CHAPTER 32
Sebastian
Chloe called at eleven, which was how I knew something was wrong.
She never called anymore; she texted, brief and bright, the way you keep a hand on a door you’ve decided not to walk through.
But the screen lit with her name while I was still standing at the window of the Paris suite with the taste of the afternoon in my mouth (Theo’s small hand fisting in my collar, Ada across the table watching me the way you watch weather change) and I let it ring twice before I answered, because I already didn’t want to.
“You’re a difficult man to reach lately,” she said. Silk over steel. “Three days, Sebastian. Voicemails. I was starting to think Paris had swallowed you.”
“I’ve been working.”
“You’ve been somewhere.” A pause, weighted, expert. “There’s a woman with copper hair running a little house in the Marais. Maison Cendre. Charming name: ash. And there’s a child. People talk, darling. People have always talked to me.”
The city glittered below, cold and indifferent, and I felt the old machine in my chest try to engage: the reflex to manage, to smooth, to say the thing that kept the board calm and the story clean.
Four years I’d have said it without thinking.
I said nothing instead, and the silence must have told her everything, because when she spoke again the warmth had gone thin.
“So it’s true. You’ve found her.”
“Chloe.”
“Do you know what you looked like tonight?” she said.
“In the photograph someone was kind enough to send me. You looked like a man who’d been let out of prison.
I haven’t seen that face since Grasse.” She let that land.
She’d always known where to put the knife; that was the thing I’d once mistaken for loyalty.
“I made you, Sebastian. When Adeline walked out and left you holding four hundred million dollars and a lie, I stood next to you and I smiled and I sold it. I have smiled for four years. And now you want to walk into the light with her and leave me standing in the dark holding the whole thing alone.”
“No one’s asking you to hold anything.”
“Aren’t they?” Her laugh was small and terrible. “If she comes back with her name and her nose and her truth, Sebastian, what happens to me? What happens to the woman who dreamed éternel her whole life? I don’t survive her. You know I don’t.”
And there it was: the real fear under all of it, the one that had run the whole machine from the beginning. Not me. Never me. The fraud. éternel was the ground she stood on, and Ada was the fault line, and she’d sooner bring the house down than feel it move.
“You should get ahead of it,” I said. “Correct the record. I’ll stand up with you when you do.”
The silence this time was different. Considering. I’d handed her something and she was turning it over, and too late I understood I’d handed her the shape of the threat: that I’d correct it, that the truth was finally something I was willing to spend.
“You’ve changed,” she said softly. “She’s changed you.
That’s… Sebastian, that’s dangerous. For both of us.
” A breath. “Let me remind you of something, since you seem to have gone sentimental. You didn’t just take her credit.
You stood on a stage and let me take her name while she stood in a green dress watching.
You called her a chemist. You told her she’d married up.
I was there. I remember the words. I could recite them.
” Her voice dropped into something almost tender, which was worse than any shout.
“There is no version of this where you come out the wounded husband. If it goes public, you go public. The great Sebastian Vale, who threw away the woman who made him and put another woman’s face on her life’s work. You don’t survive that either.”
“I’m not being steered, Chloe.”
“I’m not steering. I’m reminding.” The tenderness curdled.
“I’ve spent four years being the woman you needed me to be.
I can be the woman you’ll wish I weren’t.
I know people in every trade press from here to Milan, and I know exactly which questions to whisper into which ears.
You have no idea how far I’ll go to keep from disappearing.
You never did. You always thought I was the safe one. ”
I looked at my own reflection in the black glass (the scar, the grey eyes Theo had inherited without ever being told they were his) and I did not recognize the man who had let this woman speak for him all this time.
“Do what you have to do,” I said. “But leave Ada out of it.”
“Oh, Sebastian.” Almost gentle now. Almost grieving. “She was never out of it. She’s the whole story.” A rustle, a shift, a door closing somewhere on her end. “Whatever she is to you now, remember I know exactly what you did to her. Choose carefully.”
And she hung up before I could answer.