The Call That Broke the World
914 Words
Ettiene POV's
The phone rang at an hour when nothing good ever happened. Étienne Moreau stared at the screen, confusion flickering through his exhausted mind.
Adrien never called this late. He answered immediately.
“Oui, frère? Is Élise alright?”
But it wasn’t Adrien’s voice that replied. “Sir—It’s Henri.” A pause, a breath, and then the words that would break his world open. “There’s been an accident.”
The room seemed to tilt. Étienne gripped the edge of his desk as everything inside him tightened.
“What kind of accident?” His voice turned sharp, frantic. “Henri, tell me.”
“It was on the road outside Beauvais,” Henri said, voice trembling. “The car Adrien and Claire were in… it collided with a truck. The responders did everything they could—”
The rest dissolved. Étienne didn’t need it spoken aloud. His knees nearly buckled.
Adrien. His twin. His shadow, his mirror, his anchor.
Gone.
The silence that followed was suffocating.
When he finally managed to speak, the only name that mattered scraped out of his throat:
“Élise?”
“She survived,” Henri answered quickly. “Minor injuries. She’s asking for her papa.”
A sound escaped Étienne—raw, breathless, something between a sob and a prayer.
Not fear. Not grief. Something deeper. The horror of imagining that small girl—his niece, his god-daughter—calling for someone who would never walk through the door again.
“I’m going to her,” he choked out.
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The hospital in Beauvais was small, quiet, and too bright.
Étienne walked through the corridor with a pace that didn’t feel like his. He wasn’t the President right now. He wasn’t anything but a brother who had lost half of himself and a man terrified for a child who had lost even more.
He found her in a pediatric room, perched on the bed with her legs dangling.
Her curls were mussed, her eyes enormous. A tiny bandage decorated her forehead like a cruel sticker.
When she saw him, she didn’t speak. She simply reached out.
He crossed the room in two steps and folded her into his arms.
“It’s alright, mon cœur,” he whispered into her hair, even though nothing was alright.
“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
Her little fists clung to his coat with desperate strength. She trembled. He broke.
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Later, when paperwork was signed and condolences whispered, Henri pulled him aside.
“Adrien left everything in order. He named you as Élise’s guardian.”
Étienne stared at him, stunned—not by the responsibility, but by the weight of it.
Guardian. Protector. Father.
Adrien had trusted him with his daughter’s future. It felt like both a blessing and a wound.
“I can’t take her away from here,” Étienne murmured, stroking Élise’s curls as she slept in his arms. “Beauvais is all she knows. This hospital, that school, those neighbors… this is her world.”
“And yours, sir?” Henri asked gently.
Étienne didn’t answer. Because he already knew. His world had fractured, and its only remaining piece was a five-year-old girl whose life he could not uproot—not now, not after such devastation.
So he made a decision. Not as President. Not as a public figure. But as a man who loved his brother more than anything.
He would move to Beauvais for the month of December.
To give Élise the little amount of stability that he could before turning her world upside down. But also, to give both of them breathing room. To avoid the cameras and questions of Paris. And to grieve where Adrien lived, not where he governed.
He packed only what he needed: simple clothes, a thick coat, a few children’s books, toys, and the snow globe Élise wouldn’t let out of her hands. Security protested. His staff pleaded. The press would start speculations soon.
But Étienne didn’t care.
He would let his beard grow, discard his official car and uses a more conservative one. He wore the kind of clothes no president would ever be photographed in. And he drove south at dawn, Élise asleep in the back seat, the cold morning light drawing silver lines across the road.
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Beauvais appeared like something out of a forgotten postcard—stone houses dusted with snow, chimneys smoking faintly, the church bell tolling a slow, gentle hour. And Christmas time… the most dreadful time of the year. He'd always known these weeks were brutal.
Élise sat up as they entered the village. She pressed her face to the window. A tiny, fragile smile tugged at her mouth.
Home. At least what remained of it.
Étienne parked outside the house that had been his brother’s. It was small, warm, and humble. Adrien had loved it. Étienne carried Élise inside, swallowing the ache in his throat.
Everything smelled like lavender and old wood. Exactly as Adrien had left it.
“We’ll stay here awhile,” he told her softly. “Just the two of us.”
She nodded, eyes heavy with exhaustion.
He tucked her into her bed, kissed her forehead, and stood quietly in the doorway long after she fell asleep.
Outside, snow began to fall again. And the tears he’d been holding back finally began to flow.
“Oh, my dear brother,” he whispered into the empty room, “I never thought I’d feel so broken.”
- Writer
