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Chapter 53: What He Doesn't Hide

Autor: Romance Addict
last update Data de publicação: 2026-04-03 23:33:44

Vincent finds a narrow alcove near the back of the gallery, half hidden by a tall white partition, and we stop there where the noise from the crowd becomes a hum instead of a presence. He turns to face me and doesn't pretend he doesn't know why we're here.

"She called me two weeks ago," he says. "Asked to meet. I went because I thought it would be easier to see her once than to keep avoiding it."

"You didn't tell me," I say.

"No." He doesn't dress it up. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want
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  • FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY   Chapter 62: Rahim's Studio

    Rahim's studio is in the 11th, a former printing workshop that he rents for an amount he describes as either a miracle or a mistake depending on the month. It smells like linseed oil and turpentine and the particular dusty warmth of a space that has been lived in rather than decorated. Canvases are stacked against every wall, some finished, some abandoned mid-thought, and the floor has twenty years of paint in its grain regardless of who did the actual painting.I love it immediately.He texted me through Vincent three days after the gallery opening, asking if I'd come look at something he was working on. Vincent passed the number along without comment, which I appreciated. Rahim met me at the door with two coffees in paper cups and the distracted energy of someone who has been awake since before he should have been."She's wrong," he says, before I've even taken my coat off, gesturing at a large canvas propped near the north-facing window. "The whole left half. I've been staring at i

  • FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY   Chapter 61: The Full Picture

    Vincent talks for forty minutes.I don't interrupt. I sit with my legs tucked under me on the couch and I listen, and he tells me about Fontaine Groupe the way a person talks when they've decided to stop editing themselves, which means it isn't smooth and it isn't flattering and there are pauses where he is choosing words not to manage my reaction but to be accurate.He was twenty-eight. He had been building Caruso Capital for three years, mostly small positions in emerging artists and a handful of commercial real estate plays that had done well enough to give him credibility with larger investors. A man named Édouard Fontaine came to him through a mutual contact with a property development proposition that looked, on the surface, like exactly the kind of undervalued opportunity Vincent had built his early reputation on finding."I did the due diligence," he says. "Or I did enough of it that I could tell myself I had." He looks at his hands. "By mid-2019 there were indicators that the

  • FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY   Chapter 60: Watch and Wait

    I don't call Vincent on the way home.I take the Métro and stand holding the overhead rail and watch my own reflection in the dark window opposite and think carefully about what I actually know versus what I've been told by people with reasons to tell me things.What I know: Vincent invested in something called Fontaine Groupe between 2019 and 2021. The company was not clean. He got out before it collapsed. He has not told me this.What Amélie knows: the same thing, plus whatever she witnessed firsthand during the three years they were together.What Silas knows: enough to confirm it's real, not enough to condemn it, or at least not enough he's willing to use as a weapon.What Vincent has told me: that there are parts of his history he hasn't shared because he didn't think they were relevant, and that I can have all of it if I want it.He said that four days ago and I said okay and neither of us followed up and I think we both quietly let it sit there because things had been good and

  • FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY   Chapter 59: Two Fronts Become Three

    Amélie is still talking.I can see her mouth moving and I can hear the sounds she's making but none of it is reaching me because my eyes are on my phone screen and the name sitting there in my inbox like a stone dropped into still water, sending rings outward in every direction.Silas Kingston.Three months of silence. Three months of building something real in this apartment in this city with this man, three months of therapy and Sorbonne seminars and duck confit on Rue de Buci and learning what it feels like to want something that isn't tangled up in survival, and his name lands in my inbox on a Thursday afternoon in a university corridor while Vincent's ex-girlfriend stands in front of me explaining my boyfriend's moral failings, and the timing is so precise it feels like choreography."Elena," Amélie says."Give me a second," I say.I open the email.Elena.I'll be brief because I know you prefer it that way.A woman named Amélie Dubois contacted my office ten days ago requesting

  • FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY   Chapter 58: Three Fronts

    She stops texting me.For six days there is nothing, no unknown numbers, no elegant little grenades, and I let myself believe the conversation at the gallery worked.Vincent notices the shift in me, the loosening of something I'd been holding tight without meaning to, and on Wednesday night he takes me to dinner at a small place in the 7th that doesn't have a sign outside, just a door and an understanding, and we eat duck and drink burgundy and talk about Rahim, who has apparently asked for my number through Vincent because he wants a second opinion on a new canvas. The evening is easy and warm and exactly what the last two weeks should have been.I should know by now that Amélie Dubois does not stop.She redirects.Thursday morning, I'm in Professor Moreau's seminar on Flemish restoration technique when my phone vibrates twice in my bag. I ignore it until the break, and when I check it I find two missed calls from Vincent and a text that says: Call me when you can. Nothing urgent. Ju

  • FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY   Chapter 57: Find the Edges

    I don't tell Vincent what I'm doing.That's not because I'm hiding it, it's because I need to do it without his voice in my head telling me to be careful, to let him handle it, to trust the process. Vincent handles things with patience and precision and I love that about him and right now it is the wrong tool for this job.Amélie has switched numbers twice in four days. She is not going to respond to patience.I start on Friday morning while Vincent is in a meeting across the city. I make coffee, open my laptop, and I look for her.Amélie Dubois, galerie, Paris. She has a website. Clean, elegant, white space and good photography, the kind of site that costs serious money to build and looks like it cost nothing. Galerie Dubois, 4 Rue de Seine, Saint-Germain. Established eight years ago. She represents twelve artists. Her bio is three sentences, deliberately minimal, telling you just enough to know she doesn't need to tell you more.I scroll past the bio and into the artist roster and t

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