REJECTED BRIDE

CHAPTER 5

Chapter 5

I answer on the fourth ring.

Isabelle doesn't waste time on pleasantries. "I understand my lawyer paid you a visit. I also understand you sent her away empty-handed." Cool. Measured. "I want to be clear, Margot. This isn't cruelty. It's precaution. I've watched women in your position change their minds about what they're owed, once the shock wears off. I'd rather settle this cleanly, while there's still goodwill between us."

"There isn't any goodwill between us, Isabelle," I say. "There hasn't been since a hospital hallway. You just didn't know I could hear you yet."

The silence goes on one beat too long. Then, quietly, almost human: "Sign the papers, Margot. For your sake as much as ours."

She hangs up before I can answer.

I sit with the phone in my lap for a long time, turning the call over. Was that a threat? Or, in its own cold way, a warning? I still haven't decided two days later, when Élise calls back.

"I want to bring you in for a test shoot," she says. "Not a promise. A test. But I think there's something here, and I don't waste my clients' time telling them things I don't believe."

I nearly drop the phone.

The shoot is set for the following week. I spend the days before it the way I used to before a big campaign. Sleeping carefully. Eating carefully. Running my exercises with a sharper focus than before. For the first time since the accident, my body isn't only something to be fixed. It's an instrument again.

I tell no one. Not Odile. Definitely not Adrien, who now texts me every morning with a forced cheerfulness, like a man patching a hole in a boat with tape.

He asks twice to see me. I put him off both times. Once with a real therapy appointment, once with a lie so small it barely counts.

The third time, I say yes. Mostly because I've run out of easy excuses, and some old habit in me still flinches from conflict when putting it off will do just as well.

He picks a restaurant near his office, the kind whose menus don't list prices. He greets me with a kiss that lands near my ear, because I turn my head half a second before he arrives.

"You look well," he says, clearly hunting for something to add.

"I feel well." That's true for the first time in months. Though not for any reason I plan to share.

He orders for the table without asking. Before the accident, I found that charming. Now it just tells me how little he understands me. Rich, heavy dishes, the kind his family likes. I eat what I can and say nothing, the way I've learned to say nothing about a great many things.

Halfway through the meal, he speaks, watching me carefully. "I talked to my mother. I told her the engagement to Céline needs to be reconsidered. That it's not fair to you, and it's not what I actually want."

I set down my fork. "And what did she say?"

"She said I'm being sentimental. That gratitude isn't the same as a future." He says it like a weather forecast, something that happened to him, not a fight he picked. "I told her I needed more time to make her understand."

There it is again. More time. The same two words, endlessly renewed, like a debt he keeps refinancing instead of paying.

"Adrien," I say, "how much time, exactly?"

"I don't know. Some things can't be rushed."

"I'm not asking you to rush anything. I'm asking what the plan is. Not the feeling. The plan."

He doesn't have one. I watch him not have one. I watch his careful, patient face do what it always does when a question needs more than patience. It softens even further, as if sympathy alone could stand in for an answer.

"I love you," he says instead.

"I know you do." I mean it, which is somehow the saddest part. "That was never the question."

I don't say the rest of what I'm thinking. That love without the will to defend it, in a room full of people laughing at me, is a kind of love I no longer have room to keep paying for. I finish my water, thank him for lunch, and let him walk me to the car. He holds the door with the same automatic gentleness he always has. The gentleness that once felt like devotion. Now it feels like good manners standing in for a spine.

• • •

That evening, the test shoot photos arrive from Élise's photographer. I open them at my kitchen table with my heart in my throat, the way it hasn't been before a shoot in years.

The wheelchair is in every frame.

They haven't hidden it. They haven't cropped around it. They haven't tried to make my body apologize for itself. The lighting is built around me the way it used to be built around my legs, my stride. Around what's actually there, not what's missing.

In one photo, I'm laughing at something off-camera, hands spread on the armrests, like a woman entirely at home in her own skin.

I haven't felt that in a photo of myself in three months. I'd almost forgotten I was allowed to.

I send Élise one message. When can we do this properly?

Her reply comes within minutes. I was hoping you'd ask. I have a campaign in mind. It won't be small.

I smile at my phone for the first time in weeks. Then the next message lands, and the smile doesn't survive it.

One thing before you say yes. The brand's legal team ran a standard background check, since the campaign will be so public. Your name came up next to a Rousseau family NDA. Is there anything in your history with them that could become a problem once your face is everywhere?

I read it twice. Over the last three years I've signed a great many papers, in a hurry, in love, never once reading past the spot where Adrien's assistant had marked sign here.

I have absolutely no idea what I agreed to.