Claire's POV
I wore the midnight blue dress.
Not because Alexandre asked me to — he hadn't said a word about what I should wear, which I appreciated and which had also, paradoxically, made the decision harder. I stood in front of my wardrobe at eight a.m. on Thursday morning with Theo eating toast at the kitchen table downstairs and the meeting at eleven and the specific pressure of a room I had never been in full of men who had already decided what I was.
The midnight blue dress said: reconsider.
I put it on.
The meeting was in a private room at the Hôtel de Ville — not the public council chambers but a smaller, wood-panelled room that felt deliberately intimate. The kind of room where significant things were decided without appearing to be decided.
Henri Beaumont was already there
