CHAPTER TWO
Ada
The Vale Group atrium had been turned into a cathedral of light.
Forty thousand white roses. A ceiling of suspended crystal that threw the room into a thousand shivering prisms. Six hundred guests in couture, and above them all, three storeys high, a silk banner unfurling the single word that had eaten two years of my life:
éTERNEL.
I came in through the service corridor in a bottle-green gown I’d chosen because it was the color of the jasmine leaves, and no one looked at me twice.
That was the strange, invisible power I’d had for two years: the CEO’s wife who was never quite introduced, kept a half-step out of every photograph, a lovely blank in the corner of Sebastian’s life.
I’d told myself it was privacy. Discretion. Ours.
I found the truth of it in ninety seconds.
Sebastian stood at the center of the room, and he was luminous: black tie, black hair, the grey eyes I’d fallen into scanning the crowd like a man counting his own kingdom. My chest did the old traitorous thing it always did at the sight of him.
And on his arm, in white, radiant, laughing up at him with the ease of someone who has never once been made to feel like furniture, was Chloe Beaumont.
He bent his head to hear her. He smiled: the real one, the brow-scar one, the one I’d thought was rationed to me.
Then the lights dropped, and a spotlight found them, and a voice like warm honey filled the cathedral.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Tonight, Vale Group doesn’t just launch a fragrance. Tonight we honor the extraordinary woman behind it.”
I stopped breathing.
“For two years, in absolute secrecy, one visionary poured her soul into a scent that captures love itself. A base of sandalwood. A heart of jasmine.” The words (my words, the words I’d whispered against Sebastian’s chest in a field in Grasse) came out of a stranger’s script.
“Please welcome the heart and the hands behind éternel. The muse who dreamed it, and the artist who made it real: Miss Chloe Beaumont.”
The applause hit like weather.
And Sebastian (my husband, who had knelt in the jasmine, who had built me a secret kingdom, who had put a baby in me five weeks ago in Vienna and didn’t know) raised Chloe’s hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles while six hundred people and forty cameras roared.
Chloe stepped into the light and pressed a hand to her heart and said, “I’ve dreamed of this scent my whole life.”
She had never set foot in my lab. I would have smelled her there.
I don’t remember deciding to move. I remember the marble tilting, and the crystal ceiling raining light, and my own hand closing around the clutch where two pink lines and a wedding ring and the entire wreckage of my future sat folded in tissue.
I remember thinking, with that terrible new calm: He didn’t forget to credit me.
He chose her.
And I remember Sebastian’s eyes finding me at last across the roaring room: finding me, and holding for one half-second, and showing me nothing at all before he turned back to the woman in white.