my little secrets

No Walls

CHAPTER TWO

No Walls

— CAMILLE —

The storm arrived on a Tuesday in October, which was inconvenient for several reasons.

Camille had scheduled a working dinner with Jean-Paul Bertrand for that evening — cancelled by three o'clock when the rain became serious. She had a call with her London solicitors at five — cut short when the signal became unreliable. By six the lights in the east wing had flickered twice, and by seven the library windows were rattling in their frames with the particular persistence of weather that intends to stay.

Kofi had been with her for three weeks.

She knew this the way she knew all operational facts — precisely and without sentiment. Three weeks: long enough to observe that he was exactly what he had claimed to be in the interview. Competent, quiet, almost preternaturally unobtrusive. He had reorganised the maintenance schedule without being asked. He had resolved a long-standing drainage problem in the north courtyard that two previous managers had simply documented and deferred. He communicated with her through Léa unless the matter required her direct attention, and his judgment about what required her direct attention was — she had to admit — excellent.

She did not see him often. This was, she told herself, exactly as it should be.

She was in the library at half past seven when he knocked — three quiet, even knocks that she had already learned to recognise as his.

"Come in."

He entered carrying a battery lantern and set it on the table beside her without being asked. The overhead lights had been flickering for the past twenty minutes and he had correctly anticipated that the grid might go entirely. She did not thank him — she acknowledged it with a brief nod — and he crossed to the window to check the latch on the largest pane, which had been making a sound she found distracting.

"The latch is loose," he said. "I can fix it properly tomorrow. Tonight—" He produced a small wedge from his jacket pocket and slid it into position. The rattling stopped.

The silence that followed was noticeably better than the silence before it.

"Thank you," she said, which she had not planned to say.

He nodded and moved toward the door.

"Sit down," she said.

He stopped. Turned. There was something careful in his expression — not wariness, just attention. "Madame?"

"I said sit down. I have the estate accounts to review and I prefer not to be alone in a storm with nothing but my own thoughts for company." She looked back at her papers. "You don't have to contribute to the conversation. Just — be somewhere visible."

There was a pause of perhaps three seconds. Then she heard the quiet sound of him taking the chair near the second bookshelf — far enough to be unobtrusive, close enough to be present.

She worked. He read — she did not see what, only the shape of him in her peripheral vision, settled and still the way he always was.

Outside, the storm intensified.

At some point — she did not track exactly when — she set down her pen.

"Where did you grow up?" she asked. She said it the way she said most things: without preamble, without softening.

He looked up from his book. "Lagos. Surulere, specifically."

"I know Lagos only from business. I've been twice."

"It shows differently to visitors." There was no criticism in it. Simply fact.

"Tell me how it shows to someone who grew up there."

He considered this with the same patience he brought to everything. "Loud," he said finally. "Not unpleasantly — it's the kind of loud that means people are alive and not keeping it to themselves. My mother's house was on a street where everyone knew each other. Sunday mornings there was always something cooking on multiple floors. You could follow your nose from one end of the street to the other."

Camille listened. She was not a person who listened easily — she was more naturally an observer, a cataloguer of information — but something about the way he spoke made listening feel less effortful than usual. His voice was low and unhurried. He chose words carefully, the way someone does when they mean to be accurate rather than impressive.

"You miss it," she said.

"Yes." He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to.

"I grew up outside Lyon," she said. "My grandmother's house. She had a kitchen that smelled of lavender and bread, and she did the crossword every morning with a pencil, never a pen, because she said you should leave room to be wrong."

She had not intended to say this. She heard herself say it and did not retract it.

He said: "That's a good philosophy."

"She was a good woman."

"Is she—"

"She died when I was twenty-two."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. She had a long life and she lived all of it." Camille picked up her pen again, then set it back down. "Paris doesn't feel like that. Like the grandmother's kitchen. It's a beautiful city and it's completely indifferent to you. I've been here fifteen years and sometimes it still feels like staying in a hotel."

She did not know why she said this. She did not say things like this. She had not said anything like this to another person in — she could not immediately calculate how long.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "People edit themselves around you. You must find that — it must get quiet, inside all of that."

She looked at him directly. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that when people perform for someone, when every interaction is a kind of audition, the person being performed at is very alone. Even in a full room." He paused. "I imagine it gets quiet."

The rain hit the windows. The lantern flickered once and steadied.

"Yes," she said. "It does."

She had never admitted this. Not to Léa, who had worked for her for seven years. Not to Thierry, in six years of marriage. Not to the therapist she had cancelled on repeatedly until the therapist had, with considerable professional tact, suggested that Camille might benefit from working with someone whose schedule better accommodated hers.

She had admitted it to her estate manager of three weeks, in a library, during a storm, because he had looked at her with those patient dark eyes and said something true.

She returned to the accounts. He returned to his book. The storm continued.

When he left at ten o'clock — bidding her a quiet goodnight at the door — the room felt colder and emptier in a way that was entirely out of proportion to the event of his departure.

Camille sat for a moment, alone.

She pulled the estate accounts toward her. On the corner of the top page, in her own handwriting, she found the words: *it must get quiet inside all of that* — written without her noticing, the way you write something down to keep it.

She looked at the words for a long time.

Then she told herself the evening had simply been unusual. The storm. The cancelled plans. She had been more forthcoming than she normally would be, and she would recalibrate in the morning, and everything would return to its proper professional distance.

She was very good at telling herself things.

She believed almost none of it.