Chapter 35 #3
I’m distracted from my racing thoughts by a wall of photos.
étienne is with Eve in some of them. My eyes catch on an image of him laughing, his face drenched in sunlight.
He has his arm slung around Eve’s shoulder and he’s looking slightly off to the side, while she smiles directly into the camera.
They look so happy. I tug my attention away and look around.
It’s cozy in here, with colored throw cushions and houseplants scattered around.
I wouldn’t have thought Lise would choose to decorate like this, but then I realize that this place probably still has Eve’s stamp all over it.
My face prickles at the reminder that this is where étienne wants to be. At our first argument, he ran to a place where he obviously feels safe.
“When did you find out?” I ask as étienne comes back. I declined his offer of a drink. “About Sébastien being your dad. When we were seventeen?”
He shakes his head as he sits down at the other end of the sofa, taking a sip of his coffee.
“My mum told me when I was younger. It can’t have been more than a few months before I tried to see Albert.
She’d started to get a bit unsteady on her feet.
I think she sensed something was wrong, but she hadn’t got a diagnosis yet.
She wanted me to know who my family was in case something happened to her.
” He snorts. “She thought we might need their help in taking care of me.” He sounds bitter, but I can see from his face that it’s more than that.
He’s livid. He hooks his right arm over the back cushion as he turns to face me.
“That day when I came to the chateau, my mother had stumbled and fallen down the stairs. She hadn’t broken anything,” he says when I gasp, “but I was so worried. She’d told me she was fine, that she just needed to rest, and she’d gone up to bed.
In the afternoon, I went to check on her.
She’d fallen asleep, but I could see a bruise coming up on her face.
I tried to talk to her as I had a weird feeling that something bad was coming, but she mumbled that she needed to sleep.
She told me to go and watch TV.” He clears his throat.
“She hadn’t said much about my dad, only that he’d died before I was born.
But she had told me that if anything happened to her, I should go to the chateau on the hill, ask to speak to Albert and tell him that I was Sébastien’s son.
” He releases a heavy breath. “When I struggled to wake her, that’s what I tried to do. ”
“Albert didn’t already know about you?”
He shakes his head. “My mother hadn’t told anyone—Sébastien died before she knew she was pregnant.
She said it was our secret. Perhaps she was worried about how her brother would react, but also, she had only been a factory worker.
She and Sébastien weren’t married; she might have been scared that the family would try to take me away. ”
“Albert wouldn’t have done that,” I say quickly. “He would have been happy to have had a connection to his son, to Sébastien—”
“Sandrine made it very clear to my mother,” he interrupts furiously, “that Albert would not want anything to do with me. She said that he would never recognize me as his grandson and that there was no proof that I was related to Sébastien. She made her father out to be an old man, drowning in grief, and my mother a callous gold digger who wanted to cause him misery. She offered money for us to go away. My mother told her to go to hell.”
I’m aghast at this. “Sandrine was awful back then, worse than now. She was trying to rebuild her relationship with Albert and she didn’t want anyone to get in the middle of it.
She was horrible to Mellie and me too.” She thought Mellie was a gold digger.
Until she accepted that Mellie was just a friend and in no way a threat, we felt very unwelcome.
étienne glares at me. “What she wanted was to make sure her precious son was definitively next in line for the throne.”
étienne is a month older than Jackson, I realize. And Jackson is a Cole. If Sébastien had lived and married Estelle, étienne would have been born an Osier. He would have likely inherited everything.
étienne is an Osier…
“She needn’t have worried,” he continues. “We wanted nothing to do with them after that.”
“I’m so sorry,” I murmur. “I can’t imagine how horrible that must have been.” I reach for his hand, but he moves it away. His rejection of me makes my blood run cold. “So where do I come in?” I ask uneasily. “You said your mother worked out who I was?”
He nods. “When you went upstairs to say goodbye that day.”
Estelle had called out as étienne and I were about to paddle back to town and I’d gone to say goodbye to her in her room.
She looked so thin under the covers, but she smiled when I cooed over the picture on the dresser of her and étienne as a child.
When I think of it now, I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him sooner as the boy who’d come to Chateau Angèle, but he’d been laughing in the photo and that day he looked so distraught.
“As you were leaving,” étienne continues, “you said, ‘Right, I’d better get back to the chateau.’
“My mother asked what chateau, and when you replied, ‘Chateau Angèle, on the hill,’ I remember her going very quiet. When we both realized that you were the little girl who’d seen me bleeding and crying, that you were close to a family that we loathed, that you were in love with a boy who—” His face warps with disgust.
“You really do hate them.” My stomach is roiling.
He nods, scowling. “Every time you and I are in town together I’m on edge in case you see them.
” I’m taking it he means Albert and Sandrine—I’ve unwittingly tried to introduce him to his grandfather at least once.
Christ. “It’s why I’ve avoided you over the years.
I’ve seen you with them and have turned and walked the other way.
It makes me feel sick.” I blanch at his words.
How could he be with someone who makes him feel sick?
It doesn’t get much worse than that. “As long as you’re connected to that family, we never could have lasted,” he says miserably as I reach the same conclusion.
The vise around my heart clamps down.
“So this was what?” I try to sound steady as I indicate the two of us. “You were just using me to screw with Jackson because he’s Sandrine’s son? It was revenge?”
étienne’s fury morphs into something more uncomfortable.
“Did you want to hurt me too? Because I’d hurt you by association?”
“It might have started out a bit like—”
I cut him off, my vision swimming. “Is this the real reason why you warned me not to fall in love with you?” I look past him at the photos of him and Eve on the wall.
“Because what you had with Eve was big and real and authentic and everything about us has been based on a lie?” My eyes snag on a picture of Eve with Lise.
“Oh my God, did Lise know that you were playing me?” I’m appalled.
“No!”
“Did any of your friends?” Were they all in on it?
“No,” he repeats firmly.
It’s a small mercy.
But at the end of the day, Jackson hit the nail on the head: étienne was fucking me to fuck with him.
I feel like such a fool. But I’m more than embarrassed, I’m devastated.
I get to my feet and stalk to the door.
I’ve been the pawn all along.