CHAPTER 20
Sebastian
I had folded companies smaller than the war I fought with myself on the pavement outside Maison Cendre.
The note was in my breast pocket. Cream card stock, her hand, three sentences that managed to say no in a way no contract ever had.
Mr. Vale. There is nothing to discuss. Please direct future correspondence to my counsel.
Four years, and she still wrote her lowercase g with a little defiant tail, like it was daring me to read anything into it.
I read everything into it. That was the problem. That had always been the problem.
I could have sent the acquisitions team. I could have sent money, which was the language I actually spoke, the one that had never once failed me and had cost me the only thing that ever mattered. Instead I sent myself, uninvited, and pushed open a glass door into the smell of her.
That was the thing that undid me before I’d said a word.
Not the shop (though it was beautiful, spare and grey and lit like a chapel, blotters fanned on the counter like tarot).
It was the air. Sandalwood underneath, and over it something green and white and impossibly sweet, and my whole body remembered a field near Grasse before my brain could stop it.
My heart went sideways. I stood there like a boy.
“We’re closed for private appointments,” she said, not looking up. Then she looked up, and the room got very quiet.
Adeline Hart. Adeline Rousseau, the papers here called her, but I knew the freckles across the bridge of that nose, I’d counted them in a hundred mornings I’d been too arrogant to know I was rationing.
Copper hair pinned back. Green eyes that had once gone soft for me and now held me the way I’d held her in that gallery, showing me nothing, and God, so this was what it felt like.
I deserved it. I’d built it. It still took the wind out of me.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“I know.” I made myself not step toward her. The pull was a physical thing, a hand at my sternum. “I’m not here to buy you, Ada. I know how it sounds. I’ve said everything the wrong way for four years and I don’t have another wrong way left, so I’m going to try telling you the truth instead.”
“There’s no version of your truth I need.”
“éternel was yours.” The words came out rough.
I’d never said them aloud. “All of it. Every molecule. I let them put Chloe’s face on your soul because I was a coward who believed a lie he wanted to believe, and I have paid for it every single day, and I will keep paying, but I am done letting you think I don’t know. ”
For one heartbeat something moved behind the green. Then it closed, smooth as a vault.
“You should go,” she said, and came around the counter, to steer me, I realized, to put her body between me and the back of the shop where a staircase went up into the private dark.
But I’d already seen it. A child’s drawings taped along the wall by the stairs. Lions, dozens of them, manic and joyful, maned in orange crayon pressed so hard it had torn the paper in places. And at the foot of the stairs, small, absurdly small, a single shoe. Red. Toe scuffed white.
“Ada.” My voice did something I didn’t authorize.
She moved. Smooth, unhurried, but she moved: a half-step that put her shoulder in my sightline, her hand light on my arm, the first time she’d touched me in four years, and even that, even that, went through me like current.
“Sebastian. You’ve said your piece. Now leave, before I stop being polite. ”
She walked me to the door with her hand still at my elbow, and I let her, because the alternative was staying and shattering, and because her fingers were on me for three whole seconds and I was greedy enough to take them.
At the glass I stopped.
Taped to the door at the height of a small arm, facing out at the street like a flag, was another lion.
Cruder than the others. Newer. A round body, four stick legs, a grey scribble for eyes (grey, not yellow, insistent grey) and a mane like a sunburst, and underneath, in the shaking capitals of someone just learning them: THEO.
My thumb found the paper before I decided to touch it. The crayon was waxy under it, real, warm from the window.
“Yours?” I asked, and I didn’t know what I was asking. Only that my pulse was in my throat and the whole grey chapel of her life had tilted a degree and I couldn’t say why.
“A neighbor’s child,” she said.
The lie came out of her smooth and instant and perfect. And I saw, just for a flicker, how much she hated how easily it came.