pause, and then Olivier bursts into laughter. It seems to go on forever.
“You done?” I ask, not amused.
“I can’t believe it,” he says, still laughing. “Someone is blackmailing you.”
Now I hear Sadie screech, “Oh my God!” like some bimbo, and now she’s laughing too.
“Yes, so obviously I have to wonder if it’s you,” I tell him, losing my patience at what a joke this is to them.
“Ah. Really? You can’t be seriously thinking it’s me? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Pascal, but I don’t give a fuck about you or what you do. I have my own life here, and it has nothing to do with the life I had back there.”
“You have to come back to Paris at some point.”
“I have come back to Paris,” he says. “On business. Surprised you weren’t tailing me.”
“I didn’t know.” Though I wonder if my father did. “Have you talked to your sister?”
He grows silent for a moment. “I have. I know everything you did, Pascal.”
“Me?” I exclaim, squeezing the phone in anger. “I didn’t do shit!”
“We both know your father doesn’t work alone. You’re his little clone.”
“His Mini-Me!” Sadie pipes up in the background.
This phone call was a mistake.
“Seraphine is happier now,” I tell him. “She got everything she wanted.”
“Our father was murdered,” Olivier seethes. “And whether you did it or not, you deserve to have whatever is coming to you. If this means blackmail, so be it. I hope this chases you for the rest of your goddamn life.”
For once I’m speechless.
“And if you thought you could just phone me and confide in me and treat me like a long-lost friend, you’re even more fucked-up than I thought. You have no one, Pascal. Not your brother. Not your cousins. Everyone hates you, and you only have yourself to blame. If you want to dig a little deeper, I think you’ll find that even your mother and father would sell you out to the highest bidder. You’re alone in this world, and it’s exactly what you deserve. And the way it will stay. Au revoir.”
The line goes dead, and I stare at the phone in my hand for a moment, trying to process what happened. Normally I just shrug it off, let it slide. Any kinds of insults or conflict are brushed away because it’s not important, it’s just background noise.
But this cuts deeper, far deeper than it should. I don’t know if Olivier knew the sword he was wielding today, but it did some damage.
That hurt.
It shouldn’t have.
It was nothing new, nothing I hadn’t heard before.
It was the truth and nothing else.
But the truth hurts this time around.
I truly do have no one. No one has my back, not a soul would stand by my side.
And I never thought that would be a problem, but now I’m thinking otherwise, a tiny seed of truth that’s sprouting in the depths of my brain.
What am I even doing with my life?
I can feel the existential crisis pushing at me from all sides, the downward spiral that wants to open up and swallow me whole.
I think it’s been waiting my entire life to take me.
I get up from my desk and head over to the bar in the corner of my office. I haven’t been drinking much lately because when I get home, it’s usually so late, but it’s about half past eight now, and there’s no time like the present.
I grab the bottle of Japanese whiskey and am about to sit back down at my desk, but the room is starting to feel stifling.
I peer out the window down at Gabrielle’s room. Her curtains are open, and the light is on. I see her profile, sitting in bed cross-legged and bent over a book, her long hair in her face.
I feel a strange pain in my heart.
Olivier was right. I don’t have anyone.
But maybe I could have her.
I know she’s mine in the loosest sense. She’s bound by contract, but she could quit at any minute, taking my secrets with her. She could cut out of this life as quickly as she cut out of it before. It didn’t strike me until now that I would miss her if she were gone, that I’ve grown used to being around her, talking to her.
Looking at her.
I want her. Since the moment her big blue gemstone eyes gazed at me through the doorway in that hotel and she looked somewhere deep inside, seeing a part of me I’m not even aware of, that I’m