THE BILLIONAIRE AND HIS SIDE CHICK EXPOSED

Chapter 5: The Proposal Outside

The jet landed at Le Bourget on a Saturday morning in February. Layla learned this from a customer, who learned it from her phone, who announced it to the shop the way people announce a birth.

"Your friend has arrived," the woman said. "The tall one. With the money."

By ten, there were six vans on the rue de Belleville. By eleven, someone had put up a rope. A young man in a headset was arranging a row of white roses on the pavement outside the bakery's front window, an effect so tasteful and so wrong that Layla actually walked out to look at it. He didn't recognize her. He was too busy adjusting a bloom.

She went back inside. Her hands were steady, which surprised her.

Adrien stood behind the counter with a tray of day-old bread. He had not spoken to her more than a dozen words since the post, all of them about flour. But he was here, and he was not going upstairs, and that was something.

"You do not have to go out there," he said, not looking at her.

"I know."

"If you want, I close the door. I say the shop is shut. I have a very large voice when I need it."

"I remember." She almost smiled. "I'm not going to hide, Adrien."

He nodded. He set the tray down and folded his arms and leaned against the wall by the door. It was a position that said I am not going anywhere and I am not going to tell you what to do, and she was so grateful for it that she had to look at the floor.

Gavin got out of the car at 11:40.

He looked the same. That was the strange thing. Handsome in the expensive way, silver at the temples, his coat fitted to him like a sentence. He spoke to a woman with a tablet, then to a man with a camera, then stepped onto the pavement and looked at the bakery. For one second his face was almost naked. He looked, Layla thought, like a man who had bought a very large thing and wanted to see if it fit.

Then the smile came on, and the crowd, which had been growing, went quiet.

She opened the door.

"Layla." He said her name as if it were a gift he'd wrapped himself. "You look well."

"Hello, Gavin."

"I've been looking for you for weeks." His voice was pitched for the back row. "I made a terrible mistake. I let you take the fall for something that was mine. I've told Eleanor everything. It's finished, all of it, the divorce papers were signed on Tuesday." He reached into his coat and took out a small box. "I don't want to be the man who let you go."

Someone in the crowd gasped, politely, like at a show.

He went down on one knee on the pavement, in his beautiful coat, next to the roses. The ring caught the winter light. It was very large and very clean, and she looked at it for a long moment, and thought, with total clarity, four years ago I would have said yes before he finished the sentence.

It wasn't that she didn't love him. It was that she recognized the shape of the whole thing now. The jet, the audience, the white roses, the wife discarded for the sake of the narrative. He had not come to find her. He had come to win her, in public, so that everyone watching would know how the story ended.

"Gavin," she said. "Get up."

"Layla, please—"

"Get up. Please." She kept her voice level. She had expected it to shake. "I don't want to do this while you're kneeling. It's not fair to you, and it's a little embarrassing for me."

He rose slowly. A camera clicked.

"Thank you for coming," she said. "I mean that. I know you think this is a kindness. But I'm going to say no, and I'd like to say it in my own words, so nobody has to say it for me."

The street was completely silent.

"For four years I let you decide what I was. I was the girl you didn't take to dinner. I was the number in your phone under someone else's name. And I told myself that was the price of being chosen." She breathed. "But I was never chosen. I was kept. Those aren't the same thing, and I think you know that, and I think it's why you're on your knees on a street in front of forty cameras. Because in private you'd have lost."

"That isn't fair," he said, quietly, and for a moment his voice was only a man's.

"Maybe not. But it's true." She looked at the ring. "I hope Eleanor gets everything she asked for. I hope you find someone who's allowed to say no to you. It just can't be me."

She turned around. She did not run. She walked back through the door of the bakery, and the bell rang above her, small and ordinary, and behind her the street began to make noise again like a room after a song.

Adrien was still against the wall. He hadn't moved. She stopped in front of him and found she had nothing prepared, no sentence, no rehearsal.

"I didn't say no for you," she said. "I need you to know that."

"I know."

"I don't know what I'm going to do now. I don't have a plan or a job that isn't yours or—"

"Layla." He said it gently, as if setting a cup on a saucer. "I am still angry. A little. It will not go away tomorrow." He paused. "But I was standing here, and I thought, if she goes out and says yes, I will not stop her, and if she says no, I will still be angry. And I thought that was probably a sign of something." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I do not know what. I am very bad at this."

"You talk to bread."

"Yes. It is more reliable."

She laughed, a real one, wet at the edges. He didn't touch her. He didn't need to. He just took the day-old tray from the counter and held it out to her, and she took it, and for a moment they stood there holding either end of a tray of tired baguettes while the world went on shouting outside.

Later, when the vans had gone and the roses had been trampled and the light through the window had turned the color of weak tea, she went to the chalkboard by the door. The old menu was still there in Adrien's crooked handwriting, pain, croissant, tradition, and at the bottom, a blank space where Mamie Fontaine had once written the name of the day's special.

Layla picked up a stub of chalk.

She wrote it slowly, in her own handwriting, which had always been neat and had never once been asked to sign anything that mattered. She stepped back and looked at it. Croissant aux amandes, by Layla.

It was crooked. It was smudged at one corner. It was, she thought, absolutely hers.

"You spelled amandes wrong," said Adrien, from behind her.

"I did not."

"There is a d."

"There is a d."

"It is in the wrong place."

She looked again. He was right. She started to laugh, and after a moment so did he, and outside, in the winter dusk, Odile crossed the courtyard with her cane tapping and her coat the color of oatmeal, heading for a corner table she would never admit she had been waiting for.

Second place, Layla thought, was a perfectly good place to begin.