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Chapter 60: Watch and Wait
publish date:
2026-04-06 23:36:58
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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
FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY Chapter 56: Cut Clean
I wake up before Vincent and lie there watching the early light come through the gap in the curtains, pale and grey and very Parisian, and listen to him breathe and think about what it means that I fell asleep feeling safe after a night designed to make me feel the opposite. Amélie Dubois is good at what she does, I'll give her that.Vincent's phone is still face down on the nightstand.I get up quietly and make coffee in the kitchen and stand at the window with the Eiffel Tower doing its morning thing in the distance, iron and indifferent and gorgeous, and I wait. I don't have to wait long. Twenty minutes later Vincent appears in the doorway, dressed already, and he looks at me and says, "I'm calling her now. You can stay or go to another room. Your choice."I lean against the counter. "I'll stay."He nods once, picks up his phone, and dials.She answers on the third ring. I can hear her voice from where I'm standing, not words, just the sound of it, warm and expecting, and Vincent's
FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY Chapter 55: Sit Up
I sit up and the sheets fall away and the room feels different now, the warm close feeling of five minutes ago gone like it was never there, replaced by something cooler and more awake.Vincent reaches for his phone. "I'm going to delete it," he says."Don't." My voice comes out flat and even and completely unlike how I feel. "Don't touch it yet."He goes still.I look at the screen again even though I've already read it twice and don't need to read it a third time. Je n'arrête pas de penser à ce soir. Tu sais ce que tu me fais encore, Vincent. Tu l'as toujours su. The timestamp is eleven forty-three. We have been lying in this bed, warm and close and almost perfect, for exactly thirty-one minutes since we got home. She waited thirty-one minutes."She planned this," I say. "Elena.""She planned the bathroom. She planned what she said in front of everyone. She planned this text at this exact time because she knew we'd be home by now and she wanted to make sure it landed while we were,
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