After My Fiancé Humiliated Me, I Ruined Him novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Noon

Julien read the email again.

"Noon," he said. "That's twelve hours."

"Eleven hours and fifty-six minutes," I said.

"Thank you, Diana. Very helpful."

Solène took the phone out of his hand and read it.

Then she clapped her hands twice, sharp.

"Everybody who loves this house," she called across the room, "stay. Everybody else, thank you for coming, take a bottle on your way out, it's free."

Half the room left.

The other half took off their jackets.

By one in the morning the shop looked like a campaign office.

The counter girls had the laptops.

The orders written on the backs of invitations went into a spreadsheet.

The fashion editor had posted one photo of the bottle on the staircase before she went home, with a single line: "Paris smells different tonight."

Online orders started at a quarter past one.

By three they were coming in faster than the girls could count.

Solène sat on the velvet stool with two phones and a list of every customer the house had ever had.

She called Boston, where it was still evening.

She called her old professors, her godmother, a department store buyer she'd met once at a wedding.

She switched languages in the middle of sentences.

"No, I'm not asking for charity. I'm asking you to buy perfume. Lots of it. Tonight."

The grandmother sat by the counter and wrote a check from her own savings with a fountain pen.

Three hundred thousand euros.

Julien looked at it.

"Grand-mère. That's everything."

"It's paper," she said. "I'm keeping the house."

At half past three my COO came on speaker from New York, where it was dinner time.

"Talk to me," she said.

"Two point four million," I said. "Orders, Solène's contacts, and an eighty-four-year-old woman's savings."

"Out of fourteen."

"Out of fourteen."

There was a pause.

"You already know what you're going to do," she said. "You've known since the dinner."

I looked across the shop at Julien.

He was behind the green marble with his tie gone and his sleeves rolled up again.

He was adding a column of figures by hand, because he didn't trust the laptop.

"Julien," I said. "Come here."

He came.

"I'm going to lend the house eleven point six million euros," I said. "From my own money. Not Crestline's."

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