had nothing, no line item, no gentle cruelty, no you married up.
He just stood in my corridor with his hands empty and took it, the way I’d once been terrified he would take my son and fold him into the machine.
“I want to see him,” he said.
“No.”
“Ada.”
“Listen to me very carefully, because I will only say it once.” I planted myself between him and the door, and I felt four years of scaffolding hold under my feet.
“His name is Theo Hart. Not Vale. Hart. He is mine. He is safe. He draws lions and he’s shy with strangers and he has never once in his life been made to feel like furniture in a photograph, and you will not put your name on him.
You will not brand him. I built one thing you couldn’t steal the credit for, and it wasn’t a perfume. ”
“I’m his father,” Sebastian said.
“You’re the cautionary tale I’ll raise him not to become,” I answered. “Burn Vale Group to the ground before you brand my son.”