I have two jobs in Julian Astor's life. I create every fragrance that keeps his company alive, and I play the wife no one notices. For years, my formulas built his empire. Lately, the labels have carried the name of his "fragile" childhood friend instead. Julian expects me to keep working and keep quiet while he gives Vivian everything. I'm done with both. At our anniversary dinner tonight, he plans to take my latest masterpiece too. I brought papers of my own. He never reads anything I put in front of him, and tonight I'm counting on it.
The morning light came through the lab windows the way it always did — pale, precise, indifferent — and I was the only person in the building who noticed. I had been at my bench since six, blending the last trials of Ambre Nuit. It had taken eleven months to build the accord: a base of dark amber, a heart of black cardamom, a top note of night-blooming jasmine that I had spent a year coaxing out of a single tincture. It was the best thing I had ever made, and it sat in a glass vial on my bench with my initials on the label in letters small enough to miss. C.L. No one in the company knew what the letters meant. The licensing agreements were signed under that designation, the royalties went to a trust, and the press called C.L. a reclusive genius in a series of profiles that had never onc
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