CHAPTER 8
Ada
Paris did not care that I was dying a little every morning over a chipped sink in the Marais.
That was the first thing the city taught me, and it taught it without malice, the way it did everything: the gilded balconies and the geraniums and the light coming gold down the rue des Rosiers while I knelt on cold tile and gave up whatever I’d managed to keep down the night before.
Weeks of this now. The nausea didn’t arrive like weather anymore; it lived in me, a tenant that paid no rent and never slept.
I had eleven hundred euros left, and I would not touch the accounts.
I checked them once, in the first week, in an internet café that smelled of scorched espresso and other people’s cigarettes.
The joint accounts sat there, obscene, seven figures of Vale money glowing on the screen, and beside them a card that would clear a flat on the ?le Saint-Louis without a flicker.
His money. His name on every euro of it.
I closed the tab and walked out into the rain and I never opened it again.
I would rather starve on my own terms than eat one mouthful bought with the name he’d told me was never mine.
So I took a room instead. Sixth floor, no lift, a window that opened onto a light well and a mattress that had known too many bodies before mine.
The landlady wanted a deposit I didn’t have, so I sold my earrings: the jasmine studs he’d given me the morning after Grasse, tiny gold blossoms I’d worn to sleep for five years.
The pawnbroker on the rue de Turenne weighed them in his palm, offered me ninety euros, and I said yes without letting my voice do anything at all.
I walked out lighter by the only soft thing I’d let myself keep. It felt, absurdly, like winning.
Because here was the ember I carried up all six flights, the coal I banked every night and blew on every morning: whatever I made now would be mine.
This child. This gift. There was no board to approve it, no campaign to reassign it, no woman in white waiting in a spotlight to press a hand to her heart and say she’d dreamed it her whole life.
I had a nose and a fury and nothing else in the world, and the nose, at last, was working for no one but me.
I’d walk the city for hours to prove it.
That was the ritual. When the money-fear got loud I’d go out and read Paris the only way I knew how: by scent, block by block, the way other people read street signs.
Fresh figs and diesel on the rue de Bretagne.
The green-mineral breath of the Seine near the Pont Marie.
A boulangerie exhaling butter and burnt sugar that made my stomach turn and water at once.
I couldn’t afford any of it, but I could name all of it, and naming it was a kind of ownership no one could sign away.
This one is mine. And this. And this. I built whole formulas in my head I had no lab to make.
I was richer walking those streets with empty pockets than I had ever been on Sebastian Vale’s arm.
The city was beautiful and it did not love me back, and to my surprise I preferred it that way. Beautiful things had loved me before. I knew now what it cost.
It was a Thursday, a month into all of it, when my body finally called the debt.
I hadn’t eaten since the morning before: money, and the nausea, and a stubbornness that had curdled somewhere past pride into something stupider.
I’d gone out to walk it off, up toward a shuttered parfumerie I’d found on a side street off the rue Saint-Claude, its windows soaped white, a ghost of a shop with a wrought-iron sign I liked to stand under and imagine.
The old glass still held a whisper of what it had been (orris and civet and a century of women’s wrists), and I’d press close to breathe it like a woman at a locked church.
I got there. I remember the sign. I remember lifting my face to it.
Then the cobbles tilted the way the marble had tilted the night everything ended, and the gold light went to grain, and the whisper of orris rushed up all at once and swallowed me.
My knees were already gone. I put a hand out for a wall that wasn’t there.
Somewhere very far away I thought, with the last clear thought I had, not the baby, please, not this, this is the one thing that’s mine…
And I fell.
But my head never met the stone.
A pair of hands caught me (strong, sudden, ringed with heavy silver that bit cold into my arms) and held me up out of the dark by main force.
Perfume closed over me, dense and expensive and unmistakably old-world: leather, iris, ambergris worn by someone who understood it.
A woman’s voice, low and dry and utterly unhurried, spoke just above my ear, as if we had all the time in the world and she had merely paused to remark on the weather.
“Easy,” she said. “I have you.” A breath. Then, with the faint amusement of a verdict already reached:
“You have the hands of a perfumer. And the eyes of someone who’s been robbed.”