Prologue #2
I stopped drawing. The sketch was nowhere near finished, but it was further along than it had been this morning, and I could see the rest of the path now. I could see where it wanted to go.
“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “I won’t know until it’s done.”
When I looked up, Alexander was watching me with an expression I couldn’t pin down. Interested, maybe. Surprised. Like I’d handed him an answer he hadn’t expected.
“Sorry,” I said, suddenly self-conscious. “I talk a lot when I get excited.”
“Don’t apologize.” His voice was quieter than it had been. “I like listening to you.”
He looked startled by his own admission, like the words had escaped without permission.
For a moment neither of us said anything.
The conference room felt smaller than it had when I’d walked in, though nothing had changed except the distance between our chairs.
Except the way he was looking at me. Except the fact that I had completely forgotten I was supposed to be professional.
“Do you flirt with everyone you interview?” I heard myself ask.
His eyebrows rose. “I’ve never flirted with anyone I interviewed.”
“That was a suspiciously specific denial.”
“I’m having a very unusual afternoon.”
A knock on the glass wall made us both turn. The receptionist stood in the doorway, her expression perfectly neutral in a way that suggested she was exercising significant self-control.
“Monsieur Whitmore, your three o’clock has been waiting for twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes. I glanced at the clock on the wall and felt my face heat.
We’d been bent over this sketch for over an hour.
My interview had been scheduled for forty-five minutes, and I’d apparently lost all sense of time while arguing about design philosophy with the heir to one of the most famous jewelry houses in Europe.
“I should go,” I said, standing too quickly and nearly knocking my chair over. “I’m so sorry, I completely lost track of time, I didn’t mean to keep you.”
“You didn’t keep me.” He stood as well, and handed me the portfolio with the sketch tucked carefully back inside. “I kept myself.”
I clutched the portfolio to my chest and tried to remember how to behave like a normal person. “Thank you for your time, Monsieur Whitmore. I really appreciate the opportunity.”
“Alexander.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’ve spent the last hour telling me my design instincts are too predictable. I think we’re past ‘Monsieur Whitmore.’”
I felt my mouth twitch. “Your design instincts aren’t too predictable. They’re just more conservative than mine.”
“That’s the politest insult anyone’s ever given me.”
“I’m very good at polite insults. It’s a survival skill.”
He walked me to the door, and I thought that was the end of it. A strange interview, an unexpected connection, and then back to my tiny apartment to wait for a rejection letter that would probably be phrased very kindly.
“Miss Laurent.”
I turned. He was standing in the doorway of the conference room, one hand on the frame, watching me with that unreadable expression again.
“When you finish the necklace,” he said, “I want to be the first person you show.”
“You’re assuming I’ll finish it.”
“I’m not assuming. I’m asking.”
I considered this. “And if I don’t get the job?”
“Especially then.” He said it like it was obvious. Like whether I worked here or not had nothing to do with whether he wanted to see what I made. “Promise me.”
It was an absurd request from someone I’d known for less than two hours.
People said things like that in movies, not in real life, and certainly not in job interviews at prestigious Parisian jewelry houses.
But he was looking at me like the answer actually mattered, and I was still buzzing from the conversation, and I’ve never been particularly good at saying no to absurd things.
“I promise,” I said. “You’ll be the first to see it.”
He smiled, a real one this time, and it changed his whole face. Made him look younger. Made him look like someone I could actually talk to, instead of someone I was supposed to impress.
“Good luck, Miss Laurent.”
“Sophia,” I said, before I could stop myself. “You’ve spent the last hour telling me my design instincts are too aggressive. I think we’re past ‘Miss Laurent.’”
His smile widened. “Good luck, Sophia.”
I walked to the elevator in a daze, clutching my portfolio with the unfinished sketch inside.
The receptionist gave me a look as I passed that I decided not to interpret.
Maybe disapproval. Maybe amusement. Maybe just professional curiosity about why a twenty-three-year-old design student had monopolized her boss for an hour and a half.
The elevator doors closed, and I leaned against the wall and let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
I had no idea if I’d gotten the job. The interview had stopped being an interview somewhere around the forty-minute mark, and I genuinely couldn’t tell if that was a good sign or a catastrophic one.
Maybe he’d found me charming and would hire me immediately.
Maybe he’d found me annoying and was currently writing a memo about how I’d wasted his entire afternoon.
Either way, I had a necklace to finish.
I opened my portfolio on the elevator ride down and looked at the sketch again. His lines were still there, the three I’d told him were wrong, layered under my newer additions. Evidence of the conversation. Proof that it had actually happened and I hadn’t just hallucinated the whole thing.
A window, not a wall. Absence as a focal point. What did that look like, actually? What gem cut that way? What setting held something that refused to be held?
The elevator hit the ground floor and the doors opened onto the Paris afternoon, all gray light and the smell of rain coming.
I stepped out onto the street and started walking home, already sketching in my head, already talking to myself about proportions and materials and techniques I’d have to invent.
The look on his face when I finally showed him. The smile that made him look younger, and the way he’d leaned in to watch me draw, close enough that I could count the stitches on his sleeve.
I was going to finish this necklace if it killed me.