Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
BASTIEN
It takes me three days to realize the apartment sounds different.
Not louder. Not quieter. Just warmer, somehow. Like someone rearranged the molecules while I wasn't paying attention.
I notice it the way I notice everything: in fragments, in details that shouldn't matter but do.
Drawers close without slamming. Forks meet plates without that hollow bachelor echo Luc and I have perfected over two years of eating in silence.
The kitchen smells like actual food instead of survival.
Butter, coffee, something with citrus that lingers in the walls long after breakfast disappears.
I'm standing in the hallway in yesterday's shirt, having fallen asleep in the studio again, listening to my own apartment like I'm casing the place.
This is ridiculous. I live here, for God's sake.
But then I hear something I don't recognize.
Luc is talking.
I stop walking. Actually stop, hand still on the doorframe, because I must be hearing this wrong.
Luc doesn't talk in the mornings. Luc doesn't talk most of the time, not since Claire left, not since the custody arrangement turned him into a boy who rotates between two parents like a library book, careful not to get too attached to either shelf.
He answers questions. He completes assignments.
He exists in my apartment one week at a time with the light tread of a guest who knows the visit is temporary.
But that's his voice coming from the kitchen. Full sentences. Something about shadows and angles, and he's explaining it like it matters, like he expects someone to understand.
"And if the chair is near the window, the shadow gets longer, which makes it more interesting." A pause. The sound of a fork against a plate. "Most people don't notice. They just see a chair."
"So the shadow is doing all the work?" Madeline's voice, and she sounds genuinely curious, not performing interest the way adults do with children. "The chair is almost irrelevant."
"Exactly."
That one word. The relief in it. The surprise of being understood.
I've been trying to get Luc to talk to me about art for two years.
Tried taking him to galleries, to studio visits, to openings where he stood beside me in his good jacket and said nothing and looked at his shoes.
I thought maybe he wasn't interested. Maybe he was too young.
Maybe Claire was right, and I see everything through a curator's eye, and that eye is too sharp to be comfortable.
But he's talking to her about shadows! Three goddamn days, and he's telling her things he's never told me!
I should feel jealous. I think I'm supposed to feel jealous. That would be the normal father reaction.
Instead I feel something closer to relief.
I move to the doorway.
She's at the stove, back to me, and the kitchen looks different too.
Not rearranged, she hasn't moved anything, but somehow cohesive.
The chaos of my life has been edited into something that makes sense.
Eggs on one burner. Toast in the machine.
Fruit cut into pieces on the counter, small enough that Luc can't claim he's too busy to eat them.
She's wearing a pale pink sleep shirt that falls just past her thighs. Her hair is piled into something between a bun and a structural failure, pieces escaping down her neck. There's flour on her collarbone. She hasn't noticed.
I notice. Of course I notice.
She looks soft. Unguarded. And that has no business landing as hard as it does.
I look away. Force myself to look away. It doesn't take.
Luc sees me first. His eyes flick to the doorway, and his shoulders tense, that half-second hesitation I've seen a hundred times. The one where he decides if it's worth the risk to keep talking.
He doesn't retreat.
"Papa looks like he slept in his clothes again," he says to Madeline, not to me. "He does that when he's working too much."
"I didn't sleep in my—" I look down and remember. Yesterday's shirt. Wrinkled. "Fine. I slept in my clothes."
Madeline turns. Those clear eyes take in the wrinkled shirt, the uncombed hair, the fact that I've clearly been lurking in the hallway like a creep instead of entering my own kitchen.
"Coffee's ready," she says. No judgment. No commentary. "You look like you need it."
"I need several things."
I move past her to the coffee. Close enough to smell flour and butter and something underneath—my soap, I realize. She's been using my soap. Which means she smells like me, which is information I have no business filing away with this much interest. And yet.
The gallery opening is tomorrow. The most important show I've mounted since the divorce, since Claire took half my collection and walked out with pieces I spent fifteen years acquiring.
This is supposed to be the comeback. The proof that I still know what I'm doing.
That Claire got the paintings but not the part of me that found them.
"The gallery," I say, pouring coffee. "I have to check the installation today."
"What time?" Luc asks.
"Four. Maybe earlier."
He pushes eggs around his plate. "I'm going to Hugo's today. His mum is picking us up. So you could take her." He nods toward Madeline without looking up. "To the gallery."
I look at him. He's not looking at me, he's looking at his eggs, moving them with great concentration, but I can see the calculation happening.
"She hasn't seen the gallery," he adds. Casual. Like he hasn't thought about this at all. "And you always forget to eat when you're there alone."
"I don't forget—"
"—You forget."
Madeline is doing something at the stove. I can see her shoulders shaking slightly. She's laughing. Silently, but she's definitely laughing at me.
Wonderful.
"It might help," she says, turning around with a completely neutral expression. "Understanding the schedule. What these weeks look like."
Professional framing. Reasonable justification.
But she wants to see it. I can tell. She's leaning slightly forward, weight on her toes, genuinely curious.
Claire never wanted to see the gallery. Six years of marriage, and she came to exactly three openings, always for the public events, never for the work itself.
"Be ready at four," I hear myself say.
Luc catches my eye across the table. He's giving me a look that says he knows exactly what just happened. I refuse to accept that I've been outmaneuvered by a seven-year-old.
I take my coffee to the studio. I have a spacing problem to solve.
Except I'm not thinking about spacing. I'm thinking about flour on a collarbone and the way my soap smells different on someone else's skin.
Putain. Get it together.
This is the problem with living alone for two years. You forget what it's like to have someone in your space. The sounds, the smells, the evidence of another person existing where you exist.
Two years since Claire left, eight months since the divorce finalized.
Long enough that Luc has adjusted. Too well, maybe, given the way he's learned to carry his belongings in a backpack and not leave anything important at either house.
Seven, and he already knows not to get too comfortable anywhere. That one never stops hurting.
The affair was with an artist. Of course it was.
Guillaume Tessier, whose career I built with my own hands.
I discovered him, promoted him, and convinced collectors to take a chance on an unknown.
And he repaid me by sleeping with my wife while I was too busy acquiring other people's work to notice what was being stolen from my own home.
I still see them at openings. Guillaume and Claire, perfectly styled, moving through my professional world like they belong there. Which they do, because I put them there. I built the whole damn stage they're standing on.
Claire took half my collection in the divorce.
She knew exactly which pieces I valued most. Which ones carried history.
The Bourgeois sculpture I found at a barn sale in Normandy.
The early Richter that everyone said was a fake until I proved it wasn't. "Asset division," the lawyers called it.
She took the proof of what my eye could do.
I don't make art. I decide what survives. Claire used to say that was the problem. That I curated people the same way.
Maybe.
But it wasn't always like that.
I still remember when I was twenty-two, I tried to sign a lease I couldn't afford. The landlord wanted a guarantor with actual money, not a kid with a vision.
étienne signed without reading the terms.
Raphael clapped me on the back afterward, laughing. "If he goes bankrupt, we all go bankrupt. That's the rule."
That was the deal. We built each other before we built anything else.
That was fifteen years ago. Before we learned how to tear each other apart instead.
This opening is the first step in rebuilding. But if the spacing is wrong, none of it matters.
I spend the morning recalculating. Redrawing. Moving pieces around on the floor plan until my coffee goes cold and Luc appears in the doorway to tell me his friends are arriving and Madeline made sandwiches and saved me one.
"Eat it," he says, holding out a plate. Ham and cheese, crusts cut off. She remembered I don't like crusts. "You're being weird."
"I'm working."
"You're obsessing. There's a difference." He sets the plate on my desk when I don't take it. "She's nice."
I look up from my diagrams. "Madeline?"
"No, the other woman living in our apartment." He rolls his eyes with the particular disdain of a kid who has decided his parent is an idiot. "Yes, Madeline. She actually listens. Like she cares what you're saying."
He shrugs, already halfway out the door.
"She saved you the good cheese," he adds. "I wanted it."
He disappears before I can respond, and I sit there with my cold coffee realizing my son has said more to me in five minutes than he has in a month.