Chapter 20 Bastien — Day 53
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The kitchen smelled like coffee and rosemary bread, and Bastien had been putting off the sentence for twenty minutes.
Mara stood at the stove with her back to him, one hand steady on the pan, the other finishing the last inch of her braid from muscle memory.
He'd learned in seven weeks that her hands were a kind of shorthand for the whole ranch — they knew where the eggs were, where the bread had cooled, where the pan-handle heat lived.
She didn't do a thing twice she could do once.
It made her a hard woman to help and an easy woman to love.
Dawn light came in low across the counter and lit the fine grain of the wood.
He'd never lived in a room that felt like this. He wasn't sure he'd ever earn it.
He set the mug down. “I have to go to Montreal for two days.”
She didn't turn. “When?”
“Today. There's an eleven-forty out of El Paso.”
She flipped the eggs, slid them onto a plate, carried the plate over, and set it down in front of him. Then she looked at him. Gray-green eyes clear as pond water on a still morning. She didn't ask why. She didn't say okay.
“For my mother,” he said.
She nodded once. “Two days.”
“Two days.”
“You'll call from wherever they let you.” She wasn't asking.
“I'll call.”
She turned back to the stove. He watched her spine, watched the braid, watched the small tell — the way her thumb pressed into her opposite palm before letting go. He knew that one now. She was giving him space by not filling the space.
“Mara.”
“Mm.”
“Ask me anything you want.”
She was quiet a long moment. Then, over her shoulder: “You coming back?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
That was all. She didn't dress it up. He couldn't decide whether the plainness of it steadied him or gutted him. He thought maybe both.
He ate. She ate standing, hip against the counter, the way she always did when she was already running the day in her head. He caught the shape of her plan across her face — feed, tack, the north fence Rafe kept limping through, the ledger she'd left open by the phone.
“Thayer'll ride the south line,” she said, mostly to herself. “Orin's on stalls. Opal's got Wednesday.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. I'm saying it so I know.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. She caught it and looked away, and that little missed smile between them was as close as they ever got to a goodbye scene.
He carried his plate to the sink. She caught his sleeve on the way past. Just fingers, just a second, thumb hooked once over the cuff. Not a kiss — she'd already given him one last night. This was something else. This was the tell she'd meant to keep.
“Safe flight,” she said, and let go.
At the door he stopped. “Mara.”
She looked up.
“If anything strange comes near this house while I'm gone —”
“Beau.” Her voice was mild. “I've been running strange off this land since I was eleven. Go see your mother.”
He went.
The truck ate the last of the ranch road and threw dust behind him like a curtain drawing shut. He watched the barn in the rearview until it wasn't there, then made himself watch the road.
He'd said his name so many times as Beau that Bastien felt like a coat that no longer fit. It would fit again in six hours. That was the thing he didn't like.
El Paso to Toronto to Montreal. Three seats, three shrinkages, three versions of a man he'd tried to leave in a bathroom in Whistler two months ago with his brother's boots still muddy in the hall.
He put on sunglasses at the airport in El Paso and no one looked twice.
He put on a jacket in Toronto and two people looked.
By Montreal the driver was already outside the arrivals door with the black car and a tie the color of a bruise.
“Monsieur Lorne.”
“Hello.”
“Madame is at the house.”
“So is my cousin, I imagine.”
The driver's face didn't move. “He arrived last night, sir.”
Of course he did.
The Lorne estate sat above the river with the kind of driveway that made lawyers nostalgic. Poplars along the fence line. A gate that opened without a person visible to open it. Two hundred yards of wet gravel that crunched like teeth under the tires.
The house rose out of the last curve. Grey stone, tall windows, a portico his grandfather had bought stone by stone out of a torn-down chateau in the Pyrenees because a Lorne who couldn't buy a chateau built one. Bastien had grown up in it and never once thought of it as home.
Ilya was standing on the drive.
That was the first thing wrong. His cousin didn't wait outside.
Ilya waited in rooms with the good chairs and the good angles, where he could watch you decide whether to sit.
Standing on wet gravel in a wool coat with no umbrella meant Ilya had something to say that he didn't want said inside where the walls remembered.
The driver slid the car to the portico and cut the engine. Bastien got out.
“Ilya.”
“Cousin.”
They didn't embrace. They hadn't since Ilya was twelve and had learned that touch was a currency he preferred to hoard.
Bastien looked past him toward the door. “Is she awake?”
“She's resting. I told her not to come down until you were settled.”
“You told her.”
“I asked her.” Ilya's smile was small and precise, like a stitch. “She's very tired, Bastien.”
“I know.”
“Do you.”
The rain wasn't rain yet, only the smell of it. Bastien set his bag on the top step. The driver took it inside without a sound. The door closed behind him with the soft weight of very old wood.
“Say it,” Bastien said. “On the drive, in the wet, before I go in. Say it here.”
Ilya put his hands in his coat pockets and considered him. Ilya had their grandfather's face, which was a face for boardrooms. Fair skin gone paper-thin at the temples, hair cut so close to the scalp it looked drawn on, eyes the flat blue of a January lake.
“Take the chair,” Ilya said.
Bastien didn't move.
“Take it,” Ilya said again, gently, “or I'll make it impossible for you not to. Julien is dead. The company needs a Lorne.”
The gravel under Bastien's boots settled once, cold through the leather. He'd been ready for the sentence since Whistler. He'd rehearsed answers on planes, in the barn, at four in the morning on Mara's porch with a mug going cold in his hand. None of the rehearsed answers made it up his throat.
He gave himself the slow deliberate exhale instead.
In through the nose to a count of four. Held.
Out through the mouth to a count of six, the way his brother had shown him the summer they'd both learned to freedive and Julien had said, You panic, you die; you breathe, you live.
It came out steady. It came out on purpose.
He watched Ilya notice it and file it away like a man cataloguing a weapon.
“No,” Bastien said.
Ilya's expression didn't change. “No what?”
“No, I won't take it. No, I don't want it. No, I'm not coming back. Any of them. Pick one.”
“You're the last direct heir. You're the name on the door.”
“You're a Lorne too.”
“Not the way you are, and you know it.” Ilya took a step closer.
Not aggressive. Placing himself. “Interim isn't the same as chair.
The board won't confirm me while there's a you.
You're the ghost in every room. Board members ask about you. Journalists ask about you. Our creditors ask about you. Your mother asks about you, Bastien — only she asks with her silence.”
“Don't.”
“I will. Because someone has to.” A pause. “I'm not the villain here. I've kept this company standing for two months while you decided whether to grieve like a man or a boy. I've earned the right to say the true things.”
“Then say them and let me pass.”
Ilya tipped his head. It was almost tender. “Very well. If you won't sit in the chair, I'll drag you back into the light one way or another. Because a Lorne who hides is a bigger risk to this house than a Lorne who leads.”
“That's a threat.”
“That's arithmetic.”
“From you it's a threat.”
Ilya let a small smile through. “Then take it as one, cousin, if you prefer the drama. I don't.”
Bastien held his cousin's gaze for a long count.
He thought of Mara at the stove with her braid unfinished.
He thought of Opal's bread on the board.
He thought of Thayer's shoulders under a wet coat, Rafe's cocky grin, the way Orin said sir like the word was a promise he was still learning.
He thought of five thousand acres of West Texas that ran on baling wire and stubbornness and one woman's refusal to fold.
“Do what you're going to do,” he said. “I'm going in to see my mother.”
He walked past Ilya without touching him.
“Bastien.”
He stopped on the step.
“You should know,” Ilya said, from the drive, in a voice softer than the last one, “she cries at night. The house hears it. Someone thought I could do something. I can't. Only you can.”
Bastien didn't turn. “That's not the lever you think it is.”
“It isn't a lever,” Ilya said. “It's the truth. You're allowed to hate me for saying it.”
“I do.”
“Good,” Ilya said. “Then it's landed.”
Bastien pushed the door open and went in.
The foyer swallowed sound the way it always had.
Marble under his boots, cold enough to feel through the leather.
Ceilings so high the chandelier looked like a small distant weather system.
On the walls, the dead ones. Great-grandfather Emile with his rifle and his elk.
Great-uncle Theodore in profile, a hand on a globe.
Grandfather Auguste, painted the year before he'd bought his first hotel, wearing the exact expression Ilya had worn on the drive.
Julien in a black suit at the end of the row, painted from a photograph two months after the funeral, the paint still glossy in the low light.
He didn't stop at Julien. He'd stop at Julien another day.
His mother was in the small salon off the library, which meant she'd chosen the room herself. The small salon was where she used to interview tutors. It had a window seat and a north light and no oil portraits.
“Maman.”