The Fight

Adjudant Lemoine took our statements on the Thursday, in the kitchen, over coffee he politely didn't drink. He wrote down forgery and persons unknown in the same careful hand he had used for bad luck, and he promised to pass the file to the regional brigade. He did not look at me while he said it. I tried not to read anything into that.

For three days afterwards, Julien and I were courteous to each other with a ferocity that should have been a warning. He asked whether I'd slept. I asked whether his ribs hurt. We passed the salt like diplomats. At night he went to the study and I went to bed, and the door closed between us at the end of the hall with a click that began to feel personal.

It was on the fourth night that I finally broke it. Lucas was asleep, the house was dark, and Julien was standing at the kitchen counter in his shirtsleeves, trying to open a jar of cornichons with one arm and a great deal of pride.

"Give me that," I said.

"I can manage."

"You'll crack another rib." I took it, twisted, and handed it back open. He thanked me stiffly. I leaned against the table and said what I had been holding for a week. "Julien, I think Théo cut that brake line."

He put the jar down very gently.

"Ellie."

"Hear me out. The mechanic said the break was clean. The text that sent you up the hill before dawn. The forgery, which could only have been made by someone who'd been in your study and knew Dubois's seal. All of it arrives in the same six weeks. You can't call that bad luck."

"I can." His voice was quiet, which was worse than loud. "Because the alternative is that a man whom Camille loves, the man who is raising her through whatever she's become, is attempting to murder me. And I have no proof of that. I have a mechanic who said he couldn't swear to anything, and a gendarme who thinks I'm a lucky fool."

"You have me."

"I have your opinion." He turned. "Which is, if I may say so, not unbiased."

I stared at him. "What does that mean?"

"It means you've felt displaced since January. You told me so yourself. You said you were watching your place at the table being reassigned." He spread his good hand. "It would be very human, Ellie, to find a reason why she shouldn't be here."

It was so reasonable that it took a second to land. When it did, it landed low.

"Don't," I said. "Don't use what I told you in the dark."

"I'm not using it. I'm asking you to consider—"

"I considered a great many things when I watched a stranger copy your handwriting onto a power of attorney with my name on it. I considered whether I'd said something terrible in my sleep."

"That isn't what I—"

"You almost asked me if I'd stolen from you." My voice cracked on it, and I hated that. "In the car. Did you ever. I heard the whole sentence."

He went white around the mouth. "I didn't ask."

"You didn't have to. You thought about it."

"For half a second."

"A half-second is a long time," I said, "when it's your life."

***

I don't know which of us would have stopped it. Neither of us, probably. The thing had been building since February, in the study door and the cold side of the bed and the thousand tiny withholdings, and it had found its way out at last.

"You can leave, you know," Julien said. "Whenever you like."

The kitchen went still.

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm saying it isn't a trap." He was gripping the edge of the counter. "You have a flat. A career. A family who adores you now, and a life that would take you back tomorrow. This is mine. I can't go anywhere, Ellie. I don't get to decide it was a bad idea and book a flight. There is a boy upstairs and a woman who has already ruined me once, and a hearing in five weeks, and a house that someone has been walking through with a copy of my signature. You have a way out. I don't."

"So I'm a guest."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. You've been saying it since January." I was shaking, and I couldn't stop. "You decided I was a thing you could close the door on. A nice thing. A thing to keep safe by leaving it on a shelf where it can't be touched. Do you know what that's like? I spent years being protected from the things that made me real. I came to France to get away from it!"

"That isn't fair."

"Then here's the unprotected version." I took a breath. "I have been offered a job in London. Director of Client Strategy. It's the best thing I've ever been offered, and they want an answer by the fifteenth of April. I asked for the extension from the hospital car park. I've known since the first of March. I didn't tell you, because you were drowning, and because I was frightened that if I did, you'd say go."

The silence was total.

"You didn't tell me," Julien said, very slowly.

"No."

"Again."

"Yes, again." My eyes were burning. "And before you say it, I know. I gave you the smallest possible version once, and I swore I wouldn't. This is the whole of it. I wanted to tell you every single day for six weeks. But you stopped telling me things, Julien. You stopped before I did."

"What does that mean?"

"February. The estate office." I watched it hit him. "I brought your flask. I saw you with Camille through the window. You held her. You wiped her face."

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the anger had gone out of his face, and what was left was something I had no name for.

"She was terrified," he said. "She came to warn me. Théo had told her to refuse the staged visits entirely and demand the overnights, and she'd realised, I think for the first time, that he was steering all of it. She broke down. I held her because she was shaking." His voice dropped. "I promised her I'd say nothing. If he found out she'd warned me, I don't know what he might do to her."

"You could have told me."

"I thought you'd see what you saw."

"I did see it. That's precisely the point." I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. "You thought I couldn't be trusted with the truth, so you let me believe the worst of it for six weeks. And then you looked at me in the car and wondered whether I was a thief."

"Ellie—"

"Take the job," I heard myself say. I don't know where it came from. It sounded like someone else. "Isn't that what you were going to say?"

"I was going to say that I want you to have the life you ran away to protect." He said it with terrible gentleness, and it was the worst thing he'd said all night. "Not to spend it as a hostage to mine."

"That isn't your choice to make for me."

"Then what do you want?"

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. All the words were there, and none of them would come in order. I wanted the job and I wanted the kitchen. I wanted the man in front of me and I wanted him to trust me. I wanted to be asked, not managed.

"I want you to stop deciding what I can bear," I said. "That's all. That's the whole of it."

"And if I can't?"

"Then I don't know what we're doing."

***

A floorboard creaked.

We both turned. Lucas stood at the foot of the stairs in his pyjamas, one hand wrapped tight around the stuffed stegosaurus he had officially outgrown a year ago. His face was white in the dim light.

"Are you shouting because of me?" he said.

It undid us both. Julien was across the kitchen first, going down on one knee with a wince he didn't bother to hide. "No. No, mon cœur. Never. Grown-ups sometimes get loud when they're tired. It's about grown-up things."

"Is Ellie going away?"

I crouched beside them. I could not speak.

"I'm not going anywhere tonight," I said, which was true, and which was not what he'd asked. He looked at me with Julien's solemn, assessing eyes, and then nodded, and let me carry him up the stairs.

I tucked him in. I sat on the edge of the bed with my hand on his back until his breathing slowed, and when I came out onto the landing Julien was waiting at the top of the stairs, one hand on the banister.

"Ellie."

"I'm not leaving," I said, before he could start. "Not Lucas, and not while someone is trying to kill you."

"Nobody is—"

"Don't. Don't say bad luck to me again."

He didn't. He stood in the half-light with his hand pressed to his ribs, and I saw him want to say a dozen things and choose none of them.

"I'll sleep in the guest room," I said.

"Ellie."

"Goodnight, Julien."

The door closed with a small, ordinary click. It was the smallest sound, and I lay awake until dawn listening to it.