THE BILLIONAIRE AND HIS SIDE CHICK EXPOSED

Chapter 4: Recognized

The photo was taken on a Thursday in January, by a woman in a camel coat who ordered a flat white at the counter and then held her phone up at hip level like she was checking her messages.

Layla didn't notice. She was busy explaining to a small boy that no, he could not have the whole tray. The woman took her coffee, smiled, and left a two-euro tip. Layla remembered the tip later. It seemed such an odd thing, to be kind and cruel in the same breath.

The post went up at 2:14 in the afternoon. The woman ran a food blog called Crumb & Country with sixty thousand followers and a fondness for finding what she called hidden gems. The caption said: Guess who's serving croissants in Belleville? Remember the "other woman" from that Ashworth scandal? Turns out she's found a new calling. The pain au chocolat is divine, though, ha.

By three, the shop's phone was ringing.

By four, two men with cameras were standing across the street.

Adrien came out from the back with a tray, saw Layla's face, and stopped. She was not crying. She was standing very still, holding her own phone, the one she'd gotten from a corner store in the fall and used to check the weather. The screen showed her own photo and beneath it the number of shares, which was rising even as she looked.

"Layla."

"I can explain."

"I am sure you can." He put the tray down. He looked at her, and the look wasn't angry, and she would have preferred angry. "I read it already. On my phone. A customer showed me." He said it carefully, as if setting each word down on a table. "It is true?"

"Yes."

"You were the woman with the billionaire."

"For four years." Her voice came out small. "I was going to tell you. So many times. I almost told you at Christmas, and then I didn't, because you looked at me like I was a person who—" She stopped. "Like I was just a person who worked here."

"You are a person who worked here."

"I know, but—"

"You lied." His voice was still perfectly even. "Not with words. But you let me not ask, and you knew that I would not, and you used it."

That was so exactly true that she couldn't say a thing.

He wiped his hands on his apron, slowly, the way he did when he was about to walk away from a bad batch. "Finish your shift," he said, and went into the back. She heard the door close, not hard, which was worse.

She finished the shift. It was the longest four hours of her life. A woman came in and asked, loudly, in a bright American accent, whether Layla was really her, and Layla said she was very sorry, they were out of baguettes, though there were eleven on the shelf. The two men with cameras did not leave. Somebody, somewhere, wrote a comment beneath the post that said she looks so ordinary, and she read it twice, and understood it was meant as an insult, and that it was the nicest thing anyone had said about her in a week.

At nine, she turned the sign to fermé, swept the floor, and put out the lights. Adrien didn't come down. His door upstairs was shut. She sat on an overturned crate in the dark shop with her back against the cold glass of the display case, and did not go to her mattress. It felt like it belonged to someone who had been allowed to stay.

The bell over the door rang.

She thought it was a photographer. She was ready to say we're closed in three languages. But the figure in the doorway was small and straight-backed, in an oatmeal-colored coat, leaning slightly on a cane that never bore any weight.

"You left the door unlocked," Odile said. "It is not intelligent."

"I forgot."

"You did not forget. You are waiting for someone to come and shout at you, so you can stop." Odile crossed the shop with slow, deliberate steps and sat down at her corner table, in the dark, as if it were eight-fifteen in the morning. "I know who you are. I have known since the second week."

Layla stared at her. "You did?"

"My granddaughter has the telephone. She showed me the pictures. There was one of you carrying your shoes." Odile made a small, dismissive noise. "I thought: this poor girl has been hurt very badly by someone. And then I thought: she works so hard, this girl, like a person who is trying to earn her own bed. I decided it was none of my business."

"You could have told Adrien."

"It was not for me to tell." Odile folded her hands over the top of the cane. "Listen to me, ma fille. You think you are hiding from them. The billionaire, the newspapers, the girls with the telephones. You are not. You are hiding from you. From the woman who wanted something for four years and did not have the right to say so."

Layla put her face in her hands.

"What did you want?" Odile asked, not unkindly. "Not from him. From your life."

The answer came up from somewhere she hadn't known was still there. "I wanted to be the first choice," she said. "Just once. I wanted somebody to look at me and not have anywhere better to be."

"Ah." Odile nodded, very slowly. "Good. That is a true thing. Now you must decide whether it is a thing you give to other people, or a thing you give to yourself."

The old woman got up, tapped her cane twice on the floor as if to punctuate, and left. The bell rang behind her. In the empty bakery, Layla sat until the dark went gray, and did not sleep, and for the first time in a very long while didn't rehearse a single sentence.