CHAPTER 57
Ada
Delphine had my grandmother’s teacup in both hands and she still couldn’t keep it from rattling against the saucer.
We were in the back office of Maison Cendre, the good lamp on, the shutters half-drawn against the last blue of a Paris evening.
On the shelf behind her, the finished bottles of my newest accord caught the light and held it, the scent I’d built after four years of clawing my way up out of the wreckage Sebastian Vale had made of me.
I’d learned, somewhere in those years, to read a face the way I read a formula.
Delphine’s was all top notes tonight. Bright, brittle, hiding something dark and resinous in the base.
“Who was on the phone,” I said. Not a question anymore. I’d asked it three ways already.
She set the cup down. Gave up pretending. And when she looked at me, the woman who had walked me off a ledge in my first Paris winter, who had co-signed a lease on faith and a handshake, looked suddenly, terribly young.
“An old ghost,” she said.
“Delphine.”
“That’s all it is, Ada. A name I buried a long time ago, in a country I don’t go back to.” Her mouth twisted. “It seems the ground didn’t hold.”
“A name.” I kept my voice level, the way you keep a hand steady over a scale. “Whose name.”
She was quiet a long moment. Outside, a scooter went by, and the sound of it faded, and the office was just us and the scent of jasmine and cold ash that gave the house its soul.
“Cross,” she said finally. “There was a marriage. A debt, his, then mine, the way those things always end up. I ran before it could close over my head.” She laughed, and it had no bottom to it. “You of all people understand running.”
I did. God help me, I did. I knew the exact weight of a wedding ring set down on a stack of empty magnums. I knew what it was to be nobody’s on purpose (kept a half-step out of every photograph) and to decide, in one cold clean second, that you would rather be no one at all than that.
“I have to leave Paris,” she said. “Just for a while. Until I know how much he knows, and what he wants, and whether…” She stopped. “I won’t bring it to your door, Ada. Not to you. Not to Theo.”
And that was the thing that undid me: that even now, with her hands shaking, she was standing between the danger and my son.
“You’re not going alone,” I said.
“Ada—”
“No.” I came around the desk and took the teacup out of her hands before she broke it, and I held both her cold fingers in both of mine.
“Four years ago I got off a plane in this city five weeks pregnant with nothing but a suitcase and a formula in my head, and I did not know a single soul. And a woman I’d met exactly twice looked at me across a café table and said, stay, I’ve got you.
You’ve got me. That’s not a debt. That’s not a marriage.
That’s the only kind of vow I still believe in. ”
Her eyes went bright and full. “You have a child. You have a house with your name finally over the door. You have everything you bled for. You cannot throw it after me.”
“I’m not throwing it,” I said. “I’m spending it.
That’s the difference. Sebastian collected people.
I keep them.” I squeezed her hands. “We are not the women they threw away, Delphine. Not anymore. We’re the ones who came back for each other.
Whatever this Cross is, we deal with it together, or I chain myself to your ankle, your choice. ”
She laughed, wet and helpless, and pressed her forehead to mine, and for a moment I felt the whole hard-won shape of the life I’d built hold steady under us both. I’d learned strength the ugly way, in a marble bathroom with two pink lines. It wasn’t mine to hoard. It was mine to pass forward.
Then headlights swung across the shutters.
Not the wash of ordinary traffic. Slow, deliberate, the beam settling and stopping.
A long black car had pulled to the Cendre curb the way money always parks, like the street is a thing it already owns.
My stomach did something old and cold. I knew that kind of car. I’d been married to that kind of car.
Delphine went to the window. I watched the color leave her face by degrees, the way frost climbs glass.
“That’s not…” she whispered. “He wouldn’t come here…”
A door opened. A man got out. Tall, unhurried, in a coat cut too well for our little street, and he stood a moment on the pavement looking up at my name over my door as if he were pricing it.
Then he came to the glass and he smiled, and it was the smile of a man who has finally caught up with something he lost, and intends to collect interest.
Delphine’s hand found the edge of the desk and gripped it until her knuckles stood up like a row of stones.
He pushed the door. The bell above it rang, absurd and cheerful, into the silence.
“Hello, Mrs. Cross,” the stranger said, and Delphine went white.
TO BE CONTINUED: The Discarded Wives, Book 2.