CHAPTER5:HENRIMOREAU
614 Words
Clara met him only once, and once was enough.
Henri Moreau arrived at Blackwood Tower unannounced on a Friday afternoon in October, seventy-one years old and dressed like a man who had never once doubted his own authority, a cane he didn't need tapping against the marble like a metronome. Security let him through to the seventh floor because he was, technically, entitled to a scheduled meeting about a shipping-lane dispute — a meeting Clara suspected he had requested purely as cover to walk the building and see what he could see.
"You must be the assistant," he said to Clara, in a French accent worn smoothly for decades in New York, his eyes moving over her the way a man reads a spreadsheet. "Tell me — does Monsieur Blackwood keep you very busy? I imagine there is a great deal to manage, for a man with so much to hide."
"I manage his calendar, Mr. Moreau. Nothing more interesting than that."
"Of course." His smile didn't move past his mouth. "My great-granddaughter would be four now. Nearly five. I sometimes wonder if anyone even sings to her in French anymore, the way her mother did." He let that sit, watching Clara's face for a reaction she refused to give him. "Isabelle would want her raised among a family who loved her before she was a bargaining chip in a man's reputation."
"I wouldn't know anything about that."
"No," Henri agreed pleasantly. "I don't suppose you would." He tapped his cane once against the floor, a small, deliberate punctuation mark, and walked toward Damian's office as though he owned the air in the hallway.
Clara told Damian everything the moment the door closed behind Henri twenty minutes later, watching Damian's face go through its practiced sequence — controlled, controlled, controlled, and then, once he thought she'd looked away, afraid.
"He's testing the perimeter," Damian said. "He does this every few months. Shows up somewhere adjacent to Lily's world, says something designed to make me react, and then reports whatever reaction he gets to his lawyers as evidence of instability." He rubbed a hand over his jaw. "It's a war of documentation, Clara. He isn't trying to win in a courtroom yet. He's trying to build a file."
"What does he actually want? Not legally. What does he want?"
Damian was quiet for a long moment. "I think, underneath the lawsuits, he wants his granddaughter back. Isabelle was his whole world after his own children scattered across three continents and stopped calling. When she died, he had nothing left of her except Lily, and I was the man standing between him and the last piece of his daughter he had. I understand that grief. I even have some sympathy for it." His eyes hardened. "But sympathy doesn't change what happens to Lily if he wins. She becomes an heiress raised by a boarding school and a rotation of nannies in a country she's never lived in, visited twice a year by a great-grandfather who loves an idea of her more than he's ever bothered to love the actual, specific child."
"So you keep hiding her."
"So I keep hiding her," Damian said, "until I can find a way to fight him that doesn't end with her growing up as evidence in a lawsuit." He looked at Clara then, really looked at her, in a way that made her feel seen and unsettled in equal measure. "I didn't expect to have anyone else standing in that fight with me."
"You don't," Clara said carefully. "I just answer your phones."
They both knew, by the small, unconvinced silence that followed, that this was no longer
Entirely true.
- Writer
