Chapter 7 What the Fog Left Behind #3
He reached over and tucked her hand through his arm — not a romantic gesture, not a grand one, just the particular action of a man who has heard something important and wants to make sure the person who said it is still physically close to him.
She let him. She leaned into his shoulder a very small amount, which was her version of the same thing.
They turned back toward the hotel.
"If the test is positive," she said, after a few minutes of walking, "I want to meet her.
Eventually. Not immediately, not before you've figured out what this is and what Juliette needs.
But I want — I want you to know that I'm not going anywhere.
Not from you, not from us, not from the possibility of Juliette.
" She watched the pavement. "I grew up in a bakery that smelled like other people's birthdays.
My mum made cakes for babies she'd never met.
She always said the best thing you could do with extra warmth is find somewhere it's needed.
" She paused. "I'm not saying I know what I am to a four-year-old girl in the Jura. I'm just saying I'm not closed."
Cassian said nothing. But his arm tightened against his side, pressing her hand more firmly there, and she took that for what it was.
"The promise goes both ways," he said, when they reached the Embankment steps.
"I know you know that. But I want to say it out loud.
I won't manage you. I won't pre-digest things for your protection.
I'll tell you inside the mess." He stopped on the bottom step and turned to look at her directly.
"I need you to believe I mean that and not just that I'm saying it because you've just said all the right things. "
"I believe you're going to try," she said. "That's enough for tonight."
Something in his posture let go. Not a collapse — more like a sail when the rigging is properly adjusted, a settling into the correct shape.
He held the door open for her at the top of the steps and she walked through and thought about the word we and the way his face had looked when she said it, and she tucked that away in the part of herself that she used when she needed to remember why this was worth the complicated parts.
They walked back through the Mayfair streets, her hand still through his arm, the November air pressing cold against their cheeks, and she was thinking about Delphine Marchetti and her loud laugh and her very clear sense of her own surname, and she was thinking about a four-year-old girl in the Jura with a preference for strawberry yogurt, and she was thinking about the word door — Delphine's word, she left a door open — and about all the doors that mattered most in a life, how they were almost never the grand ones with brass fittings, but the ordinary ones that someone had kept unlocked for no reason other than hope.
Her phone buzzed against her thigh.
She ignored it.
It buzzed again. Then a third time in rapid succession — the triple-notification pattern of a tagged post or breaking alert, something with traction.
She would have kept ignoring it, except that Cassian felt the change in her pace.
"Go ahead," he said.
"It's probably nothing." But her hand was already moving.
She unlocked the screen and the notification was sitting at the top, bold and unmissable, from a gossip account she'd been tagged in by someone — she didn't know who, it didn't matter who — and the photograph was blurry but absolutely clear: Cassian, unmistakable in his dark coat, the watch catching the light on his wrist, descending the steps of a brick building she now knew was Hargrove & Fenn, Harriet's office. The caption read:
Sterling spotted at family-law specialist — secret child? Sources close to the billionaire say the tech mogul has been in contact with a French solicitor for several weeks. His spokesperson declined to comment. More to follow.
She stared at it for two full seconds.
Then she looked up at Cassian.
He had already seen it in her face. He stood very still on the pavement outside the hotel, and in the ambient glow of the street lamps his expression was that of a man who has just watched a fuse light from across a room and is calculating the distance to the charge.
"Cassian," she said, quietly.
"I know."
She turned the phone face-down against her palm.
"So much for four to six weeks," she said.
He looked at her, and what she saw in his face was not the boardroom composure and not the careful management and not the pre-digested version of anything.
It was just him, standing on a Mayfair pavement in the cold, with nothing between them except the truth of what was coming — and the fact that she was still, her hand in his arm, standing next to him.
She was going to need all of her emotional intelligence for what came next.
She could feel the dimensions of it gathering at the edges of the evening like weather coming off a mountain range: vast, indifferent, and entirely committed to arriving on its own schedule, regardless of what either of them had planned.
Her thumb hovered over the phone screen.
She didn't open the article. Not yet.