CHAPTER 7
Sebastian
The pen stopped over the blank where her name should have gone, and I sat there long enough that the legal team stopped pretending not to watch me.
Spousal disclosure. Standard for the campaign.
One line: spouse of record. I’d signed a thousand documents that month without reading them, and this was the one that wouldn’t let me.
Because to fill the line I had to write Adeline Vale, and Adeline Vale had walked out of a service corridor eleven days ago and dropped off the face of my ordered world, and no one could tell me where she’d gone.
I capped the pen. “Give me the room.”
They gave it to me. I called security instead of calling my wife, which tells you everything about the man I was.
Marcus had the manifests within the hour. He laid the tablet on my desk with the careful blankness of a man who has learned not to have opinions in front of me, and I read, and the floor of my chest gave way.
She’d flown commercial. The night of the gala, the same night, she’d bought a one-way seat on a red-eye to Paris.
Economy. Row 41, a middle seat over the wing, the cheapest fare in the cabin.
My wife, who had a jet idling forty minutes away, whose black card had no ceiling I’d ever found, had folded herself into coach between two strangers and gone.
And she hadn’t gone as mine. The name on the manifest was Rousseau. Adeline Rousseau.
I didn’t recognize it, and then I did, and that was worse.
Her mother’s maiden name. The mother whose grave she’d always visited alone, because I was forever in a meeting.
She’d reached back past me, past the whole life I’d built around her, and picked up the one name that had nothing of mine in it.
She’d shed me like a coat. Like something she’d only ever been wearing.
It kept turning over in me, wrong, and I sat with the tablet going dark in my hand until my mother’s heels came clicking across the marble.
“Sebastian.” She said it the way she’d said it my whole life, a name and a verdict at once. Chloe drifted in behind her in cream silk, her face arranged into concern. My mother sat. She did not ask. “You’ve had men pulling flight records. The whole floor knows. Stop.”
“She’s in Paris. Under a different name.”
“Good,” my mother said. “Let her be there.”
“Mother—”
“You dodged a bullet, darling, and you’re too proud to say thank you.
” She folded her hands. “A girl who marries a Vale and then vanishes the instant the spotlight isn’t on her.
What does that tell you? She wanted the name.
When she didn’t get the light she wanted, she left.
That isn’t a wife. That’s a gold-digger who overplayed her hand and had the sense to fold before the scandal. ”
“There’s no scandal,” I said. “She didn’t take anything.”
“Which is exactly how a clever one leaves.” Chloe’s voice, soft, reasonable, the voice that photographed like a dream.
“Sebastian, if you chase her to Paris, that’s the story.
CEO abandons his own launch to run after the wife who ran.
” She touched my sleeve. “You’ve protected the brand.
You’ve protected yourself. Let the poor thing go and grieve it quietly. It’s kinder.”
They were so certain. They had always been so certain, and I’d built a religion out of it, because it asked nothing of me but my pride, and my pride I had in abundance.
I told them they were right. I signed nothing. I went up.
The twenty-second floor was dark and unmarked, the way I’d built it: your secret kingdom.
I put my hand to the reader out of some idiot reflex, and it should have refused me; the lab was keyed to her thumbprint alone.
But her print sat in the system as its architect, and mine above hers as the man who’d paid for the walls, and the lock read me and turned green and let me into her.
She was everywhere.
She was in the two hundred little bottles ranked on the organ like a choir holding its breath.
In the white coat on its hook. In the blotter she’d dropped on the floor eleven days ago that no one had thought to sweep.
And she was in the mother bottle of éternel, unstoppered, breathing into the empty room: sandalwood and jasmine and that green-white impossible sweetness, the exact scent of a field outside Grasse where I’d once knelt in the dirt and promised a twenty-one-year-old girl the rest of my life.
I stood in it. In the smell of the night I’d proposed. She had bottled the best hour of my life molecule by molecule, in a room I never visited, and I had let a stranger in white stand up and claim she’d dreamed it.
The fear came up then: the first true one, not pride, not image, the animal one from underneath. You have made a mistake you cannot buy back. It rose through the sandalwood with my heart in its fist, and for one second I could not breathe in the field where I’d once been happy.
So I did what I had always done with things I couldn’t control.
I stepped back into the corridor. I pulled the door shut on the scent of her, on the field, on the girl in the jasmine and the fear that knew the truth before I did, and I heard the lock catch.
And I left it locked for four years.