CHAPTER 51
Ada
I crossed the atelier and did not stop crying, and that was the first thing I understood about the woman I was becoming: she wept and moved anyway.
Sebastian lifted his head from the table when he heard me.
His face was ruined in the way I’d only ever let myself imagine on the cruelest, most satisfying of my Paris nights.
And now that it was here in front of me, real and wet and undefended, the satisfaction had drained off somewhere and left only a man.
My organ flung its two hundred notes into the air between us, sandalwood and orris and crushed green leaf, the whole vocabulary I’d built to say the things I couldn’t.
For four years this room had been my armor.
I’d made it a place no Vale could enter.
He was in it now. And I was the one who’d let him.
“Don’t,” he said, hoarse, when I reached him. “Ada, don’t cry for me. I’m not… I haven’t earned your—”
“I’m not crying for you.” I pressed the heel of my hand under one eye. “You don’t get to tell me what my crying is for. Not anymore. Not ever again.”
He went still. Took the correction the way he was learning to take all of them now, with his whole body, like a man setting down something he’d been told for years he was allowed to carry.
“No,” he agreed quietly. “No. You’re right.”
I stood over him with the last of my armor coming off plate by plate, and it did not feel like surrender.
That was the thing no one warns you about.
Surrender is going soft because you’re too tired to stay hard.
This was the opposite. This was me, clear-eyed, thirty years old, choosing to set the weapon down on the bench because I had finally decided the war was not the thing I wanted to win.
“I love you,” I said.
The words did not shake. I’d made sure of that. I’d waited until they cost me the safety of never having said them, until there was no taking them back, until they were the most expensive thing in a room full of expensive things. And then I spent them, on purpose, with my eyes open.
Sebastian didn’t move for a full breath. Like a man afraid that if he reached for it, it would prove to be a scent and not a substance, there and then gone, the way I’d been.
“I earned that,” he said. Not a question. A man checking whether the ground would hold him.
“You earned the right to hear it,” I said.
“You did not earn me. Those are different, and they’re going to stay different, and if you ever confuse them again I will walk out of this room and you will never find the door I leave by.
” I took a breath that tasted of jasmine.
“I’m not the girl who married up. I never was.
Maison Cendre is mine. My name goes first: on the door, on the bottle, in the story people believe.
Not because you allow it. Because it’s true, and you’ll spend the rest of your life being a man who tells the truth about me. ”
“Yes.” His voice cracked clean through. “God, yes.”
“And Theo is the center. Not you. Not me. Him.” I let that one land where it needed to. “We build everything around that boy and we tell him no lovely lies about who made what. He gets to grow up knowing exactly whose hands he came from.”
“Equals,” Sebastian said, like he was tasting the shape of a word he’d never once used about me in two years of marriage. “You and me. Level.”
“Equals,” I said. “Which means you don’t get to kneel your way out of this, and you don’t get to buy your way in. There’s no grand gesture that fixes four years. There’s just the next true thing, and then the one after that.”
He reached up (slowly, telegraphing it, giving me every chance to step back) and took my hand from my face where it had been pressed to my own tears.
He turned it over. Kissed the palm, once, nothing like the way he’d kissed Chloe’s knuckles for the cameras, because there were no cameras and no board and no story to sell, only my hand and his mouth and the ruined honesty of him.
“Then let me do the next true thing,” he said.
I should have pulled back. The old me would have. Instead I let my forehead come down against his, and we breathed the same air, thick with the scent I’d built from a field and a promise and a lie, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.
“There’s one thing left,” he said finally, against my mouth.
“One thing I have to do, and I can’t do it here.
It won’t count here.” His grey eyes came up to mine, wet and steady and terribly certain.
“It has to be where it all began. Where I got it right, before I spent everything getting it wrong.”
I knew. Of course I knew. The sandalwood knew, and the jasmine knew, and the twenty-one-year-old girl asleep at the bottom of me woke up and knew.
“Come to Grasse with me,” he said. “To the field.”
And I understood exactly which field he meant.