She Lost Her Name, She Took Back Her Place novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Rule Two
I lay very still with his hand in my hair.
The rule was mine to keep now. I could stay silent, and I could not lie.
Silence had been my best weapon in two lives, and tonight it would have felt like a door closing on him.
"Yes," I said.
His hand stopped moving.
"Yes, what?"
"I wore the blue dress. I held your hand." My voice came out thin. "I remember it, Adrien. I remember all of it."
He let out a long, slow sound.
It was not triumph. It was the sound of a man putting down something heavy that he had carried up a very long stair.
"Thank you," he said.
"That's all?"
"That is rule two. You did not lie to me." He turned his face into my hair. "I won't ask you why tonight."
I should have been grateful.
Instead I lay awake until the windows went gray, listening to him sleep, and counted what he knew.
He knew I had ruined Bianca.
He knew I had done it smiling.
He had chosen me anyway, with that in his hands.
I could not decide whether it was love or a debt he meant to collect.
In the morning he brought me coffee in his own shirt and kissed my temple.
Neither of us said a word about the night.
That was the worst of it.
He was kind, and he was patient, and I felt him watching me whenever I looked away.
At noon I was in the tearoom of the Visconti hotel on avenue Montaigne, with a pot of verveine and the grandfather.
He sat in his wheelchair by the window, wrapped in a camel coat, his cheeks pink for the first time since the hospital.
"My lifeguard," he said. "You are thinking too loud."
"I'm sorry, Grandpapa."
"Do not be sorry. Be honest." He pointed his cane at my plate. "Eat. My grandson has been strange for a year. Since the winter before last. He looks at the Rochefort door and does not go in."
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