Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
MADELINE
The kitchen is a crime scene of coffee cups.
I count six before I stop counting. They're scattered across every surface, some still half-full and cold, others empty and abandoned mid-thought.
Sketches cover the table—on the backs of envelopes, a napkin, what appears to be an electricity bill.
Yet the chaos has a rhythm to it, like someone was chasing an idea across every available surface and didn't notice when morning happened.
At étienne's, I was dressed by six. Schedule reviewed by six-fifteen. Downstairs and professionally invisible by six-thirty. The silence in that apartment had weight. It watched you.
This apartment hums. Creaks. The music swelling up through the floorboards is something mournful and French I can't name, and layered under the coffee smell is turpentine and old books and a building that's been breathing for two hundred years.
Bastien is at the counter, absorbed in a small canvas propped against the wall. Same linen shirt as yesterday, more rumpled now, cuffs unbuttoned and shoved carelessly up his forearms. His reading glasses are somewhere in the disaster of his hair. He hasn't shaved. Possibly hasn't slept.
He's so focused on the painting he doesn't acknowledge my presence at all.
"There's coffee," he says to the canvas. "Some cups might be clean. Unclear."
"I can see that." I survey the graveyard of cups. "Several coffees, in fact. A whole coffee civilization, rising and falling across your countertops."
"Mm." His attention doesn't waver from the painting. "Luc is off today. No school runs. The housekeeper comes Tuesdays. Friday is the gallery opening and it's slowly destroying my will to live."
I wait for more. Context. Instructions. Anything resembling the detailed binder étienne handed me within fifteen minutes of my arrival.
He frowns at the painting. Adjusts it a centimeter to the left. Frowns harder.
Right. So this is how we're doing things here.
I open the fridge.
The situation is tragic. A bowl of lemons that might be decorative or might be a cry for help. Cheese that could go either way. Cream that expired four days ago. Half a baguette wrapped in a cloth that's seen better decades.
The pantry isn't much better. Pasta, at least. Olive oil. A jar of something that might have been pesto in a previous life.
This man is slowly starving himself surrounded by art worth millions.
"When did you last eat something that required actual cooking?"
He has to think about it. That's not a good sign. When it requires thought, the answer is too long ago.
"Claire used to handle meals." His hand pauses on the canvas frame, just for a beat, before continuing its restless adjustment. "Before that, my mother. Before that, whatever was closest to the studio at three in the morning." The words come out flat, careful. "I never learned."
Claire. The ex-wife. I know they divorced, it was in the briefing materials, but I don't know the details. The way he says her name, flat and careful, suggests I shouldn't ask.
"I'll make something," I say instead.
"You don't have to."
"You have eggs. You have cheese that's… probably fine. And you have me, and I won't tolerate men pretending coffee counts as a meal. Sit down."
He almost smiles. It's barely there, just a flicker at the corner of his mouth, but I catch it before it disappears.
He sits.
And then he watches.
Not the way a normal person watches someone cook.
Not zoned-out glances, not scrolling his phone while occasionally looking up.
Every movement I make—the scrape of the spatula against the pan, the way I push hair behind my ear when it falls forward, the specific angle of my shoulder as I crack eggs one-handed, showing off a little—has an audience of one, and he's not casual about it.
I've been looked at before. By men at bars who wanted something. By étienne's guests who wanted to figure out where I fit in the household. By étienne himself, who looked at everyone the way you'd look at furniture, appraising its value, deciding if it belonged in the room.
This is different. Bastien looks at me the way he looked at that canvas. Like I'm something he's trying to understand. Not because of what I can do for him, but because of something he sees that I can't.
It makes my skin warm. Makes me aware of every small movement, the tilt of my wrist, the way I reach for the salt, the line of my neck when I glance back at him over my shoulder.
He doesn't look away. Doesn't pretend he wasn't.
I turn back to the stove.
The eggs are almost done when I hear his pencil snap.
I glance over. He's staring down at two halves of a broken pencil like they betrayed him. Like he has no idea how his own hand did that. He sets both pieces down carefully. Picks up a new one from the chaos on the table.
But there's color on his cheekbones that wasn't there before.
I plate the eggs. Bring them to the table. Set one in front of him like a challenge.
He eats because I put food in front of him.
I can tell the difference by now between someone who's hungry and someone who's eating because a person is watching them.
He's the second one. Left to his own devices, he'd probably forget food existed until his body reminded him, and even then, he'd resent the interruption.
Something about that makes my chest tight. This man, alone in his apartment full of art, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep, no one making sure he takes care of himself.
That's not your job, I remind myself. You're here for Luc.
The tight feeling in my chest stays with me through the dishes.
I need to fill the space between us with something safe. "The gallery opening. Friday. What still needs to happen?"
He looks up. This, apparently, is a topic he has opinions about.
"The spacing in the east corridor is off. Half a percent, maybe less, but you can feel it when you walk through." He sets down his fork, fully engaged now. "And the centerpiece is too large, but I can't move it, so everything else has to work around it, and the math isn't mathing."
"The math isn't mathing," I repeat, amused.
"It's a technical term."
I laugh before I can stop myself.
He goes still. A different stillness this time. A surprised stillness, like he forgot people did that.
"So," I say, before the moment can turn into something else. "What should I be doing today? With Luc?"
He blinks. Like he forgot I'm actually employed here.
"Luc will emerge when he's ready. He needs time to observe people. Decide if they're worth the effort." He waves vaguely. "Don't worry. Read a book. Settle in."
"You want me to... do nothing?"
"I want you to give him space. He'll come to you when he trusts you. Forcing it makes it worse."
Every instinct I have rebels against the notion of not doing something. At Prestwick, we were trained to be useful every moment. To justify our presence through constant service. Sitting around feels like failure.
But Bastien's already lost in his work again, and I get the sense that arguing would be pointless.
I take my coffee to the living room.
The afternoon stretches out, strange and slow.
I try to read. The words don't stick. I keep listening for sounds from upstairs, from wherever Bastien is working, from anywhere in this unfamiliar apartment that might tell me what I'm supposed to be doing.
Around two, I hear footsteps.
Luc appears in the doorway. He looks at me for a long moment without speaking.
Then he walks in and claims the armchair in the corner like it's his designated territory.
He opens his sketchbook and starts drawing.
I wait for him to say something. He doesn't.
So I go back to my book.
Twenty minutes pass. Maybe more. The apartment creaks around us. The afternoon light shifts across the floor. Neither of us speaks.
It should be uncomfortable. It isn't.
There's something almost companionable about it, this silence. Two people existing in the same space without needing anything from each other.
The front door opens and closes. Bastien's voice drifts from the entry: "I need to check on the gallery. An hour, maybe two."
"Okay," Luc calls back, without looking up from his drawing.
And then it's just us.
I read. He draws. The apartment breathes around us.
When Bastien returns, the light has gone golden. He appears in the doorway looking more disheveled than when he left, charcoal on his fingers and something restless in his eyes.
"For dinner," he says. "I'll order something."
"I can cook again."
"You don't have to—"
"—I want to." I set down my book. "What does Luc like?"
Luc looks up. Surprised, maybe, that someone asked. "Pasta," he pipes up in a small voice, "With the sauce Papa does. But not burnt."
"I don't burn it. I caramelize it aggressively."
"That's burning, Papa."
"That's flavor, Luc."
I stand, smiling at the familiar rhythm of their bickering. "I'll make pasta. Without aggressive caramelization."
"Boring," Bastien says, but he's almost smiling too.
The pasta is simple. Garlic, good olive oil, the cheese that turned out to be intentionally stinky. Luc sits at the kitchen table while I cook, offering opinions about pasta shapes with unexpected authority.
"Penne is boring. Rigatoni is acceptable. Farfalle is for children."
"You are a child."
"I'm seven." He says this like it explains everything. "Farfalle is for babies."
Bastien wanders in and out, picking up sketches, putting them down, unable to settle. When the pasta is done, I slide a plate onto the table and look at him until he stops pacing and sits.
Luc talks more than I'd expected, about school, about a book he's reading, about his art teacher who apparently doesn't understand chiaroscuro.
After dinner, he disappears to his room and the apartment goes quiet.
I've changed into jeans and an old sweater, still not sure how comfortable I'm allowed to be here, still feeling like a guest who hasn't learned the rules yet. When I drift out to the balcony, Bastien is already there.
He hands me a glass of wine without asking if I want one.
"Luc sat in the same room as you," he says.
"He did."
"For how long?"
"A couple hours. On and off."
"He hasn't done that in a while." He takes a sip of wine. "Just existed near someone like that."
There's more behind that sentence. I can hear it. But he doesn't offer and I've learned when to wait.
"You're good with him," he says. "Natural."
"That's my job."
"No." He shakes his head. "What you do is your job. How you do it is something else."
The wine is making me warm. Or maybe that's not the wine at all.
"You changed," he says quietly. "The sweater is old. You've had it for years. There's a pull in the sleeve you haven't fixed."
"Are you analyzing my clothes?" I ask, thinking of Sophie.
"I'm noticing you." He says it simply. Not flirting. Stating. "There's a difference."
I pull my knees up to my chest, curling smaller, and I catch something shift in his expression. A tightening around his eyes, like what I just did told him something he wasn't ready to know.
"étienne keeps everything very structured," I say. "This is different."
"Yeah, I am different." No defense in his voice.
"étienne needs everything in the right place to understand it.
I just... watch. Until it makes sense." His gaze drifts over me, my shoulder, my hair, the way I'm tucked into the chair.
The way you'd look at a room you knew you were about to leave.
"He'll tell you what you're doing wrong. I'll just know."
"That's unsettling."
"Probably." He doesn't sound sorry.
"What do you see right now?"
The question comes out loaded and I know it.
He tilts his head.
"A woman who makes herself indispensable," he says slowly, "so people can't leave. But they still do. And every time they do, you make yourself smaller, more useful, more invisible. Because being needed is safer than being wanted."
I stop breathing for a second. Just a second. But he sees that too.
I think about my parents. The careful way they loved me, always from a distance, always conditional on me being who they expected. The way I learned to be helpful, to anticipate, to make myself essential, because at least then they noticed I was there.
"Who taught you that?" His voice is low now. "That being needed was the same as being wanted?"
"I don't remember not knowing."
He nods like this confirms something.
The evening light is fading, going purple at the edges, and somewhere in the apartment Luc is in his room, probably drawing, and the record has stopped but no one has turned it over.
"I should go to bed," I say, even though it's barely nine.
"You should." He doesn't move. Neither do I. "Madeline."
"Yes?"
"Thank you. For today."
I stand. Set my wine glass on the railing.
At the threshold, I pause. Look back.
He's watching me. But it's different now. Not the way he studied me over breakfast. This is heavier. He's a man looking at something he's already decided matters and not being happy about it.
"Goodnight, Bastien."
"Goodnight."
I climb the stairs. Past Luc's room, where light spills under the door and the faint scratch of pencil on paper tells me he is still drawing. Up another flight, into my own unfamiliar space.
I lie in the dark and listen to the apartment settle.
Music starts again below. Piano this time, something quiet and yearning.
What Bastien said stays with me. About making myself indispensable. About the difference between being needed and being wanted.
I think of the way he looked at me just now. Like I was already becoming a problem he didn't know how to solve.
He's wrong about one thing though.
Being wanted isn't safer than being needed.
Being wanted by a man who sees everything is the most dangerous thing I can imagine.