Chapter 22: Disinherited

Henri did not make a speech.

He sent the guests home.

He had the ballroom doors closed and the orchestra paid.

He had the old banker escorted to his car.

At one in the morning, he sat behind his desk in the library, and the family stood before it.

Bianca came in last, dressed again, in a plain gray coat that someone had found for her.

Her hair was pinned wrong. There was a mark on her wrist where she had gripped the sheet.

"Papa," she said.

"Sit down."

"Papa, I can explain. Élise..."

"I have watched the footage from Bastien's terminal," said Henri.

He did not raise his voice.

"Four times now. It shows a young woman in a blue jacket, with her back to the camera and a Rochefort badge in her hand.

"It shows her typing a code. It shows her turn her head to check the corridor."

Bianca's mouth opened and closed.

"I knew it at once," Henri said. "I told myself that a father may be wrong about his own child."

He laid his palm flat on the desk.

"I waited, Bianca. I gave you a month. I wanted you to come to me and say it."

"I was frightened."

"You were frightened, and you set a trap for your sister with a camera."

"She is not my sister!" Bianca shouted, and her whole face broke.

"She is a stranger! She took everything, Papa!

"She was in my place, in my room, in my life, and you all loved her, and you do not even know..."

"Know what?" said Margaux.

Bianca's eyes flew to me.

I stood very still.

She wanted to say it. She wanted to cry out that I had died at twenty in a rain-slick car, and that she had died at eighteen in a dead man's house.

She wanted to say it in front of them all, so they would look at me as she did.

She looked at the four faces in the room, and I saw her understand that no one would believe her.

"Nothing," she whispered.

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