All Chapters of FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

The gallery is everything I imagined Paris would be before I actually lived here.High ceilings, white walls, champagne flutes catching the light, and people dressed like they woke up looking expensive without trying. I smooth my hand down the front of my emerald green dress, the silk cool under my fingers, and remind myself for the fourth time tonight that I belong here. I'm Vincent Caruso's girlfriend. I'm a Sorbonne student. I have €50,000 sitting in a bank account. I belong exactly here."Stop fidgeting," Vincent says quietly, his hand finding the small of my back, warm through the silk. He leans close enough that his breath brushes my ear. "You look stunning, mon cœur. More stunning than anything on these walls.""You say that to all the girls you bring to galleries?" I ask, and he laughs softly, this low private sound that still does something ridiculous to my stomach after three months."Just this one," he says, staring back at me. The opening is for a young Moroccan painter n

Vincent finds a narrow alcove near the back of the gallery, half hidden by a tall white partition, and we stop there where the noise from the crowd becomes a hum instead of a presence. He turns to face me and doesn't pretend he doesn't know why we're here."She called me two weeks ago," he says. "Asked to meet. I went because I thought it would be easier to see her once than to keep avoiding it.""You didn't tell me," I say."No." He doesn't dress it up. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want to make it into something before I knew what it was.""And what was it?"He looks at me steadily. "Awkward. Mostly civil. She asked about my work, I asked about hers. She asked about you." He pauses. "She wanted to know if it was serious."My stomach tightens. "What did you say?""I said yes." He says it simply, like there was no other answer. "I said you were the most serious thing in my life right now. She didn't love hearing that."I look at him for a moment. Part of me wants to take that an

I sit up and the sheets fall away and the room feels different now, the warm close feeling of five minutes ago gone like it was never there, replaced by something cooler and more awake.Vincent reaches for his phone. "I'm going to delete it," he says."Don't." My voice comes out flat and even and completely unlike how I feel. "Don't touch it yet."He goes still.I look at the screen again even though I've already read it twice and don't need to read it a third time. Je n'arrête pas de penser à ce soir. Tu sais ce que tu me fais encore, Vincent. Tu l'as toujours su. The timestamp is eleven forty-three. We have been lying in this bed, warm and close and almost perfect, for exactly thirty-one minutes since we got home. She waited thirty-one minutes."She planned this," I say. "Elena.""She planned the bathroom. She planned what she said in front of everyone. She planned this text at this exact time because she knew we'd be home by now and she wanted to make sure it landed while we were,

I don't tell Vincent what I'm doing.That's not because I'm hiding it, it's because I need to do it without his voice in my head telling me to be careful, to let him handle it, to trust the process. Vincent handles things with patience and precision and I love that about him and right now it is the wrong tool for this job.Amélie has switched numbers twice in four days. She is not going to respond to patience.I start on Friday morning while Vincent is in a meeting across the city. I make coffee, open my laptop, and I look for her.Amélie Dubois, galerie, Paris. She has a website. Clean, elegant, white space and good photography, the kind of site that costs serious money to build and looks like it cost nothing. Galerie Dubois, 4 Rue de Seine, Saint-Germain. Established eight years ago. She represents twelve artists. Her bio is three sentences, deliberately minimal, telling you just enough to know she doesn't need to tell you more.I scroll past the bio and into the artist roster and t

Amélie is still talking.I can see her mouth moving and I can hear the sounds she's making but none of it is reaching me because my eyes are on my phone screen and the name sitting there in my inbox like a stone dropped into still water, sending rings outward in every direction.Silas Kingston.Three months of silence. Three months of building something real in this apartment in this city with this man, three months of therapy and Sorbonne seminars and duck confit on Rue de Buci and learning what it feels like to want something that isn't tangled up in survival, and his name lands in my inbox on a Thursday afternoon in a university corridor while Vincent's ex-girlfriend stands in front of me explaining my boyfriend's moral failings, and the timing is so precise it feels like choreography."Elena," Amélie says."Give me a second," I say.I open the email.Elena.I'll be brief because I know you prefer it that way.A woman named Amélie Dubois contacted my office ten days ago requesting