CHAPTER 37
Sebastian
The audit landed on my desk at seven in the morning, and I read it in the clothes I’d worn to Ada’s bed the night before, the ghost of her still on my collar: jasmine, green and low, the scent I’d spent four years pretending I couldn’t smell.
I’d ordered the audit as a formality. A box to tick. I already knew, the way you know a wound is bad before you look, that Chloe had never made éternel. But knowing is a soft thing, easy to talk yourself out of at three in the morning. This was hard. This had timestamps.
The lab on the twenty-second floor logged every entry to the thumbprint.
éternel had taken twenty-six months to build, and across those twenty-six months the reader recorded exactly one authorized print, four hundred and eleven times.
Adeline Vale. Chloe Beaumont’s print appeared in the system on a single date, two weeks before the gala, provisioned by an executive override.
Mine. I didn’t remember signing it. That was the kind of man I’d let them make of me: one who signed away his wife’s life without reading the line.
But it was the second file that finished me.
The gala run-of-show. Draft version four, eight months before the launch: eight months, when éternel was still nowhere near finished and Chloe had never set foot in that room.
The creator’s name in that draft was already hers.
And attached to it, a thread of messages between Chloe and my mother, going back further still.
He’ll believe it if it comes from family.
Play the money angle. Make Adeline the climber.
He’s proud; give his pride somewhere to land and he’ll do the rest himself.
He’ll do the rest himself.
I had. God help me, I had done all of it myself.
I found Chloe in the east conference room, where she’d been camped for a week trying to save her campaign, and I set the printout on the glass table between us the way you set down a body.
“You never made it,” I said. “Not a molecule. There was never a night you couldn’t sleep for the perfume, never a grandmother’s garden. You walked into a room she’d built and put your name on the door.”
She looked at the pages. She did not reach for them, and she did not do the thing I’d braced for: the tears, the wounded innocence, the Sebastian, how could you think.
She went still, and then her face simply switched off, like a light in a room no one needed anymore.
The performance ended. What was underneath was worse, because it was calm.
“You waited a long time to look,” she said.
“You engineered the whole night. The run-of-show, eight months out. You fed my family the gold-digger story and let my mother pour it into me a spoonful at a time.” My voice was not steady. I hated that it wasn’t. “Tell me how much of it was real. Any of it.”
“None of it was real, Seb.” She said it almost gently, almost kindly, the way you’d correct a child on a simple sum.
“That was the point. Real doesn’t scale.
A woman in a lab coat who won’t stand for a photo.
There’s no story there, no face, no four hundred million.
I gave the brand a person people could love.
” She tilted her head. “Your mother wanted her gone before the first anniversary. She thought Adeline had no name, no family, nothing to hold you. I only gave her the lever. I’d been building it since before Grasse. ”
“Since before…” The floor moved under me. “You watched me propose to her knowing you were already—”
“I introduced you to her,” Chloe said. “Did you forget that too? The gala in Nice. I brought the little perfumer to meet Sebastian Vale because I needed someone brilliant and invisible, and she was so brilliant, and you were so bored. I didn’t plan for you to marry her.
” A flicker of something almost like admiration.
“That was the only part I didn’t write. But I’m very good at improvising. ”
I thought I’d walked in there holding the knife. She’d let me carry it in so she could take it from my hand.
“It’s over,” I managed. “I’ll release the audit. Every page. You’ll never work in this industry again, and my mother…”
“Go ahead.”
She stood, smoothing her skirt, and gathered her bag with the unhurried grace of someone who had already counted the room and found she was the only one left standing.
“Release it. Ruin me. Ruin your mother. It won’t buy you a single thing you actually want.” She stopped at the door, close enough that I caught her perfume (hers, sharp, expensive, nothing I’d ever wanted) and she smiled.
“Expose me and you still lose. I only lied, Sebastian. You’re the one who believed it, because believing it was easier than deserving her.”