Chapter 10

#Aveline

On the fourteenth day, Lucan came into my room without his tablet. He stood at the foot of the bed with his hands in his pockets, and that scared me more than any scan.

"Say it," I said.

"It's almost gone." He laughed, and it came out shaky. "I put your scans next to the ones from the night you arrived, and I thought I had mixed up the files. The big tumor is a shadow. If the numbers hold, you are not going to die."

I waited to cry. Instead I sat very still and listened to the monitor, and I thought about a foyer, and a paper that said six months.

"Thank you," I said.

Evelisse made a small sound and then she was holding me so tightly that the stitches pulled. I let her. Alistair stood in the doorway wiping his face, pretending to study the ceiling. Ronan said nothing. He walked out, and I heard him in the corridor, blowing his nose like a man who did not want to be heard.

The next morning I asked for a chair in the garden.

"The doctors want you to rest another month," Evelisse said, tucking a blanket around my knees. "We can bring books. Or set up a film room. Or find a painter to teach you."

"I don't want to learn something, Mother."

It was the first time I had called her that. She stopped with the blanket in her hands, and then she kept tucking it, slowly, so I would not see her face.

"I want to work," I said.

"Child, you have been alive for two weeks," Alistair said. "Everything we have is yours. Rest and let us take care of you."

"I know you mean it kindly. But I spent eight years resting. I lived in a big house and I was not allowed to want anything. If I sit in another beautiful room and get looked after, I will go mad."

Nobody spoke. Darius had been standing by the garden wall with his phone. Now he turned around.

"What did you do before you were married?"

"Marketing and sales strategy. I was good at it." It felt strange to say that without apologizing. "I was going to open my own firm. Then I got married, and his mother told me to stop."

Darius took a thick blue folder from the bag at his feet. "A skincare line owned by one of our subsidiaries. It has lost money for three years, and the board wants to sell. Tell me what is wrong with it."

"Darius," Evelisse said. "She's recovering."

"She's asking for something to do."

I took the folder. As I read, my head went quiet in the good way, like walking back into a room I had left years ago and finding everything where I put it.

"The product is fine," I said after ten minutes. "The reviews are great. You're talking to the wrong women. Sixty percent of your repeat buyers are mothers buying for teenage daughters with sensitive skin, but every ad shows a young woman on a beach. You spent three years chasing a customer who doesn't exist while the real one was already paying you."

All three of them were staring. Ronan had stopped in the doorway with a cup in his hand.

"How long to fix it?" Darius asked.

"Six weeks, with the real data."

"Then it's yours. A team, a budget, an office."

"No team," I said. "And no budget from you. If I use the Marceau name and it works, I will never know if it was me. Give me the files and a desk, and let me do it quietly."

"What name will you work under?" Lucan asked gently.

The bracelet box had sat open on my table every night since the first time. Evelisse never said a word about it.

"Elodie," I said. It still felt like someone else's coat, but I wanted to try it on. "Just Elodie. No Marceau, no Calloway."

"No one will connect you," Darius said. "The world thinks we lost our only daughter twenty-nine years ago."

My mother turned to the window. Her shoulders shook, but she was smiling.

Darius brought dinner that evening and sat across from me, which he had never done.

"One more thing," he said. He slid a printed page across the table. "One buyer has already made an offer for the skincare line. Camille Draven. She buys failing brands and sells them in pieces. She doesn't know you exist."

Her photo showed a hard, beautiful face and a smile like a locked door. Under it was a magazine quote: I don't rescue brands. I decide which ones deserve to live.

"She wants it by the end of next month," Darius said. "She has a team of forty and three years' head start."

"I have no team."

"You have me," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved. "When you ask."

He left. I looked at the woman who decided which brands deserved to live, and I thought of a woman in a mansion who had once been told she deserved nothing.

I pulled the blue folder toward me and opened it to the sales data. For the first hour, I only read. Then I found the page I should have looked at first: the list of every agency that had worked on this brand in three years.

There were four names. I knew one of them.

Halloran & Pierce was the firm I had worked for before my marriage. They gave me my first promotion. They threw a small party for me on my last day, when I told them I was quitting because my husband wanted me home.

Their campaign was the woman on the beach. Three years of it. Every page had the same style, the same typeface, even the same tagline pattern I had once taught a junior team in a meeting room on the ninth floor.

I turned to the last page of their final report and read the signature line.

Prepared by: Naomi Adeyemi, Senior Strategist.

My Naomi. My maid of honor. She had written the plan that was sinking this brand, and she had written it the way I taught her.

Then I saw the yellow note on the cover, in Darius's neat handwriting.

Camille Draven bought Halloran & Pierce last month. Every file, every client, every person.

I stared at it. If Camille owned the firm, she owned Naomi. And Naomi was the only person alive who would know my style the moment she read my work.

My hand went to the borrowed phone on the table. I knew her number by heart. I had not dialed it in four years.