11: The Day I Killed Layla Walsh

Layla's pov

"Sign here," the clerk said. "And here. And once more at the bottom."

I signed.

The pen was cheap and scratched against the paper, and every time I pressed down I felt it in my wrist. The office smelled like dust and old radiators. A gray clock ticked over the door, and behind the glass window the clerk, a thin woman with red glasses and no expression at all, stamped each page with a heavy black stamp.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thunk.

It sounded like someone closing a coffin.

"Last one," she said, and slid a page under the glass. At the top, in small printed letters, it said: Former name: Layla Marie Walsh. New name: Layla Orion.

I stared at the words. Eight months of lawyers' emails, forms in two languages, and a court order from a judge back home who had never met me. All of it came down to this single sheet of paper.

"Madame?" the clerk said.

I wrote my full name one last time, slowly. Layla Marie Walsh. The curve of the W was the same one I had practiced in the margins of my notebooks when I was nine, copying my father's signature because I thought it looked important.

The pen lifted.

Thunk.

"Congratulations," the clerk said, in the flat voice of someone who had said it a thousand times. "You are now Madame Orion."

Nobody clapped. The radiator ticked. Somewhere down the hall a door slammed.

I took the papers and stood there holding them, and I couldn't make my feet move.

"You are going to stand in the way," a voice said behind me. "There is a line."

Madame Fontaine was leaning on her cane by the wall, in her best wool coat, the one with the missing button. She had insisted on coming. She'd told me it was because she wanted to make sure the clerk spelled Orion correctly, and I hadn't believed her for a second.

I walked out of the building into the cold, bright air and sat down on the stone steps. Madame Fontaine lowered herself beside me with a small grunt. Neither of us said anything for a while. A man pushed a stroller past us, and two schoolgirls shared a bag of chips, laughing.

"It feels like a funeral," I said finally.

"Hm."

"I know that's stupid. It's just a name."

"Is it?"

I looked down at the papers in my lap. "My dad gave me that name. He used to say it was a good, solid name, the kind you could build a life on. And now I've just..." I stopped, because my voice was doing something I didn't want it to do. "Got rid of it. Like it was nothing."

"You have not got rid of anything."

"I buried it."

"Then it is buried. That is different from forgotten." She tapped her cane against the step. "A name is not a grave, Layla. It is a coat. You wore one for twenty-two years, and it was a good coat, and then something happened to the person inside it. Now you need a different one. That is not an insult to the first."

"And Orion?"

"That was your mother's."

"Her maiden name," I said. "She was an Orion before she was a Walsh."

"Then you have not thrown away your parents. You have only chosen which one to stand behind."

I laughed, short and wet, and wiped my face with my sleeve.

"That was actually kind of nice."

"Do not tell anyone. I have a reputation."

The wind picked up, and I pulled my scarf tighter around my neck. It was gray wool, one of Madame Fontaine's old ones, and it smelled faintly of orange peel and tobacco.

It had been nine months since I walked into her shop. Nine months of sweeping floors at nine o'clock and learning to tell vetiver from patchouli with my eyes shut. Of washing glass until my fingers were pruned, and weighing out powders on a scale so delicate that a breath could ruin it. She had given me my first lesson the day after I started. She'd lined up twelve little bottles on the counter, put a strip in my hand, and said, "Smell. Do not think. Say the first word."

I got seven right. The next week, nine. By Christmas I could name them all.

The money from the house had cleared the second week. I had walked into the shop with an envelope to pay her back in full, all four hundred and eighty euros, and she had looked at it like I'd offered her a dead fish.

"Fifty a week," she'd said.

"I have it now."

"A debt is how I know you will come in on Monday."

I had paid fifty a week. I hadn't missed a Monday.

There were things I had stopped doing, too.

I had stopped calling Claudia. Or rather, she had stopped calling me. In the first month she'd phoned every Sunday, bright and fast, asking if I was eating, if I was sleeping, if I was taking my pill. By the third month it was every other Sunday. By the fifth, a text now and then. The one time I asked about the certificate again, she said, "Next time, I promise, we'll sort it out," and she'd gotten off the phone so quickly I heard the call end before she finished the word promise.

I hadn't asked since.

I didn't have a plan. I just had a notebook, a head that was slowly clearing, and a strange, tight feeling in my chest that came whenever I thought about her. I kept it folded up small and put away. I wasn't ready to look at it yet.

"Come," Madame Fontaine said, pushing herself up with her cane. "I am hungry, and you will buy me lunch. This is a very expensive day for me, and I deserve a croissant."

"You didn't have to come."

"I know." She was already walking. "I wanted to."

We went down the steps and along the street, past a florist setting out buckets of tulips and a man hosing down the pavement. I walked slowly so she could keep up. She didn't say thank you, and I didn't expect her to.

I was looking at the shop windows, not really seeing them, when something on the glass of a little cafe caught my eye.

It was a poster. Thick cream paper with gold letters, taped neatly at the corners. At the top, in curling script, it read:

CONCOURS DES JEUNES PARFUMEURS DE PARIS

Below it, in smaller print, there was a date, an address near the Opera, and a line of French I could just about understand. Open to new creators. Original compositions only. Registration closes Friday.

I stopped walking.

A young perfumers' competition. The best new noses in the city, judged by the people who made the famous scents. The kind of place where people got discovered.

My stomach did a slow, cautious flip.

"Is something wrong?" Madame Fontaine had stopped a few steps ahead and turned around.

"No. I just..." I nodded at the poster. "That looks interesting."

She walked back and looked at it for a moment, her glasses pushed up on her forehead. She hummed a little under her breath.

"It is a very old competition," she said. "Very serious. Very political. Half the judges would sell their mothers for a good press photograph."

"Right. So it's not something I'd..."

"No, no. You would not be ready." She turned and started walking again. "Not for years."

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. I was almost disappointed, which was ridiculous.

Then she said, without turning around, in the most casual voice in the world, "Of course, I already signed you up."

I froze.

"You what?"

"On Monday." She kept walking. "I filled in the form myself. I wrote your name very neatly."

"Madame Fontaine, my name wasn't legal until twenty minutes ago!"

She stopped, finally, and looked back at me over her shoulder. Her pale eyes were bright, and the corner of her mouth was turned up in the smallest, most satisfied smile I had ever seen.

"Yes," she said. "I know. I wrote Orion."