Framed

I wrote to Hannah from the hospital car park and asked for two more weeks.

She gave me until the fifteenth of April without asking a single question, and I loved her for it, and hated that I needed it. The thirty-first of March slipped past while I was learning how to help a man with cracked ribs get out of a bath. I told myself that it was a perfectly reasonable extension. I told myself I'd tell Julien the moment he was strong enough to be told.

He came home on the Tuesday, grey and stiff and appalled at his own dependence. For ten days the house reorganised itself around his recovery, Hélène arriving with soup, Lucas appointing himself nurse, and Madame Roux sending up cold meats and a note about not lifting anything. Camille's Saturdays continued, quietly, on a reduced footing. Théo sent a very good bottle of wine and a card.

Everything was gentler. For ten days I let myself believe that the near thing had cleared the air, that the thumb and the silence and the study door had been crowded out by something larger.

On the eleventh day Maître Dubois telephoned, and asked us both to come in at once.

***

He did not make us wait. His clerk showed us straight through, and he was standing at the window of his office with his hands behind his back when we entered, a small exact man who looked, for the first time since I had known him, thoroughly unsettled.

"Sit," he said. "Please. I received this at nine."

It was a bundle of papers, bound with a plastic spine. A supplementary submission, filed that morning at the family court by Camille's counsel, in support of her application. The cover letter was impeccable. It regretted, on behalf of its client, the painful necessity of drawing the court's attention to certain irregularities.

There were three exhibits.

The first was a set of bank statements, from the Domaine's operating account, covering the winter. Three transfers, highlighted in yellow. Eighteen thousand euros, twenty-two, eighteen again: fifty-eight thousand in all, sent in January and February to a UK current account.

The second was a power of attorney, two pages, in Julien's name. It granted my full name, typed in capitals I had never once seen on a French document, authority over the Domaine's accounts "for the duration of Monsieur Castellan's convalescence." The date was three weeks before the accident.

The third was a short, polite declaration from "a concerned former member of staff", unsigned, to the effect that a recent arrival in the household had taken a noticeable interest in the estate's finances.

"They argue," Dubois said, "that the father of this child has been recklessly exposing a minor's inheritance to a third party of very recent acquaintance. That the household is unstable. That the mother, by contrast, is in a position to offer security." He took off his glasses. "It is not badly done."

Julien had taken the bundle from the desk and was reading it the way he read everything, slowly, line by line, with his lips pressed together. I watched his eyes reach the first highlighted transfer and stop. He turned the page. He turned it back. I have never been looked at by a man who was trying so hard not to look at me.

"The dates," he said, to no one. "January. February. You were here for all of it."

"Yes," I said. "I was here for all of it. I was also washing up in your kitchen and arguing with your son about marshmallows. I can't tell you how I'd have found the time to steal from you."

It came out sharper than I meant. He flinched, very slightly, and set the papers down.

I couldn't speak. I looked at the statement. At the number at the top of the page, a sort code and an account number, and I felt the room go very slowly sideways.

"That's mine," I said. "That's my account."

"I did wonder."

"But the money isn't there." I had my phone out, my thumb unsteady on the banking app. I turned the screen to him. "Look. There's nothing. No deposits. I've never seen a cent of it."

"I believe you," Dubois said. "The statement has been altered. The font on the balances is not quite the same. But I need you to understand what the court will see, Mademoiselle. A woman who appears in his account details, in an unfamiliar country, three weeks before a mysterious accident."

"Mysterious," Julien said sharply. "It was bad luck."

"So the gendarmes believe." Dubois's face did not change. "I merely observe how it will read."

***

It was the power of attorney that made him angry. I had never seen him angry before. It was quiet, controlled, and it made his hands shake.

"This bears my stamp," he said. "My notarial stamp, Monsieur Castellan. I have been a notary for thirty-four years, and I have never drafted this document, never witnessed it, and never in my life allowed that seal out of my sight. It is a very good copy. I would very much like to know who was in a position to make it."

Julien had gone still. He was looking at the signature at the bottom of the page.

"It looks like mine," he said.

"It resembles yours," Dubois said. "It was traced, I think, from a genuine example. It is a little too careful. You do not sign so neatly."

"Then someone had access to my papers."

"And to the account details of Mademoiselle." Dubois turned to me. "How would someone obtain your sort code and account number, in France?"

I stared at the statement, and then, without warning, I remembered. A day in January, the kitchen, a pen, an envelope. I had paid for Lucas's birthday weekend in a theme park near Dijon, and Julien had wanted to reimburse me. I'd written my details on the back of an envelope and put it in his hand. He'd laughed and said that I was the only woman he knew who sent her own invoices. I could see him slotting it into the second drawer of the desk in the study.

"I wrote them down for Julien," I said slowly. "In January. He put them in the study."

"The house study?"

"Yes."

Dubois and Julien looked at each other, and neither of them said what was obvious. That someone who wasn't a member of the household had been in that room. Someone who had a reason to be in the house at weekends. Someone who might have asked, one Saturday, for a pen.

I thought, Camille. I thought, or someone who sent her.

I also thought, with terrible clarity, of the woman I'd watched in Julien's arms through a window, and I couldn't make the two pictures sit in the same frame.

"We should file a complaint," I said. "For forgery."

"We should," Dubois agreed. "Against persons unknown. I would not name anyone yet." He looked at Julien. "You do not wish to accuse the mother of your son without proof."

"No," Julien said. "Not without proof."

***

We drove home in silence. Julien took the long way, the road through the vines, with one hand pressed to his ribs and the other tight on the wheel, and we passed the second bend without either of us looking at it.

It was only when he'd parked the car and turned off the engine, and the quiet had stretched past any reasonable length, that he said, "Ellie."

"Yes."

"Did you ever—" He stopped.

The hair rose on my arms. I did not move.

He looked at the dashboard. He looked out at the cherry tree by the gate, just starting to bud. And then he turned to me, and his face rearranged itself into something kind.

"No," he said. "Forget it. I know you didn't."

I nodded. I said that of course he did. I got out of the car and went up the path and put the kettle on.

But I had heard the question. I had heard the whole of it, quite clearly, in the half second before he put it away. And I had heard the other thing too, which was how long it had taken him to say that he knew.