REJECTED BRIDE

CHAPTER 7

Chapter 7

In the end, the locked guest list doesn't matter at all.

Élise's contact can't get a photographer's credential, no matter how hard she pushes. But Pascal can. When I tell him what I'm trying to do, he doesn't even let me finish. Turns out he's been on Isabelle's guest lists for years. Old money likes to be seen wearing the newest designers, and he is very good at being useful without being noticed.

"After everything you've walked through," he says, "the least I can do is hold a door."

He arranges for a photographer to arrive as part of his own party, tucked neatly into the very list Isabelle approved herself.

It's a strange kind of justice, really. The door Isabelle locked so carefully swings open anyway, held by someone the Rousseaus never once thought to watch.

The dinner is at the same hotel ballroom as the Foundation gala, a few months ago. I'm sure Isabelle picked it on purpose. Close the loop. Replace one photograph with another until the first is simply forgotten.

I arrive forty minutes in, in a dress Élise's stylist chose just for tonight. Deep green. Structured. The kind of dress that makes the chair look less like an absence and more like a throne. I told exactly two people I was coming. Élise, who arranged for the photographer to make sure a few frames land on the right desks. And Odile, who helped me dress and then, at the door, took both my hands and said only, "Go show them."

I don't go in through a kitchen this time.

I come through the front, past a receiving line that clearly has no idea what to do with me, into a ballroom mid-toast. Isabelle stands at the center, champagne glass raised. Céline is beside Adrien in a white dress carefully chosen to read as bride to anyone inclined to get ahead of themselves.

"...and so it is with tremendous joy," Isabelle is saying, "that we announce the engagement of my son, Adrien, to Céline Delacroix, a union of two families who..."

She stops mid-sentence.

It takes a moment for the room to understand why. Then the guests nearest the door turn, one by one, and a silence spreads backward through the crowd until it reaches the front, where Isabelle stands frozen, glass still raised, her toast unfinished.

Adrien sees me last of anyone. I watch his face do what it always does: soft, absorbing concern. And I realize I don't need anything from that expression at all.

"Margot." He comes toward me, low-voiced, urgent. "What are you doing here?"

"I was invited to a family gathering a while ago the same way," I say, loud enough for the nearest tables. "Turns out I don't need an invitation to show up where I belong."

Céline recovers fastest, as she always does, stepping forward with a bright, brittle smile. "Margot, this really isn't the place..."

"You're right," I say. "It isn't. It's the place where a woman who mocked my body in front of a room full of people gets applauded for marrying the man I saved." I let that land, watching the color climb her face. "I'm not here to make a scene. I'm here because I'm done being the thing everyone discusses quietly and asks to disappear."

Isabelle sets her glass down with the same small, precise click I remember from the drawing room. "This is a private event."

"It's a room full of two hundred people and at least one photographer who isn't on your payroll," I say calmly. And I get the satisfaction of watching Isabelle's gaze dart, without her permission, to the edge of the room, where a young man with a camera has already lifted it to his eye.

"Adrien." I turn to him. For the first time all night, my voice softens. Not with tenderness. With something closer to real curiosity. The last honest question I have for him. "You once told me you didn't have the energy to argue with your mother about me. I want to know if that's still true. Right now. In front of everyone whose opinion apparently outweighs mine."

The ballroom holds its breath along with me.

Adrien looks at his mother. He looks at Céline, whose smile has gone thin and fixed, waiting. He looks, finally, at me. And for one long moment, something almost moves behind his eyes.

"Margot," he says quietly. "Please. Not like this."

Not she's right. Not this ends now. Just, once again, a request that I make things easier for him.

I open my mouth to answer, the words already sharpened, three months in the making, when Isabelle's voice cuts across the silence first.

"Enough of this." Her glass isn't quite steady in her hand. "Security. Now."

Two men in dark suits are already moving in from the edges of the room. I feel the shift in the air before I understand it.

"Isabelle." Adrien's voice, sharper than I've heard it in three months. "Don't."

"I am not going to stand here and let her turn my son's engagement into a spectacle." She isn't looking at me now. She's looking past me, at the young man with the camera, lens still raised. "Someone get that camera out of this room."

Hands close gently around the handles of my chair from behind. Not Adrien's. A staff member, murmuring an apology I don't register.

"Wait." I twist around, searching for Adrien's eyes over the rising noise. "You were about to say something. Say it."

But he's already being pulled the other way. Céline's hand is tight around his wrist. Isabelle's voice rises over both of them. The photographer is steered firmly toward the exit. The whole room dissolves into the chaos of people pretending not to watch the thing they're all watching.

"Adrien," I say again. And for the first time all evening, I hear my own voice crack.

He looks back at me once, over his mother's shoulder. His mouth is already forming a word I'll spend the next several days trying to decide whether I actually saw or only hoped for.

Then the doors close between us. I'm in the corridor, alone, my heart going too fast, and the answer I've waited three months to hear is still sitting, unspoken, on the other side of the wall.