Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
éTIENNE
The new au pair is a problem.
I stand at my study window, whiskey untouched on the desk behind me. Paris glitters below, indifferent to the chaos inside my head.
She's not a problem professionally. No.
Her file is impeccable. Prestwick trained. Multilingual. Structured references. Every line of her background vetted, verified, and approved before she ever stepped through my door.
Operationally, she is precisely what I hired.
Which is why this irritation makes no sense.
It has been six days since she arrived. And in less than forty-eight hours, she rotates to Bastien's apartment.
I should feel neutral about that. It's the entire point of this arrangement. Shared coverage, shared cost, no single household bearing the full weight of another person's presence.
Instead, I find myself tracking her presence like a variable for which I can't account.
She had integrated too quickly. That is the problem.
By the third morning, Sophie was already greeting her without testing her first. No critique of posture. No inventory scan of clothing choices. No cool dismissal designed to establish hierarchy.
Just a quiet "Bonjour, Madeline" over breakfast.
I noticed because Sophie did not look at me when she said it.
She looked at her.
Children orient toward safety. It is instinctual.
I watched Madeline adjust Sophie's coat before school. Nothing performative, no exaggerated warmth. She simply noticed the collar sitting wrong and fixed it with quick, efficient hands before Sophie could protest.
And Sophie allowed it. That alone qualifies as an event.
The previous au pairs tried too hard. Too many smiles, too much praise, that forced warmth meant to speed past Sophie's defenses. She saw through it every time.
Madeline seems to understand what is needed without instruction.
She moves through the apartment like she's mapping it in real time.
Not intruding, not shrinking. With Bernard, she uses the same measured respect she uses with me.
And when she speaks to Sophie, she lowers herself to her height first. Kneels rather than bends.
A small thing that matters more than it should.
I have caught myself watching her more than once. Unintentionally. From the kitchen threshold while she reviewed driver routes at the island. From the hallway when Sophie dragged her toward the sitting room to show her some sketchbook catastrophe that required immediate adult acknowledgment.
And this morning. Putain, this morning.
She was making coffee, humming something I didn't recognize, wearing that cream blouse that's slightly too thin for a professional setting. When she leaned forward to hand Sophie a napkin, I could see the shadow of her collarbone. The faint suggestion of lace beneath the silk.
I looked away.
Then I looked back.
I'm forty years old. I sign her paychecks. I could be... not her father, but close enough that the math is uncomfortable. She graduated from university the same year I launched my tenth collection. When I was burying my parents and taking over the company, she was in kindergarten.
And I've spent the better part of this week noticing the curve of her hip when she leans against the counter. The way her trousers fit when she bends to retrieve something Sophie has dropped. The particular architecture of her waist, her back; the soft lines that her clothing can't quite hide.
She bit her lip yesterday while reviewing Sophie's schedule, and I lost an entire paragraph of the email I was writing.
Bordel.
I find myself tracking the fullness of her mouth when she smiles. The flush that creeps up her neck when she catches me watching, which she did this morning, across the kitchen, and neither of us looked away immediately.
I should have.
She has the body of someone who hasn't yet learned to armor herself.
Still supple. Still unspoiled. Youth you can see in her skin, in the way she moves without knowing she's being watched.
Hips that have never been gripped hard enough to bruise.
A mouth that doesn't know what it's offering when she bites her lip like that.
And my hands remember her, even though I've barely touched her. Just her hair. Just that pin. Just thirty seconds in my study that I've replayed approximately twenty-seven times since.
She called me Monsieur Laurent afterward. Like nothing had happened. Like I hadn't just slid my fingers through her hair while she sat in my office, in my chair, under my roof.
I take a long sip of whiskey and try to redirect my thoughts to proper concerns.
For one, I've noticed Madeline listens to Sophie as if the question holds operational significance. As if it matters. And Sophie speaks longer with her than she usually does with adults.
This is informative. And concerning. Not because of Madeline, but because it means Sophie has adapted to absence faster than I'd realized.
Sophie rations attention with me. I see it now. She saves her real questions for moments when I am fully present. Evenings without calls. Mornings when I am not already mentally halfway to the office. She has learned to assess my availability before offering vulnerability.
Eight years old and already managing emotional bandwidth.
That is not a skill a child should require.
And it's my fault she learned it. Because I've tried this before. Hired warmth. Brought in nannies and au pairs and tutors who seemed kind, seemed genuine, seemed like they might stay.
But they don't. They leave, or they disappoint, or they turn out to want something other than what they claimed. Money, connections, a line on their CV that says they survived the Laurent household.
Margot wanted all three. She got them. Then she left anyway.
I take another sip. The burn is sharper this time.
Margot. My ex-wife. Sophie's mother in the biological sense only. Beautiful, brilliant, and so cold that our marble floors felt cozy by comparison. She used to say the apartment felt like a museum. Curated, immaculate, emotionally uninhabitable.
In the end she said motherhood was "limiting." Said she hadn't signed up to be diminished by domesticity. Said I was, and I quote, "emotionally unavailable to the point of being decorative."
Margot never wasted a well-constructed insult.
She moved to New York within a year of handing me that revelation and married a therapist shortly after. Someone capable, presumably, of providing the emotional fluency she believed I lacked. She sends Sophie a birthday card. Sometimes.
I didn't fight her for custody. There was nothing to contest. She didn't want it.
Sophie was two when Margot left. Too young to retain memory but not too young to absorb absence. Children don't remember details. They remember emotional climates. And sometimes, at school pickup, at the park, I catch Sophie watching other mothers.
I never ask what she's thinking. I'm not sure I could survive the answer. The whole thing makes me angry in a way I can't do anything with.
I can't repair what Margot took from her life. But I can control exposure going forward.
Which is why Madeline rotating in two days should feel like relief.
It doesn't.
I move into the hallway.
The apartment is dark and silent except for the low electrical hum of a city that never fully powers down.
There's light beneath her door. She is still awake. Reviewing schedules, most likely. She has been recalibrating driver transitions all week, unnecessary optimizations that nonetheless improve continuity across households. The woman cannot leave well enough alone.
Competence.
I stop outside her door.
There are reasons to knock. Legitimate ones. The rotation. Handover notes for Bastien. Contingency protocols. All valid.
None urgent enough to justify standing in the dark outside my employee's bedroom at midnight.
There is shadow movement beneath the door. Pacing. Or maybe she's changing. Unbuttoning that cream blouse. Stepping out of those trousers that have been driving me to distraction all week.
Ten feet away from where I'm standing in the dark.
I want to know what she looks like on the other side of that door. Whether she sleeps in silk or cotton or… nothing at all.
I want to know what sound she'd make if I pressed her against that door.
Whether she'd gasp or sigh or say my name in that voice—that calm, unhurried voice that somehow makes me feel like I'm unraveling.
I want to slide my hands beneath whatever she's wearing and find out if her skin is as soft as it looks.
I want to feel her arch against me, taste the hollow of her throat, hear that composure finally break.
I want to know whether she's thinking about me at all, or whether I'm just the employer who pays her salary and signs her references and has no business imagining her naked in the room I provided.
My body responds either way.
Merde.
I'm standing in my own hallway outside my employee's bedroom door, wanting things I have no right to want.
I turn away without knocking.
Soon she will be in Bastien's apartment. Bastien, who has never understood boundaries. Bastien, who operates emotionally before strategically. Bastien, who studies people the way he studies art, with that focused intensity that makes them feel like he understands them on some deeper level.
The bastard will notice her. Of course he will.
The same things I've been noticing. The curves.
The mouth. The way she moves. He'll say something clever and watch her react and file away every detail for later.
He'll find excuses to be close. A hand on her back guiding her through his gallery.
Fingers brushing hers when he hands her a wine glass.
He won't care that she's staff. Bastien has never cared about being appropriate.
He'll want her.
And unlike me, he won't stand in a dark hallway talking himself out of it.
The thought settles under my ribs and stays there.
I can tell it is embedded so deeply it is going to be very difficult to extract.