Chapter 10

Celeste made a sound that he didn't know how to categorize.

"You planned from the beginning," he said, "to take the child from Lily rather than give him back. The compatibility tests were falsified. There was never any medical necessity." He paused. "I want you to know that I understand this now. All of it."

He stood up. He left the room. Celeste's voice followed him down the corridor, breaking apart entirely, calling his name over and over, and he kept walking.

Three weeks later, Damian was in a bar near his offices at midnight.

He was not drunk yet, but he was working on it. The glass in front of him was his third. A group of men in the next booth were on their fifth round, their voices carrying more than they realized.

"—that Blackwood woman. You hear about that? The wife."

"Oh, the one who went off the rails? Postpartum something."

"Went over a cliff, apparently. Shame. She was—" a pause — "well, you know. She was something."

The glass in Damian's hand landed on the side of the man's skull hard enough to shatter.

He stood there in the sudden silence, looking at the man on the floor, and felt nothing in particular except tired.

"Get out," he said, to the rest of the booth.

They got out.

The bar incident made the financial pages.

BLACKWOOD GROUP HEAD IN BAR ALTERCATION: SHARES SLIDE FOR SECOND CONSECUTIVE WEEK. The board called seven times before ten in the morning. He declined all of them.

He sat in his office — the corner office on the forty-second floor, the one with the view of the whole city — and looked at the skyline, and then he picked up the phone and called his communications director and told her to organize a press conference.

"When?" she asked.

"This afternoon."

He stood in front of the cameras and told the truth.

He told it without softening, without the framing that his lawyers had spent the morning suggesting, without any of the careful strategic positioning that the Blackwood Group's communications department was paid a great deal of money to provide. He talked for eleven minutes.

He talked about what he had used Lily for when he'd married her. He talked about what he'd allowed to happen to their son. He talked about the press conference he'd forced on her, and the clinic, and the things he had let himself believe because believing them was easier.

The share price dropped another four percent while he was still speaking.

He finished. He stood at the podium for a moment longer.

"My wife deserved better than every choice I made," he said. "I can't give her that now. The only thing I can give her is this — the record, set straight. Her name, cleared. That's all." He stepped back from the microphone. "Thank you."

On the other side of the world, in a flat in Paris with afternoon light coming through the windows, Lily was sitting on the floor with the television remote, cycling through channels while Julian Hartley made tea in the kitchen.

The news segment stopped her hand.

— Blackwood Group CEO delivers public apology for treatment of late wife—

The shot that came up: Damian at a podium, looking like he hadn't slept in three weeks. The subtitles ran across the bottom.

She felt something clench, briefly, in the centre of her chest. A sensation she couldn't quite name — not grief, not anger, something more like a note struck in a minor key that resonated somewhere old and deep. She was still trying to identify it when the remote was taken gently from her hand.

"The doctor said you shouldn't watch too much news," Julian said. He sat down beside her, handed her a mug of tea, and changed the channel to something entirely without drama.

Lily held the tea and looked at the screen and felt the strange hollow sensation slowly fill back in with ordinary, comfortable things — the warmth of the mug, the sound of rain outside, Julian's shoulder against hers.

"I'm fine," she said.

He didn't argue. He just refilled her tea when it was gone.

Later, in the garden, he talked quietly with her doctor while she sat with her design portfolio in the afternoon light.

"Her physical recovery is complete," the doctor said. "The neurological damage is the variable. Memory recovery timelines are unpredictable. It may come back in fragments, over years. It may not come back."

Julian was quiet for a moment.

"Whatever happens," he said, "she stays with us."

The design school was Julian's idea, and it was a good one.

Lily had mentioned — in the careful, tentative way she mentioned things that felt like preferences, things that felt like they might be real — that she liked fabric. That she liked the way it draped and moved, the way you could make something flat do something three-dimensional. Julian had found a school in the sixth arrondissement, modest and well-regarded, and enrolled her in the introductory programme before she'd had time to argue.

She loved it immediately and completely.

In the studio, something in her came alive that had been quiet for months. She worked fast and intuitively, her hands knowing things her conscious mind hadn't caught up with yet. Her professor — a small, skeptical Frenchwoman who was not easily impressed — stopped mid-critique during the second week, looked at what Lily had done with a length of burgundy silk, and said nothing for a moment. Then she said: "You've trained before."

Lily didn't know if that was true. But her hands apparently remembered.