Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO
My heart is racing . I can feel him—and his words—everywhere. As if those two short syllables are sharp, poisoned spears he’s thrust deep into me. I’m afraid that if I look down, I’ll see them sticking out of me.
“Prove it?” I repeat, flabbergasted. But there’s a thread of trepidation winding through me, too.
Because asking me to prove that he is not Luc Garnier suggests that he knows I can’t, and no one can know that.
No one, and certainly not some random man who turned up this morning like some kind of nightmare.
Because if I’m revealed as a liar, who will trust me again?
What will happen to this business I’ve built so painstakingly over the years?
It’s not like I have any other skills—or supportive family members—to fall back on.
“It’s not as if that would be hard. All I need to do is call the actual Luc Garnier. And then, I imagine, the police?”
The man standing before me looks entirely too pleased with himself. Those eyes of his in that dark, rich-bodied color, gleam.
It all bodes ill.
“Then by all means,” he invites me. “Do that.”
I realize that I’m holding my breath. But I worry that if I try to do something about it, I’ll make it worse. I’ll start hyperventilating, maybe, and collapse on the floor, and that’s highly unlikely to help me out of this situation that shouldn’t be happening in the first place.
And in any case, it won’t solve this problem. Neither will working myself up into hysteria.
“Do you think that I won’t?” I ask, and try to inject a note of bemused astonishment into my tone, as if I can’t believe that he would question such a thing. The way I would if he turned up pretending to be Tess.
He only stands there before me for a moment, as if deciding what to do next, and his head tilts slightly to one side.
I tell myself this would be easier if he didn’t look the way he does.
If he didn’t make me think of fallen angels, Paradise Lost, and all kinds of epic poetry featuring demigods and legends.
If the hint of those things didn’t seem to gather about him like a thunderstorm and infuse every part of him with that same brooding intensity.
I’m not a fan of how all that thunder and the flashes of lightning echo in me, either.
It shouldn’t be possible that any one man can have this effect on me. I detest it. I don’t understand it—and part of me doesn’t want to.
But he doesn’t seem inclined to leave.
And it occurs to me then that I don’t know how to make him without causing scenes and forcing questions I don’t want to answer.
Or worse yet, risking him telling the world that I’m a fraud.
“Perhaps it’s time that you and I come to terms, Annagret,” he says quietly.
I decide that another thing I really don’t like is my name in his mouth.
“What terms are there to come to?” I demand, but something is happening to me even as I try to pretend otherwise.
My pulse is too strange. My blood in my veins feels fluttery and odd, and there’s a sort of quickening deep inside of me, seeming to heat me up from within.
I am certain I don’t want to know what that is.
“You seem to think you can walk in here and pretend to be a man who everybody already knows, and while I admire the audacity, you must have known it couldn’t work. ”
I try to look concerned, like perhaps the reason he didn’t know is because he’s obviously delusional…but I’m too polite to say such a thing out loud.
He does not look appropriately chastised.
“Here’s the interesting thing about Luc Garnier.
Everyone knows who he is. And everyone can describe him when asked, and always in the most glowing terms.” I try not to react to that compliment—because that’s what it is.
A compliment on my ability to sell a story and watch it take flight.
But he’s not done. “Except it is never the person they describe. It is never what the man himself looks like. It is a list of accomplishments. A retelling of feats of detection and investigative prowess.”
There’s a hint of that brief smile, though I would not call it an expression of joy. Not on him. “I looked all over for a picture of this man. And if you can believe it, none exist.”
“Mr. Garnier is famously camera shy, the better to allow him to actually do his work,” I say with a slight frown, the way I always do. “It would be difficult to conduct private investigations if he couldn’t actually be private, wouldn’t it?”
This usually gets people to back off, but this man does not look remotely mollified.
He shakes his head. “Not one picture, in all the world, of a man so famous that you need only say his name for people to respond as if he is Poirot. Sherlock Holmes. Remington Steele. Do you know what all of those famous sleuths have in common?”
I know what he’s getting at but I have no intention of admitting it.
“None of them do any real-world investigating,” I say with a nod as if I think that’s what he meant. “The very thing I would be doing right now if I weren’t busy trying to peaceably eject a con man from my boss’s office.”
“Perhaps you can solve this mystery for me,” he says as if I haven’t spoken. “Given that I have scoured the earth and can find no one who has actually seen the great man in person—”
“Aside from me,” I interject.
He inclines his head. “Is it any wonder, if you are the only witness to this man, that some have been forced to conclude that he, too, is a work of fiction?”
“When you’ve told me you are him?” I ask through my teeth. “This must be a new kind of fiction, with two men playing the same part. I’m not sure I’m familiar with the conventions of the genre, but I have to tell you, I’m not that interested in the premise.”
His eyes gleam at that. “Aren’t you lucky, Annagret, that despite all the confusion and these many years of remaining out of sight and thus creating comment, I, the great Luc Garnier himself, am not fictional at all?”
And he smiles at me again. Wider this time.
Fatuously, to my mind.
I want to shout at him. Maybe throw something. And the fact I even have the urge is shocking.
I’ve worked hard these past years to completely divorce myself from the kind of life I had growing up.
If not to entirely forgive my father’s inability to be anything but weak, then to at least stop dwelling on it.
And to move past my stepmother’s need to forever belittle and demean me because she hated any remnants of my mother, the woman my father loved first, since there was no changing it.
My mother died a few months after giving birth to me.
She was told to me in stories, growing up.
That was all I had when my stepmother got done purging the house of the pictures and mementos she claimed made my father grumpy and me impossible.
My mother became a bedtime story my father told me in a low whisper so no one else would hear.
I became my mother’s twin as I grew, looking like her in every way and thereby ensuring that my stepmother would hate me.
And she did.
It had been a loud and fraught childhood home, with rages at the dinner table, shrieked accusations at the slightest provocation, and bitter rants that we were all forced to attend to until my stepmother’s temper was satiated.
I have long since accepted that there will never be a good reason for the way she made me the target for all of her ire, aside from the cruel jealousy that seemed to rule her, or for my father’s inability to defend me from her.
Instead, I spend my life sorting out other people’s mysteries, and finding them answers. I couldn’t find answers myself, because there is no answer to a problem like my stepmother. She simply is who she is, willing and only too happy to cause damage wherever she goes.
I decided when I left that I would get other answers.
And maybe someday that will feel like healing.
But because of my beginnings and how I left at eighteen—in the middle of the night, with her shrieking behind me to spur me on—I treasure calmness. Serenity. Keeping my cool under any and all circumstances.
It feels like virtue after some fifteen years with a woman like my stepmother.
I’ve made this virtue my entire personality, in fact. She told me no one could ever love a sneaky, nasty liar like me. I told her that if I was those things, she made me into them. I’ve spent these years on my own proving that she was always wrong about me, that I do good things, that I am good.
I like to think I prove this in my work. That one little white lie doesn’t cancel out the questions I’ve answered and the problems I’ve solved.
I have no idea why it’s so hard to hold onto all that—to me— while staring back at this man.
“Tell me how you think this is going to go,” I say, and it’s a fight to sound measured and even , but I tell myself that’s how I would sound if there really was a Luc Garnier I could raise with a phone call.
“You are an impostor. You must know that there’s no possible way I’m simply going to…
go along with whatever it is you’re planning here, do you? ”
Again, that smile of his, and every time I see it, it seems to find new parts of me to bloom in, dark and gold and problematic. “My dear Annagret, you have no choice but to do exactly that. Surely you know this.”
I flush, feeling red and angry. And perilously close to breaking some of my longest held vows.
He moves then, and I don’t know why I get the impression that he has to force himself into action. As if he’s as held tight in this thing between us as I am, but thinking such a thing seems to make the blooming more intense.
I watch as he crosses the office to stand at the bank of windows and look out at the view. This sparkling sprawl of Manhattan there before us that I made possible. Because it’s easy enough to have a dingy office somewhere unremarkable.
But a place like this? With a view like that?