Chapter 7- The Weekend

Alexandre's POV

I had closed nine-figure deals without losing sleep.

I had sat across negotiating tables from men twice my age who had spent careers mastering the art of psychological pressure and felt nothing but cold clarity. I had built a company from borrowed money and nerve and the specific hunger of someone who understood exactly what losing felt like and had decided, at twenty-two, never to feel it again.

I had not, in thirty-three years, been nervous.

I was nervous.

It was Saturday morning, 9:47 a.m., and I was standing in the kitchen of my townhouse in the 16th arrondissement looking at the breakfast I had asked my housekeeper, Sylvie, to prepare — and then sent her home because having staff present felt wrong for this particular morning — and wondering if a two-year-old would eat croissants.

Obviously a two-year-old would eat croissants. Every person in France ate croissants. But Theo was also apparently opinionated about socks and crayon custody and the attendance record of a neighbourhood cat, so I was not prepared to assume anything.

I had also bought fruit. Three kinds. And small cups of chocolate milk because I had vague memories of children and chocolate milk and it had seemed like a reasonable instinct at the time but now looked slightly excessive next to the croissants and the fruit and the orange juice and the brioche I had added at the last minute.

My phone buzzed.

We're outside. — C

I straightened. Looked at the table. Looked at myself — dark jeans, a grey sweater, no suit, because Saturday — and then walked to the front door and opened it before she could knock.

Claire was on the doorstep with Theo on her hip and a bag over her shoulder and the expression of someone who had prepared herself thoroughly for this moment and was managing it with composure.

Theo was looking at the door.

Then at me.

Then at the door again, with the assessing expression I was beginning to recognise as his default mode when presented with new information.

"Bonjour," I said. To both of them, but I was looking at him.

"Bonjour," Theo said, with great seriousness.

Claire set him down. He stood on the doorstep and looked past me into the hallway — the high ceilings, the pale stone floors, the staircase visible at the far end — with the focused attention of someone conducting a structural survey.

"It's big," he said.

"It is," I agreed.

"Why."

"I — " I looked at Claire, who offered nothing, expression carefully neutral. "I have a lot of rooms."

Theo considered this. "We have two rooms," he said. "Me and Maman. Mine has a boat on the wall."

"I know," I said. "Your maman told me."

He looked at me sharply at that — the quick recalibration of a child discovering that the adults in his life have been exchanging information. Then he looked back at the hallway.

"Do you have a garden?" he said.

"I do."

"Can I see it?"

"Theo—" Claire started.

"Yes," I said. "Come in."

He approved of the garden.

This was established within approximately ninety seconds of entering it — he made a full circuit of the perimeter with his hands behind his back in a manner that reminded me uncomfortably of myself, examined the stone wall at the far end, tested the grass with one foot, and then turned back to us with a verdict.

"It's good," he said. "Gerald would like it."

"Gerald is welcome any time," I said.

This appeared to settle something significant. He crouched down immediately and began a detailed inspection of the garden's ground-level ecosystem — leaves, small stones, the edge of a flower bed — with the total absorption of someone who had found exactly what he needed and required no further adult input.

Claire stood beside me watching him.

"He does that everywhere," she said quietly. "Surveys the perimeter first."

"I noticed."

"You do it too."

I looked at her. She was still watching Theo, the morning light on her face, her arms crossed loosely across her chest in the particular posture of a parent who has relaxed their vigilance by exactly one degree — enough to breathe, not enough to stop watching.

"I do," I said.

She glanced at me sideways. Something moved across her face — not quite a smile, something more complicated, the expression of someone noticing a thing they hadn't expected to notice.

Then she looked back at Theo.

"He'll need feeding in about an hour," she said. "He had breakfast but it was — Theo, what did you eat this morning?"

"Soldier," Theo said, without looking up from his investigation.

"He had one soldier," Claire translated. "Which means he will be hungry and aggressively deny it."

"I have croissants," I said.

"He loves croissants."

"And three kinds of fruit."

She did look at me then. "Three kinds."

"And chocolate milk. And brioche." I paused. "And orange juice."

Claire stared at me for a moment. Then she pressed her lips together in the way of someone suppressing something. "Alexandre."

"I wasn't sure what he ate."

"He's two. He eats everything and also nothing, depending entirely on his mood and the position of the moon." The suppressed thing surfaced briefly — a real smile, quick and unguarded, there and gone. "But the croissants will work."

I filed the smile away somewhere I chose not to examine.

Breakfast was chaos.

Not bad chaos — the specific warm chaos of a small person at a table, which I had no prior experience of and found entirely absorbing. Theo ate one and a half croissants, rejected the melon categorically, ate all the strawberries, drank half his chocolate milk, and conducted a parallel conversation with Gerald — propped against the sugar bowl — about the structural qualities of the garden.

I sat across from him and watched and said almost nothing.

Not because I had nothing to say. Because I was aware, with a clarity that had nothing to do with business, that this was not a situation that could be managed or accelerated or strategically directed. This was simply time. And time, here, required only showing up and being present and letting my son decide at his own pace what I was going to be in his life.

"You have a lot of spoons," Theo observed, at one point.

"I do," I said.

"Why do you need so many spoons."

"I — don't, probably."

He thought about this. "We have four spoons," he said. "That's enough."

"You're right," I said. "That's enough."

Claire, across the table, looked at her coffee.

After breakfast Theo migrated back to the garden with the inevitability of water finding its level. Claire helped me carry plates to the kitchen — I told her she didn't need to, she ignored me, which I was learning was simply how she operated — and we stood at the counter with the garden visible through the glass doors, watching Theo crouch over something in the flower bed with total concentration.

"He's looking for worms," Claire said.

"Is that—"

"Normal? Completely." She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. "He has opinions about worms. Mostly positive."

I looked at my son in my garden in the October morning light, carefully and respectfully excavating the soil for worms, and felt the specific sensation I had been feeling repeatedly since Thursday — the sharp, wordless thing in my chest that I had no name for and was beginning to suspect I would need one.

"He's extraordinary," I said. Quietly. Not meaning to say it out loud.

Claire didn't respond immediately. When I glanced at her she was still watching Theo, something soft and unguarded in her expression that she hadn't intended me to see.

"I know," she said. Just that. No performance in it, no pride — just the simple statement of someone who had known an extraordinary thing for two years and eight months and was still not done being grateful for it.

We stood in silence for a moment that was not uncomfortable.

"The wedding," I said.

She stiffened slightly. A degree. "What about it."

"I'd like to do it soon. Before the end of the month." I kept my voice even. "Not for — it's not about rushing you. It's about Theo. The sooner his name is secured legally the sooner—"

"I know why," she said. "I agreed, Alexandre. I'm not going to change my mind."

"I know you're not." I looked at her. "I just want you to know it's not about control. The timeline."

She looked back at me with those green eyes that had been making things complicated for me since Thursday morning and said: "Isn't it?"

And the honest answer — the one I was not prepared to give yet, standing in my kitchen on a Saturday morning with our son in the garden — was: not entirely. Not anymore.

"No," I said instead.

She held my gaze for a moment. Measuring something.

Then Theo appeared at the glass door with both hands cupped together, face illuminated with the specific joy of someone who had found exactly what they were looking for.

"Papa," he said, pressing his face against the glass. "I found one. Come and see."

The word hit the room like something physical.

Papa.

Not Alexandre. Not the careful nothing he had called me at the gate on Tuesday. Just — papa. Easy and immediate and entirely matter-of-fact, the way children confer titles without ceremony because to them the important things don't require it.

Claire had gone very still beside me.

I looked at my son's face through the glass — his eyes bright, his cupped hands protecting whatever small creature he had found, waiting for me with the uncomplicated confidence of someone who had decided the matter was settled.

I set my coffee down.

Opened the garden door.

Crouched down in front of him on the cold stone step in my good jeans without a second thought.

"Show me," I said.

He opened his hands.

A single worm. Small, unremarkable, and to Theo clearly magnificent, displayed in his small palms with the pride of a man presenting something priceless.

"He lives here," Theo said firmly. "In our garden."

Our garden.

I looked at the worm. Then at my son's face. Then, briefly, over his head at Claire standing in the kitchen doorway with her coffee cup and her carefully composed expression and the slight brightness in her eyes that she was doing her best to manage.

"He does," I said. "This is his garden too."

Theo nodded, satisfied, and carefully returned the worm to the flower bed with a gentleness that made something in my chest do the wordless sharp thing again, harder this time.

"Papa," he said, brushing the soil from his hands onto my jeans without looking up, with the casual ownership of someone who had decided this was acceptable. "Can we have more croissants."

Behind me I heard Claire exhale — soft and slightly broken, quickly recovered.

I looked at the soil on my jeans.

"Yes," I said. "We can have more croissants."