After My Fiancé Humiliated Me, I Ruined Him novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Saint-Honoré

In Paris Diana walks into the dying perfume house as a customer and clashes with its grumpy director, until his sister walks in wearing Diana's earrings.

The company jet landed at Le Bourget at two in the afternoon.

I gave the driver the address from the deal file.

It was raining the thin gray rain Paris does in March.

The street was all glass and gold. Handbags lit like jewelry.

Maison Valery sat between a shoe designer and a bank.

It was smaller than its photo.

The gold letters over the door had worn thin in places. The window held six bottles on a bed of dried jasmine, and one of the bottles was dusty.

This was the shop Ashton had smiled in front of.

This was what he'd been selling while I picked out a navy dress for him.

I crossed and pushed the door open.

A bell rang somewhere above my head.

Inside it smelled like a hundred gardens at once. Dark wood shelves ran up to the ceiling. Glass bottles with handwritten labels. A long counter of green marble with a crack through one end.

There were no customers.

A man was behind the counter, writing in a ledger with a fountain pen.

He was tall, with a short dark beard and dark hair that needed a cut. His white shirt was rolled to the elbows. A row of thin paper strips stuck out of his breast pocket.

He looked up at me.

Then he looked at my coat, my bag, my shoes.

"We're closing," he said in English.

"Your sign says seven."

"Then the sign is wrong."

He went back to his ledger.

I walked to the nearest shelf and picked up a bottle.

"Don't touch that."

"I'm a customer."

"No, you're not." He put the pen down. "You walked past twice and you took a picture of my window. You're from one of the chains. Which one?"

"I'm not from a chain."

"Then you're from the bank, and that's worse."

"Do you treat everyone who walks in like this?"

"Only the ones who look at my shop like they're measuring it."

I had been measuring it.

I put the bottle back exactly where it was.

"I'd like to buy a perfume," I said.

"Which one?"

"I don't know. That's why I came into a perfume shop."

He stared at me.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth, and he killed it before it became a smile.

"What do you wear now?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Soap."

He closed his eyes for a second, like I'd told him I ate my steak boiled.

"Of course you do."

A door opened at the back of the shop.

An old woman came through it, very small and very straight, in a black cardigan and a silk scarf. Her white hair was pinned up with a pencil.

She didn't say hello.

She took my wrist and turned it over and smelled it, the way a doctor takes a pulse.

"Soap," she said in English. "Hotel soap. Not French."

"It's from a hotel in New York."

"It's a bad hotel."

It was one of mine.

"Sit," she said.

There was a little velvet stool by the counter. I sat on it.

She took three paper strips from a jar, dipped each one in a different bottle, and waved them under my nose one at a time.

The first one smelled like oranges and church.

The second like cut grass and pepper.

The third was something warm and dark.

"Which?" she asked.

"The third."

I breathed it in and my eyes stung for no reason at all.

The old woman watched me.

"You came a long way," she said. "And you have just been made a fool of. By a man."

I didn't answer.

"And you're not sad," she went on. "Not yet. You're angry, and you're very hungry, and you haven't eaten since yesterday."

Behind the counter, the man had stopped writing.

"How can you possibly tell that from a piece of paper?" I asked.

"The paper doesn't tell me. You do. You chose the one that smells like a bed someone left." She patted my hand. "Everyone who has just been made a fool of chooses that one."

"Grand-mère," he said. "She's a buyer."

"She's a customer, Julien. Look at her shoes. She walked here in the rain to buy something she doesn't know the name of."

Julien.

Julien Valery. Director. Page one of the deal file.

He came around the counter and stood over his grandmother's shoulder and looked down at me.

"Then what will the customer have?"

"The third one," I said.

"It's not for sale. It's not finished."

"Then why did she make me smell it?"

"Because she likes to show off."

"Make her a coffee," the old woman told him. "She's going to faint on my floor."

Julien sighed through his nose and went into the back.

I heard a machine start to grind.

The old woman sat down on the stool next to mine and folded her hands.

"So," she said. "Who was the man?"

Before I could think what to tell her, the bell over the door rang.

A tall young woman came in out of the rain, shaking out a black umbrella.

Long platinum hair. Red lipstick. A black blazer dress that cost more than the shop's window display.

"Grand-mère, he's impossible, he wants white peonies for May and there are no white peonies in May."

She tucked her hair behind her ears as she said it.

Two diamonds caught the light.

Round. A quarter carat each. Four-prong settings in white gold.

I knew the weight of them. I had worn them every day for nine months.

She was wearing my earrings.

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