Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
MADELINE
The gallery opening was a triumph.
I know because I watched it happen. Strangers pausing in the east corridor exactly where Bastien said they would, their faces shifting without understanding why. The invisible math of his obsession, landing exactly as intended.
He moved through the crowd. It was a version of him I hadn't met yet. Confident. In control. All that frantic energy from the week, the sleepless nights, the cold coffee, gone. Just a man finally letting people see what his eye could do.
I was happy for him. Genuinely happy. Which felt strange and warm and a little too real for someone who was supposed to be professionally detached. Once, near the end of the night, his gaze found mine across the room. Dropped to my mouth. Stayed there a beat too long.
We didn't talk about it. Not that night, not the next morning. Bastien said Bernard would come at ten. I said I'd be ready.
And now the Seine slides past the window and I'm pressing two fingers to my bottom lip.
My brain keeps serving up the same unhelpful replay. His hand on my jaw, the wall against my back, the sound he made when I pulled him closer.
And then, because my brain is a traitor, the memory shifts. étienne's study. Amber light. His fingers in my hair, sliding the pin free so slowly I forgot to breathe. I fold my hands in my lap and keep them there.
Bernard says nothing for the entire drive. Just lets me sit in the back seat having a quiet crisis while Paris scrolls past. Then, eventually, "We've arrived, Miss Blake."
I take a breath, then another. Pretend I'm the kind of woman who shows up to new households without the taste of another employer still on her lips.
The building is different from the others.
Not smaller. Raphael Beaumont built a hotel empire from nothing, and the address is still firmly in the kind of neighborhood where croissants cost eight euros and no one blinks.
But where étienne's building announced itself with carved stone and centuries of architectural disapproval, and Bastien's wore its beauty like an afterthought, this one just exists.
Quietly. Red brick weathered by age, window boxes spilling geraniums, a green door that looks like someone actually uses it.
Bernard pulls to the curb and retrieves my bag from the boot before I can protest.
I climb out. Smooth my dress. Check the thread on my sleeve that Sophie identified, which I still haven't cut because every time I look at it I think of her small fingers tugging at the fabric, her jaw set against the tears she refused to cry.
The green door opens before I reach it.
Raphael Beaumont is standing in the doorway in jeans and a soft gray sweater, a smudge of flour on his hand like he was in the middle of something domestic when the buzzer rang.
"Madeline." He says it simply and comfortably and without pretense. "Welcome. Come in."
He steps back to make room, and I notice three things in quick succession: the smile lines around his eyes are deeper in person than they were across the conference table, his shoulders are broader than I remembered, the kind of broad that makes you think of someone who builds things with his hands and doesn't mention it, and he smells like garlic and olive oil and something baking.
He was cooking.
My stomach, which subsisted on Bastien's decorative lemons and questionable cheese for a week, makes its interest known.
Okay, that's not entirely fair. He did order in a few times. But still.
"I hope the drive wasn't too long." He's already reaching past me, and for one disorienting second I think he's going in for an embrace, but his hand finds the handle of my suitcase where Bernard has materialized behind me. "I've got this, Bernard. Thank you."
Bernard surrenders the bag with a nod. "Miss Blake. Monsieur Beaumont."
And then he's gone, and I'm standing in Raphael Beaumont's entry hall watching a man worth several hundred million euros carry my suitcase himself. It strikes me that Bernard didn't give me any warnings or intel about Monsieur Beaumont, like he had with étienne and Bastien.
"Emma's in the kitchen," he says over his shoulder. "She's been asking about you since breakfast. Fair warning, she has questions."
"What kind of questions?"
"The kind only a kid her age can ask. Deeply philosophical. Mostly about whether you prefer cats or dogs and if you've ever met a princess."
I follow him down a hallway lined with photographs. A woman on a beach, laughing at something outside the frame. Emma as a toddler on a bicycle with streamers flying from the handlebars. The same woman holding a newborn, exhaustion and joy fighting for space on her face.
I slow without meaning to.
"Emma's in the kitchen," Raphael says again, and I realize I've stopped walking entirely.
"Sorry. I was just—"
"It's fine." He doesn't elaborate. Doesn't explain who she is. Just waits for me to follow.
The kitchen is warm. Messy. Loud with the sound of something bubbling on the stove.
Flour dusts the counter near a bowl of something that might become bread.
Children's drawings cover the refrigerator in overlapping layers, held up by magnets shaped like croissants, and there's a half-finished puzzle on the table and a stuffed rabbit propped against the fruit bowl like it's supervising.
And in the middle of it all, perched on a stool at the island with her chin in her hands, is Emma.
She sees me and her whole body goes still.
For one second, I brace for it. The assessment. The test. Sophie's cool evaluation or Luc's silent cataloguing.
Emma launches off the stool and crashes into my legs.
"You're HERE!"
Her arms wrap around my waist with the full commitment of someone who has not yet learned to hold anything back. Her face presses into my stomach. She's smaller than Sophie, softer somehow, all round cheeks and flyaway hair, and she's holding on like I might disappear if she lets go.
"I told Papa you'd come, but he said we had to wait and see and waiting is HARD and I made you a card, but then I spilled juice on it so I made you another card, but THAT one has a smudge, so I'm making you a THIRD card, but it's not done yet so you can't see it—"
The words pour out in one breathless stream. No pause for response. No space for doubt.
She's not testing me.
She's just… glad that I'm here.
I have to blink twice before I trust my voice.
"I can't wait to see the card," I manage. "Even if it's not quite done yet."
Emma pulls back just enough to look up at me. Brown eyes. Her father's eyes, warm and searching and completely without armor. "Sophie said you do really good braids. Like Elsa braids. Can you do Elsa braids?"
"I can try."
"Can you do them NOW?"
"Emma." Raphael's voice is gentle. Amused. "Maybe let her put her bag down first."
"But Papa—"
"—Bag. Then braids."
Emma sighs with the profound suffering of a child who has been asked to wait five entire minutes for something she wants.
She releases my waist, grabs my hand instead, and starts pulling me toward the hallway.
"Your room is next to mine," she announces.
"I picked it. Papa said I could pick. There are two guest rooms, but the other one doesn't have good light in the morning and Sophie said you like morning light because you always open the curtains first thing at her house, so I picked the one with the window that faces east because that's where the sun comes up. I learned that in school—"
She's still talking as she drags me up the stairs. Still holding my hand like she's afraid I'll vanish if she lets go.
I glance back.
Raphael is standing at the bottom of the stairs, dish towel still over his shoulder, watching us go.
He catches me looking. Offers a small smile.
I turn back to Emma before my expression can give me away.
The guest room is simple. Cozy bedding, pale wood, fresh daisies on the nightstand. A window seat overlooking the garden.
"Do you like it?" Emma is hovering in the doorway. "I picked the flowers. Papa said roses, but I said daisies because roses are fancy and you don't seem fancy. Not in a bad way! In a good way. Sophie is fancy. Luc is... Luc." She waves her hand vaguely, as if this explains everything. "But you're—"
"—Not fancy?"
"Normal." She says it like it's the highest compliment she knows how to give. "I like normal."
I set my bag on the bed. "I like normal too."
Emma beams. Physically beams, like someone turned on a light inside her.
"Okay, but NOW can we do braids?"
We end up on the window seat, Emma positioned between my knees, her hair damp from an apparent pre-arrival bath and smelling like strawberry shampoo.
Her hair is different from Sophie's. Thicker, wavier, with a tendency to curl at the ends that makes the Elsa braid more negotiation than execution.
But she sits perfectly still while I work, occasionally offering commentary on crucial matters like her teacher's new shoes and whether fish have feelings.
"Sophie says fish don't have feelings because they have small brains," she reports. "But I think that's mean. Maybe they have really small ones though. Like, tiny. Because their heads are tiny. So the feelings would have to be tiny too, right?"
"That seems fair."
"Do YOU think fish have feelings?"
"I think," I say carefully, separating another section, "that we can't always know what someone else is feeling just by looking at them."
Emma sits with this for a moment. "Like Papa."
My hands pause. "What do you mean?"
"He does this thing where he smiles, but it's not... like, it's just his mouth? Not his eyes. Mama used to make his eyes smile. I've seen it in videos."
I don't know what to say to that. I keep braiding.
"Do you have a mama?" Emma asks.
"I do. She lives in America."
"Do you miss her?"
The question is so simple and so complicated that I have to think about it. "Sometimes. We're not very close."
"Why not?"
"I don't know, actually. We just... aren't."
Emma processes this. "That's sad."