After Rebirth, I Became My Ex's Aunt-in-Law

Jade reached for the phone.

Aria turned it face-down on her knee before Jade’s fingers got there.

”Give it to me,” Jade said. ”I have to answer. If I answer, maybe she’ll—”

”She’ll what?”

Jade opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

”She wants us to answer,” Aria said. ”That’s why she sent it. She wants to know it worked.”

”It did work.”

”She doesn’t get to know that.”

Jade pressed both hands over her mouth and turned to the window. Her shoulders shook once, then went still.

Damien held out his hand. Aria gave him the phone. He read the message without any change in his face and handed it back. Then he made one call.

”Rue Saint-Honoré. Both ends of the street. Ten minutes.”

He hung up.

”She knows we’re in Paris,” Aria said.

”She wants you looking over your shoulder.”

Aria looked down at the phone in her lap. Paris is lovely in October.

’She needs him alive,’ she thought. ’He’s the only thing she has to trade.’

She held on to that.

Damien’s hand was still on her knee. She covered it with her own, and he turned his palm up and laced their fingers together. He didn’t let go until the Maybach pulled to the curb.

Then he reached over and lifted her hair off her shoulders. He gathered it at her nape, rose-gold and impossible to miss, and tucked it down inside the collar of her coat. He took his time. His knuckles moved along the side of her neck, and he turned the collar up around her jaw and smoothed it flat.

”What about yours?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. His thumb rested in the hollow of her throat, where her pulse was going too fast.

”Breathe,” he said.

She breathed.

***

The street was stone and glass. Handbags in one window, watches in the next, a doorman in a long grey coat outside a shop with no name on it at all. Aria spotted two of Damien’s men before she had gone twenty steps. One was reading the menu outside a café. The other stood at a bus stop, letting the buses go by.

Then she saw the sign.

It was smaller than in the Polaroid. Green-painted wood, squeezed between a jeweler and a couture house, as if the street had grown up around it and never managed to push it out. The gold letters had been repainted more than once.

Le Jardin Secret.

Zinc buckets crowded the pavement under the window. Eucalyptus. Dahlias the color of rust. A bunch of something white near the door.

Aria stopped in front of the white ones.

Roses. Not camellias.

Jade was close behind her. ”Aria. She said not to—”

”I know what she said.”

Damien pushed the door open. A bell rang over their heads.

Inside, the shop was narrow and cold, and it smelled like wet stems and earth. A zinc counter ran down one side. Shelves of ribbon spools and old tins covered the other. At the back, a woman sat on a high stool, stripping thorns from a bundle of roses with a short curved knife.

She was small and wrapped in a brown cardigan, with fingerless gloves and white hair pinned up at the back of her head. Eighty, maybe older. Her hands kept working.

”Bonjour,” she said, without looking up. ”Je ferme à midi.”

”She closes at noon,” Damien said.

Aria checked her phone. 11:54.

In the car, they had agreed on what to say. No names. A photograph, an old customer, a question about camellias. She nodded at Damien, and he began in French.

The woman glanced up. Her eyes went over Damien first, top to bottom, and didn’t seem impressed by anything they found. Then they moved to Aria.

The knife stopped.

She set the rose on the counter. Then the knife. She took off her glasses and looked at Aria without them, then put them back on, as if one pair of eyes might be lying to her.

”Tu as les yeux de ta mère.”

Aria caught one word. Mère.

Damien was quiet for a beat. Then he said it in English. ”You have your mother’s eyes.”

Aria’s hand found the edge of the counter.

Behind her, Jade let out a breath.

”You knew her,” Aria said.

Damien translated. The old woman didn’t answer. She was looking past them now, through the front window at the street, and she kept looking for longer than Aria liked.

Then she climbed down off the stool, one hand on the counter, and walked to the door. She turned the sign to FERMé. She locked the door, and she pulled the blind down over the glass.

The shop went dim.

Jade moved to the edge of the blind and stayed there, watching the street through the gap.

”Are you Madame Aubert?” Aria asked.

Damien translated. The old woman turned around.

”Qui t’a donné ce nom?”

”Who gave you that name?” Damien said.

Aria hesitated. ”Séverine.”

Something tightened at the corner of the old woman’s mouth.

”Alors elle est vivante, celle-là.”

”So that one’s still alive,” Damien said.

It didn’t sound like good news or bad news. Madame Aubert walked past them toward a curtain at the back of the shop and held it aside.

”Viens. Pas devant la vitrine.”

”Come,” Damien said. ”Not in front of the window.”

The back room was smaller than the shop. A deep stone sink, a table scarred with knife marks, a radiator that ticked and gave off no heat at all. Buckets of cut stems stood along the wall in rows. A wooden chair sat by the sink, and a second one with a cushion so flat it might as well not have been there.

Madame Aubert lowered herself into the chair with the cushion. She pointed Aria to the other one.

Aria sat. Damien stood behind her, one hand on the back of the chair. She could feel his knuckles against her shoulder blade through her coat.

For a long time, the old woman only looked at her. At her face, her chin, the line of her nose. Aria let her. She had been looked at by cameras and directors and a thousand strangers online, and none of them had looked at her like this, as if they were checking her against a picture they kept somewhere behind their eyes.

Then Madame Aubert folded her gloved hands in her lap.

”Montre-moi la clé.”

Aria didn’t need that one translated. She knew la clé.

Her hand went to her coat pocket. The key was there, where it had been since the chateau. Nobody had mentioned it.

”I never said anything about a key,” she said.

Damien translated.

Madame Aubert didn’t look surprised. She looked tired, and older than she had a minute ago.

”Ta mère m’a dit que tu viendrais. Avec la clé.”

Damien’s hand closed on Aria’s shoulder.

”Your mother told her you’d come,” he said. ”With the key.”