LOGINI moved the bag while the apartment was still quiet.Not back into the wardrobe. Down the stairs, one careful step at a time, and into the narrow space beneath the staircase where the cleaning things were kept and where nobody had any reason to look. I pushed it far enough back that it sat in shadow, invisible unless you were specifically looking for it. Then I straightened up and smoothed my shirt and went to start dinner preparations because Noé would be home in an hour and I wanted everything ready.I wanted this evening to be good.That was all I wanted from it. One good evening, simple and warm and entirely his, the kind he would remember without knowing he was storing it, the way children stored things in their bodies before their minds knew how. I wanted him to come home and find the kitchen smelling of something he loved and I wanted to stand beside him at the counter and let him help and listen to everything he had been saving up to tell me since morning.That was not very mu
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN Adrien's POV I found it by accident.That is the honest version. I was not looking for anything. I had come downstairs for water, a task requiring no particular attention, and I had passed the staircase and something had caught in my peripheral vision the way things caught when you had spent years training your attention to miss nothing, a shape in the shadow that did not belong there, an edge of fabric tucked back against the wall in the space beneath the stairs.I stopped.I crouched down.I pulled it out.A bag. Small and practical, packed with the specific efficiency of someone who had done this before, who knew how to compress a life into the minimum required and move quickly. I held it for a moment without standing up, just crouching in the hallway with the bag in my hands and the quiet apartment around me, and I turned it over once and felt the weight of it.Not heavy. That was the thing that moved through me first before anything else arrived. It was no
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIXI moved the bag while the apartment was still quiet.Not back into the wardrobe. Down the stairs, one careful step at a time, and into the narrow space beneath the staircase where the cleaning things were kept and where nobody had any reason to look. I pushed it far enough back that it sat in shadow, invisible unless you were specifically looking for it. Then I straightened up and smoothed my shirt and went to start dinner preparations because Noé would be home in an hour and I wanted everything ready.I wanted this evening to be good.That was all I wanted from it. One good evening, simple and warm and entirely his, the kind he would remember without knowing he was storing it, the way children stored things in their bodies before their minds knew how. I wanted him to come home and find the kitchen smelling of something he loved and I wanted to stand beside him at the counter and let him help and listen to everything he had been saving up to tell me since morning.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE The phone rang before I had finished deciding anything. I looked at the screen. Margot. I stared at it for one ring, two rings, then I picked it up. "Mademoiselle Camille." Margot's voice was warm and unhurried the way it always was, carrying the particular ease of someone who had been managing the logistics of this household long enough that very little surprised him. "I am calling about Thursday." I said nothing and waited for his next sentence. "Monsieur Duval asked me to let you know." A brief pause, and I could hear Noé's voice in the background, high and bright and narrating something with great conviction to nobody in particular. "He has agreed to the arrangement. For the school morning. You will attend as Noé's mother." The bag sat beside me. The packed bag, with the practical clothes and the borrowed laptop and Dr. Rousseau's card in the front pocket, sat beside me on the bed, and I pressed my lips together and looked at the wall and felt something
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOURCamille's POV I woke up to a ceiling that didn't look like where I dozed off.This was different. This was my ceiling, my room, my bed, and I was in it when I should have been at the kitchen table with a borrowed laptop and a column of numbers that refused to cooperate, and it took me three full seconds to understand how I had gotten here.Someone had carried me.The jacket was the evidence. Still draped across my shoulders, too large, the collar brushing my cheek when I turned my head, dark fabric that smelled like a hospital and something underneath the hospital, something clean and specific and entirely his. I lay there for a moment holding that information.Adrien had carried me upstairs.I did not let myself think about what that meant. I started to, briefly, the image of it arriving before I could stop it, his arms, his hands, the particular quality of being held by someone who handled things with that precise and total care, and I shut it down with the fir
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREEI had been sitting in that chair for forty minutes before she woke up.I want to be precise about that because the imprecision of it bothers me. I am not a man who sits in chairs in other people's bedrooms at seven in the morning for forty minutes. I am a man who has rounds and paperwork and a son to get ready for school and a hospital that runs on a schedule that does not accommodate extended periods of sitting and thinking about things I cannot fix yet.And yet.I had taken care of Noé first. That is important. I had heard him at his usual hour through the wall, the morning monologue beginning, and I had gone in and done the routine with the thoroughness she usually brought to it, the cereal and the toast and the finding of the missing shoe which was, again, behind the radiator, a location it seemed to prefer. I had combed his hair with less success than she achieved and he had informed me of this diplomatically. I had put him in his coat and sent him down to M







