REJECTED BRIDE

CHAPTER 4

Chapter 4

The lawyer's visit lasts eleven minutes. I know because I watch the clock on the wall the whole time, the way you watch a pot you're afraid will boil over.

She's sitting on my sofa when I roll in, a composed woman in a gray suit with a folder unopened on her lap. She introduces herself only as representing "the Rousseau family's interests." Then, in the careful, bloodless voice of someone paid by the hour, she explains that given the change in my "circumstances," the family wishes to formally document that no financial claims exist between me and the Rousseau estate.

"You want me to sign away any claim to his money," I say flatly. "In case I don't leave quietly."

She doesn't deny it. She just slides the folder an inch closer.

I don't sign anything. I ask her to leave. I close the door behind her and sit with my back against it for a long time, feeling something I didn't expect. Not hurt. Insulted. Three years of loving Adrien, and one truck, quietly reclassified as a financial risk to be managed.

I don't sleep that night. I lie awake with the ceiling fan turning slow circles above me, and I let myself really remember. Not the neat version I give people who ask. The whole thing.

A rooftop bar. Four months before the crosswalk. Early enough that keeping it secret still felt like a game. Adrien, three drinks in, laughing with a friend from university who asked why he hadn't told his mother yet.

"Because she'd never accept a model," Adrien said, laughing like it wasn't a problem. "Margot's incredible. But Maman would need a whole list of reasons, and I don't have the energy for that fight right now."

I wasn't meant to hear that either. I'd stepped away for a call and came back in time to catch the tail end. I remember standing there, deciding whether to be hurt. And I remember choosing to be amused instead, because he sounded so casually sure that someday he'd have the energy. I believed him. I let someday carry more weight than any word should have to.

Someday, it turns out, needed a truck and a spinal injury to finally show up. And even then he didn't have the energy for the fight. He had energy for I need time. Energy for everyone's emotions are running high. But across three months of hospitals and family dinners and one very public gala, he never once found the energy to say, plainly, to the one person whose approval he needed most: no.

People assume I think about the accident a lot. I don't. I have never once regretted throwing myself in front of that truck. What I regret, lying in the dark, is spending three months waiting for the man I did it for to make an equally quick decision of his own.

• • •

By morning, something in my chest that has been raw for weeks has gone strangely calm.

I call Élise. Not on Tuesday, like we planned. Three days early, because I can't wait another minute to do something that belongs only to me.

"I know this is early," I say. "But I don't want to wait. I want to know what you honestly think I have to offer. Don't be gentle. I've had enough gentleness lately to last a decade."

She laughs, warm and a little surprised. "That's the first useful thing anyone's said to me all week. Send me what you have. I'll tell you the truth."

So I spend the afternoon going through four years of my own photos with a new kind of eye. Not does this look good. Just: does this say something. Deep in a folder from a shoot two years ago, I find a black-and-white shot of myself mid-turn, caught in a half second between poses. I stare at it a long time before I understand why it stops me.

I look, in that photo, exactly like someone with somewhere to be.

That evening, I send Élise a dozen images.

• • •

Adrien calls twice that day. I let both go to voicemail.

The first is an apology. Careful and well put together, the kind a man drafts before he dials. I should have said something in that room. I'm sorry, and I'm going to talk to my mother.

The second, an hour later, is smaller, more honest, and somehow the one that reaches me. I don't know how to fight her without losing everything else. I know that's not a good enough reason. I just don't know what a better one looks like yet.

I listen to both twice.

Then I do something I haven't let myself do in three months. I open the locked folder on my phone. Four years of behind-the-scenes footage. Shoots. Campaigns. A runway show in Milan I walked at twenty-three, chin up, spine entirely unbroken.

I watch myself walk.

Really walk. Not the careful, hard-won steps from physical therapy that I'm learning to be proud of in a smaller way. The old kind. Thoughtless. Fast. Completely mine.

I cry this time, without holding back, until there's nothing left. When it's over, something other than grief is sitting where the grief was.

Not hope, exactly. Something more useful than hope.

Resolve.

I'm still sitting with it, phone in my lap, screen dark, when it buzzes.

A name I've never once seen on my screen lights it up. Isabelle Rousseau.

My thumb freezes over the answer button. The calm I just fought for starts to crack.

Isabelle has never called me directly. Not in three years of secrecy. Not in three months of hospitals and drawing rooms.

The phone buzzes a second time. It refuses to go to voicemail on its own.