CHAPTER 22
Ada
Estelle came to the atelier the next morning while the diffusers were still warming, and she did not sit down, which was how I knew she was frightened.
“I heard a name in the trade rooms yesterday,” she said, drawing off her gloves one finger at a time.
“Vale. He has taken a suite at the Meurice and a table at every launch between here and September. A man does not lay siege to a city he has already conquered, Adeline. He is looking for something.” Her pale eyes found mine over the organ, over the two hundred essences I’d built one by one across four years. “Or someone.”
I kept my hands moving. A blotter, a dip, a breath. “Then he can look.”
“Delphine says you nearly lost the boy on the rue de Poitou.”
So Delphine had called her. Of course she had. I set the blotter down. “A bus. A crowd. Theo let go of my hand for four seconds. It happens to every mother in Paris every single day.”
But it hadn’t felt like every mother. It had felt like the pavement itself opening, like the trapdoor over the trapdoor over the dark, and when the bus slid past and the space where the tall man had been was only empty air, I’d held Theo so hard he’d squirmed and said Mama, you’re crushing my lion.
Delphine arrived at noon with a lawyer’s card and a worse idea.
“Lyon,” she said, before she’d even shut the door.
“Or Geneva. You have the Swiss accounts, you have the alias, you have… Ada, you have a son. We build the case quietly, we get an injunction ready, and if he so much as says your real name in a room, we’re already gone.
” She put the card on the counter between us the way Sebastian had once set down a champagne flute.
Final. Reasonable. “You did it once. You can do it again.”
And there it was. The word that turned my blood from ice to iron.
Again.
“No,” I said.
“Ada…”
“I ran once.” My voice came out steady, and I marveled at it the way I’d marveled in that gallery behind the stage, a lifetime ago.
“I ran out of a service corridor at midnight with a positive test in my clutch and no plan past the airport, and I told myself I was being brave. I wasn’t.
I was surviving. There is a difference, and it took me four years and a city to learn it.
” I picked up the lawyer’s card and held it, and did not tear it, because Delphine had given it to me out of love.
“The entire point of everything I built, the atelier, the name on the door, Estelle at my organ, forty people downstairs who eat because of what I make. The point was that I would never again be a girl who has to disappear to be safe. If I run to Geneva, I am the girl in the jasmine again. Terrified. Nameless. Somebody’s secret. ”
Delphine’s jaw worked. “And if you stay and he takes him?”
“He won’t take him.” I said it and I believed it, and belief, I had learned, was a thing you could build on purpose, the way you build an accord.
Top note, heart, base. “I don’t protect Theo by fleeing.
I protect him the way I protected myself.
I build the walls so high and so beautiful that Sebastian can throw himself against them until his knuckles bleed and it will not matter, because I own the ground he’s standing on.
” I set the card down. “I am not the girl who fled a gala, Del. I’m the woman who took his stolen scent and his stolen name and made something out of nothing that he flies to Paris to stand near.
Let him stand near it. Let him see exactly what he threw away. ”
Delphine looked at me for a long moment. Then, very quietly: “There she is.” And she almost smiled.
That night I ran Theo’s bath too hot and had to cool it, and he told me about the ducks in the Tuileries and a dog named Biscuit and the specific injustice of green beans, and by the time I tucked the duvet under his chin he was drawing on the pad he refused to sleep without.
A lion. Always a lion. This one had a mane like a sunburst and too many teeth.
“Big day,” I said, and kissed the copper crown of his head, which smelled of chamomile and warm child and the particular sweetness I would have known blind in a room of a thousand children.
“Mama.” He didn’t look up. He was shading the mane, tongue between his teeth, shy and careful the way he got when a thing mattered. “There was a tall man. At the shop with the blue door.”
Everything in me went still, the blotter halfway to the counter.
“What tall man, my love?”
“He was looking at me.” Theo chose a new crayon, considered it, began another lion beside the first, smaller, its mane just starting.
“For a long time. He didn’t say anything.
” He frowned at the page, at the two lions, the big one and the small one, and I could not breathe, and the room smelled of chamomile and I could not breathe.
“He had eyes like mine, Mama,” Theo said, drawing another lion. “Why did he look at me like that?”
And my blood went to ice.