She Lost Her Name, She Took Back Her Place novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Emerald in the Coat

Bianca plants the mother's emerald ring in Élise's coat. Élise hands it over before anyone can accuse her, and the Viscontis demand her at Sunday dinner.

Margaux's emerald ring went missing at breakfast, and the housekeeper was the first to say so.

She stood at the end of the dining table with a tray in her hands and her face gone tight.

"Madame, I have turned the dressing room over twice. It is not in the dish, and it is not in the safe."

Margaux set down her coffee cup.

"It was on my hand when I went to bed," she said. "Or I thought it was."

Henri lowered his newspaper.

Bastien looked up from his phone.

Bianca put down her croissant with a small, worried frown.

"Maman, don't panic. It has to be somewhere in the house."

She did not look at me.

I sat in the chair they had given me at the foot of the table.

I was wearing the one plain sweater I owned.

My coat was hanging in the cloakroom downstairs, where Bianca had put it last night.

I had checked the pockets at midnight, before I slept.

The ring had been in the left one, wrapped in a tissue, pushed to the bottom.

I had taken it out and kept it in my sleeve ever since.

I knew the next step. The housekeeper would be asked to search the guests' coats, and the coat she opened would be mine.

In my first life, I had written that step for Bianca.

I stood up.

"Madame Rochefort," I said. "May I say something before anyone looks?"

All four of them turned to me.

"Last night I found a ring in my coat pocket," I said. "I think it's yours."

I took the tissue from my sleeve and put it on the table in front of her.

Margaux unwrapped it with careful fingers.

The emerald lay in the white paper, green and heavy.

"Why was it in your coat?" Henri said.

His voice was flat.

"I don't know, monsieur," I said. "I thought someone put it there to keep it safe during the party. I didn't want to wake the house over it."

I kept my hands loose at my sides and my eyes on Margaux, not on him.

"I'm sorry I didn't bring it to you at once. I was afraid it would look wrong."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Oh, you poor thing," Bianca said. "You must have been so frightened."

She said it with such soft sympathy that Bastien glanced at her and then at me.

"It was probably one of the maids," she went on. "Putting things away in the wrong place. Please, Papa, don't be hard on her."

"I'm not hard on anyone," Henri said.

He was looking at the ring, not at either of us.

Margaux closed her hand around the emerald.

"Élise," she said. "Thank you. That was kind of you."

It was the first time she had said my name without her voice shaking.

I sat down and picked up my tea.

Bianca smiled at me across the table, a small, friendly smile.

Her foot touched mine under the cloth, once, lightly.

I did not move my foot away.

After breakfast I carried my plate to the kitchen and started washing it.

"Mademoiselle, you do not wash your own plate," the housekeeper said.

"I did at the home," I said. "Please let me."

She let me, and she gave me a small paper bag of almond biscuits to take upstairs.

I was drying my hands when Bastien came in.

He closed the door behind him and leaned on it.

"I'm going to say something and you won't like it," he said.

"Go on."

"Bianca told me Thursday that you would take things. Small things first. She said girls who come out of those places learn to."

"And you believed her."

"I said she was being unkind." He rubbed his jaw. "But she cried when she said it, and I had never seen her cry before."

I put the towel on the rail.

"You watched her cry again last night," I said. "Over a pin that was never lost."

He did not answer that.

"The pin was on Maman's collar all night," I said. "I'm only saying what you saw yourself."

Bastien looked at the floor for a while.

"You gave the ring back before anyone asked," he said finally. "That's what I keep thinking about."

"I would have gone to prison before I let it be found in my coat."

"Then be what you say you are," he said, quietly. "Prove her wrong. Not to me. To Papa."

He pulled the door open and left.

I stood in the kitchen with a bag of almond biscuits and unsteady hands.

I had not wanted his warning, and I had needed it.

It told me what Bianca had been doing since the day she woke up in this house. She had been talking to each of them alone and in tears, one at a time, long before I ever walked through the door.

She had a head start of two weeks.

I did not.

My phone buzzed on the counter. It was a number I did not know.

Mademoiselle Rochefort, said the message. Monsieur Visconti's secretary has called the house. The family hosts a dinner tomorrow evening at Avenue Montaigne. The grandfather has asked that the blood daughter attend. Please be ready at six.

Underneath it, a second message.

You have nothing suitable to wear. I will have something sent to your room. M.

I read it twice.

Tomorrow evening at Avenue Montaigne.

I knew that dinner. I had sat at the long Visconti table in the first life with a white napkin on my lap and a jewel at my throat.

I knew the soup course and the seating card.

I knew that somewhere between the soup and the fish, Adrien's grandfather would stop talking, grip the arm of his chair, and turn gray.

In the first life I had watched it happen and done nothing, because I was nineteen and afraid of making a scene.

I had a day and a half to learn which pocket held his medicine.

Then I realized I did not know which pocket either.

I had never looked.

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