Chapter 5: The Badge

On Sunday night Margaux carried her last box into her own flat on the Croix-Rousse hill and locked the door behind her.

She had left Thibault a note on the kitchen table.

*Gone to my flat to prepare for work. Back at the lab Monday.*

He would read it as a wife's whim, and she meant him to.

Her best friend Lise Boyer was already on the sofa with a pot of soup and her shoes off.

Lise was a dental surgeon with red curls and a mouth that never waited for permission.

"Show me the recording," she said.

Margaux played it.

Hortense's voice filled the little room. *Keep her soft until the baby is born. She raises it.*

Lise listened to the end, then threw a cushion across the room.

"I am going to drive to that villa and pull that woman's pearls off one by one."

"Don't," Margaux said. "I need the pearls where she can lose them in public."

"Fine. Then I'm taking the pearls as a deposit."

Margaux laughed, and then she was crying, and Lise held her until it stopped.

"There's something else," Margaux said. "I'm pregnant."

Lise went very still.

"His?"

"Nine weeks. The doctor says if I end it I might never carry another."

"Then you keep it."

"He thinks I can't have children. Everyone does. So I'll keep it, and he won't know."

Lise took her hand.

"Then we're a team of two, and one is the size of a lentil."

Margaux wiped her face.

"Eat your soup," Lise said. "You're feeding somebody."

On Monday morning, Margaux put on a white blouse and a grey jacket that had been hers before the marriage.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Husband Called Me Barren, Now a Billionaire Begs for Me from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.