“Oh yeah?” Antoine gives her a nasty smile. “Are you really going to talk to me about respect, putain?” The last word hissed under his breath.
“How dare you speak to me like that?” She rounds on him, a surge of real anger breaching the icy fa?ade.
“Oh, how dare I?” Antoine gives her a sly-looking grin. “Vraiment? Really?” He turns to me. “You know what she is? You know what our very elegant stepmother really is? You know where she comes from?”
I’ve had my suspicions. As I grew older, they grew too. But I’ve barely even allowed myself to think them, let alone voice them aloud, for fear of my father’s wrath.
Antoine stands up and walks out of the room. A few moments later he comes back carrying something in a large frame. He turns it around so that all of us can see it. It’s a black and white photograph, a large nude: the one from my father’s study.
“Put that back,” says Sophie, her voice dangerous. Her hands are clenched into fists. She looks over at Mimi who is sitting stock still, her eyes wide and scared.
Antoine sits back in the chair looking pleased with himself, propping the photograph beside him like a child’s science project. “Look at her,” he says, gesturing to the image, then at Sophie. “Hasn’t she done well? The Hermès scarves, the trench coats. Une vraie bourgeoise. You’d never know it, would you? You’d never know that she was really a—”
A crack, loud as a pistol shot. It happens too quickly to understand what’s going on: she moved so fast. Then Antoine is sitting there holding his hand to his face and Sophie is standing over him.
“She hit me,” Antoine says—but his voice is small and scared as a little boy’s. It isn’t the first time he’s been hit like this. Papa always was pretty free with his fists and Antoine, the eldest, seemed to get the worst of it. “She fucking hit me.” He takes his hand away and we all see the mark of her hand on his cheek, the imprint of it a livid pink.
Sophie continues to stand over him. “Think what your father would say if he heard you talking to me like that.”
Antoine looks up at Papa’s portrait again. Tears his eyes away with an effort. He’s a big guy but he seems almost to shrink into himself. We all know that he would never dare speak to Sophie like this in Papa’s presence. And we all know that when Papa gets back there’ll be hell to pay if he hears about it.
“Can we please just focus on what’s important?” I say, trying to gain some control. “We have a bigger problem to focus on here.”
Sophie gives Antoine another venomous stare, then turns to me and nods, tightly. “You’re right.” She sits back down and in a moment that chilly mask is back in place. “I think the most important thing is that we can’t let her find out any more. We have to be ready for her, when she returns. And if she goes too far? Nicolas?”
I nod. Swallow. “Yes. I know what to do. If it comes to it.”
“The concierge,” Mimi says suddenly, her voice small and hoarse.
We all turn to look at her.
“I saw that woman, Jess, going into the concierge’s cabin. She was on her way to the gate and the concierge ran out and grabbed her. They were in there for at least ten minutes.” She looks at all of us. “What . . . what could they have been talking about for all that time?”
Jess
I stare at the girl on the stage. It’s her, the girl who followed me two days ago, the one I chased onto the Metro train. She stares back. The moment seems to stretch. She looks as terrified as she did when that train pulled away from the platform. And then, as if she’s coming out of a trance, she swings her gaze back to the audience, smiles, climbs back onto the hoop as it starts to rise upward—and is gone.
Theo turns to me. “What was that?”
“You saw it too?”
“Yeah, I saw it. She was staring right at you.”
“I met her,” I say. “Just after I spoke to you for the first time at the café.” I explain it all: catching her following me, chasing her into the Metro. My heart is beating faster now. I think of Ben. The family. The mystery dancer. They all feel like parts of the same puzzle . . . I know they are. But how do they all fit?
After the show ends the audience members drain the remainders from their glasses and surge up the staircase, heading out into the night.
Theo gives me a nudge. “Come on then, let’s go. Follow me.”
I’m about to protest—surely we’re not just going to leave?—but I stop when I see that rather than continuing up the stairs with the rest of the paying customers, Theo has shoved open a door on our left. It’s the same one we noticed earlier, during the performance, the one through which those suited men kept disappearing.