CHAPTER 53
Ada
For nine years I had known exactly what I would say if Sebastian Vale ever knelt in the jasmine again, and now that he was down there in it (grass staining the knee of a suit that cost more than my first lab, steel-grey eyes tilted up at me, the ring small and steady between his fingers), every rehearsed word had gone out of me like breath.
Silence. Mine. The novelty of it was almost funny.
Behind him the field ran on to the hills, row after white row breathing out that green-sweet perfume I’d spent my whole life trying to bottle and never quite caught, because you cannot bottle a place that also happens to be a wound.
Grasse at harvest. The same fields. He had brought me back to the scene of the crime, and I understood he’d meant it exactly so, not a do-over of the beautiful lie, but a confession made where the lie was born.
“Ada,” he said, when he couldn’t stand the quiet. “You don’t have to—”
“Be quiet,” I told him. “I’m choosing my words. You of all people should let me have that.”
His mouth closed. Nine years ago I had answered before he finished the question, twenty-one and drunk on the smell of the flowers and on him, a girl who mistook being wanted for being seen.
That girl had said yes to a man who talked about people the way he talked about acquisitions.
I was not going to hand this to her ghost.
“When you asked me the first time,” I said, “I said yes to being loved. That was the mistake. I gave you the whole thing and kept nothing back for myself, and you spent it, and you told me I’d married up while you did it.
” I watched the words land, watched him take them, because he took them now; that was the difference in him, four years earned one apology at a time.
“So I need you to understand what you’re asking, and what I’m answering.
Because it is not the same question, and I am not the same yes. ”
“Tell me,” he said. “All of it.”
“Equals.” I held up one finger. Absurd, counting terms on my hand over a kneeling man like a contract, and neither of us laughed.
“Not the CEO and the girl in the white coat. Not the Vale name and whoever it lets stand beside it. Equals, or nothing. Second.” Another finger.
“The truth. Even when it’s ugly. Especially then.
You threw me away once because you believed a lie you found more comfortable than me. Never again.”
“Yes.” No hesitation. The word came out of him rough.
“Theo first.” My voice thinned at the edge, and I let it. “Before your board, before your name, before your pride. Before me, if it comes to it. He is three, and he draws lions instead of talking, and he waited four years for a father to be worth the wait. Don’t make a liar of me.”
“Ada.” Just my name. His jaw worked the way it did when he was holding something too large to say.
“And Maison Cendre is mine.” I lowered my hand.
“My work, my house, my name on the door. You don’t fund it, you don’t fold it into anything, you never again put another woman’s face on a thing my hands made.
I made éternel in a lab you built me and let the world call it hers.
My next masterpiece dies in the bottle before I let that happen twice. ”
“It’s yours,” he said. “It was always yours. I know that now like I know my own name.”
The jasmine moved around us. Off to the left a small tornado in a striped shirt tore between the rows, copper hair flaring through the white blossom, arms out like a plane, chasing a swallowtail he had no hope of catching and would not be told so.
Our son. In a field where his parents had made him a promise before they’d made him, running through it now like he owned the light.
I looked back down at Sebastian, and the last of the fear had gone.
Not because I trusted him: that I was still building, board by board, the way you rebuild a house you watched burn.
But because this time I was choosing with my eyes open.
Not the girl in the jasmine. The woman who’d survived leaving it.
“On those terms,” I said, and my voice came out clear as a struck glass, “yes. I’ll marry you again, Sebastian Vale. On purpose. This time all the way through.”
The relief that broke over his face was nothing like the relief I’d once watched flicker there when he thought I’d be reasonable and disappear.
This one undid him. He got the ring onto my finger with hands that were not quite steady, and it caught the light and kept it, and he pressed his mouth to my knuckles the way I had once watched him press it to another woman’s, except this was mine, given back, made true.
He stood, and I was already reaching for him, jasmine crushing green-sweet under our feet, his mouth finding mine warm and certain and nine years overdue.
A body hit us both at knee height. Theo, breathless, blossom in his hair, planted between us with a swallowtail nowhere in evidence and a scowl of enormous three-year-old suspicion, looking from his father’s face to mine and back.
“Are you going to marry my mama again?”
And over our son’s copper head, in the field where it all began, Sebastian and I looked at each other and both said, “Yes.”