“I’m so sorry, Cile,” he says, soft, leaning over us, kissing my face, touching Julien’s hair. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.”
“You’re never here,” I say. “You’re never here.”
The Monday after the incident, the kids are off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is a blessing. Not that I would have sent Julien anyway. He is still having nightmares, and not ready to be back on campus.
Without informing François, I spend the morning making calls to schools in Paris to check the protocol on matriculating midsemester. Lucie is still incollège, the French equivalent of middle school. Placing her would be relatively easy. But Julien will be introisième, his first year oflycée, and finding an opening at an appropriate school could be challenging. Regardless, after Friday’s calamity, I am up to the task.
François has taken the kids to lunch at Farmshop in the Country Mart when the text comes in from Clément. Since the shoot with Victoire, we’d spoken about half a dozen times. Mostly styling-related. The subject of Anouk had managed to not come up.
Can you talk?
He’d written it in French. No greeting. The urgency of it throws me.
“Ça va bien, ma belle?” he answers on the first ring.
“Ouais. Toi?”
“Très bien.”
“What’s going on?”
“So, the other night, I hadun petit apéro avecAlain. He has a new muse, by the way. Sophie is no more. This one is younger.”
“They always are,” I say, staring out at the pool from my vantage point in the bedroom. Wondering where this is leading.
“Anyway, he says just before Christmas, he was at L’Avenue and there was a dinner party with a bunch of the people from theAzimuthmovie celebrating. Cate Blanchett and Idris Elba and, you know, the sexy British guy fromInception. And Anouk was there.”
My pulse quickens. I almost know what he’s going to say before he says it.
“At the party?”
“Yes. And she was very much flirting with your husband. He says he knows it was your husband because he dropped by the table to say hello and she introduced him by name. I think perhaps she’d forgotten that you’d met Alain. Or she did not realize that you and I talk from time to time. Butquand-même… I thought you would want to know.”
I wish I could say I was shocked. I wish I could say I didn’t see it coming. But I recall that conversation we had on Minnie’s terrace, at the save-the-elephants event. When she’d confided about the first boy who’d broken her heart, and how she schemed to get revenge. How “dismissing him was delicious.”
Even if her dalliance with Lorry wasn’t triggered by my revelation about Cabo, going after François certainly was.
I do not confront my husband immediately upon his return.
He walks in with the kids laughing over a joke Lucie has apparently shared and proffering cookies.
“I know you love these,” he says, placing the white Farmshop bag on the kitchen island. His eyes, shifting to a dazzling blue in the light. “I got you the chocolaty chocolate chunk. Luce, tell Mommy the joke,” he directs, before turning back and winking at me. “You’ve got to hear this one, Cile.”
The interrogation will have to wait.
On Tuesday morning, after I’ve dropped the kids at school, I return home to find him in the media room reviewing a rough edit fromWintertide, the second film. And I light into him.
“What did you do? What did you do with Anouk Ferrand?”
He looks up at me at the entrance from his spot on the sectional, thrown. “What? What are you talking about?”
“In Paris. I know you saw her. What did you do? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He pauses the image on the screen then—Idris and Tamsin, mid-conversation in an alternate timeline—and adjusts his position, defensive.
“Nothing. I didn’t do anything. She joined us for dinner the night before the premiere. She was friends with the head of publicity for Sony. Gloria, I think.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, François?”