CHAPTER ONE
Ada
The morning of the gala, I found out I was pregnant in a Vale Group bathroom with a marble floor that cost more than my mother’s funeral.
Two lines. Pink, unmistakable, faintly obscene under the recessed lighting. I sat on the edge of the tub for a long time with the test balanced on my knee and my heart going somewhere very fast and very far away.
Five weeks. I did the math twice. Five weeks meant the night in Vienna, the good night, the one where he’d looked at me the old way, before the meetings and the silences and the growing distance that I kept telling myself was just the price of building an empire.
A baby.
I pressed my hand flat to my stomach and, for one clean, foolish second, I was happy. Uncomplicatedly, stupidly happy.
Then I wrapped the test in tissue, slid it into the inner pocket of my clutch, and went to work, because tonight the world would finally meet the thing I had spent two years of my life creating, and I did not intend to miss it.
The éternel lab occupied the twenty-second floor, unmarked, keyed to my thumbprint alone.
Sebastian had built it for me in the first year of our marriage: your secret kingdom, he’d called it, back when he still gave me things instead of instructions.
It was the one place in the entire glittering machine of Vale Group that was purely mine.
I let myself in and breathed, and the tension in my shoulders loosened the way it only ever did in here.
The final accord waited on the organ: the tiered bench of two hundred essences where I built my scents like a composer builds a chord.
éternel was finished. Had been for weeks.
But tonight was the launch, and I wanted to check her one last time, the way you check a sleeping child’s breathing even though you know it’s fine.
I touched a blotter to the mother bottle and drew it under my nose.
Sandalwood. Jasmine. That impossible green-white sweetness.
Grasse. The field. Us.
My eyes stung, and I told myself it was the pregnancy.
“…doesn’t even know, apparently.”
The voice drifted through the propped door from the corridor. Two of the launch staff, coffees in hand, killing the last hour before the chaos.
“How does she not know? It’s her husband’s company.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Mr. Vale’s kept it locked down. But my sister’s on the press team and she saw the run of show.” A pause, a lowered voice, delicious with gossip. “Tonight they’re introducing the ‘creator’ of éternel. The face of the whole campaign. The nose behind the magic, blah blah.”
I went very still, the blotter halfway to the counter.
“So? Everyone knows who made it.”
“That’s the thing. It’s not…” The voice dropped further, and I had to strain. “It’s Chloe Beaumont. They’re presenting Chloe as the creator. Full spread, the interviews, the perfume named after her grandmother’s garden, the whole story. It’s already printed.”
The blotter slipped from my fingers and drifted to the marble floor.
“No way. Isn’t the wife the one who…”
“Guess the wife didn’t make the cut.”
They wandered off, laughing about something else, the way people do when they’ve just casually stepped on a landmine that belongs to someone they’ve never met.
I stood alone in my secret kingdom, in the scent of the field where a man had once promised to spend his life failing to deserve me, and I understood, with a calm that frightened me, that I had never been his wife.
I had been his supplier.
My hand went to my stomach. Then to my clutch, where two pink lines waited in a fold of tissue, next to a phone that hadn’t received a single message from my husband all day.
Not tonight, I told the calm thing rising in me. Let me see it first. Let me be sure.
Because part of me (the twenty-one-year-old in the jasmine) still refused to believe he could do this.
She was about to learn.