Page 102 of Under Her Protection

"No."

"Copy."

"Avery."

"Yes."

"If I do not tell you tomorrow morning, do not tell her the reason for the swap. Tell her I needed a break. Tell her the detail benefits from rotation."

"Copy."

Leo put the phone back in her inside pocket.

She leaned her forehead against the wall of the service corridor, briefly.

She straightened up. She smoothed her jacket, which did not need smoothing, which was not a Leo gesture and which she had, apparently, picked up from a woman she had been fucking for weeks now. She noticed the acquisition. She went back to the red lounge.

She stood at the wall and did her job.

In the car home, on the avenue Matignon, Vivienne reached across the seat and put her hand on Leo's hand on the leather between them.

Leo did not move her hand.

She did not close her hand around Vivienne's either.

Vivienne, who was, Leo knew, working her with the same slow attention she worked everything, registered this. Vivienne's hand, on hers, stilled. Vivienne's eyes, under the lamp on the dashboard, moved once, sideways, to Leo's face, and did not remark on what they found there.

"Leo."

"Madame."

A beat.

"Yes."

"Home, please, Eric."

"Yes, Madame."

Eric drove.

Vivienne took her hand back.

She put it on her own lap, and she looked out of her own window for the rest of the ride, and the avenue d'Iéna passed, and the avenue Kléber, and the avenue d'Iéna again, and the gate of the rue de Chaillot opened, and Leo, in the passenger seat with her earpiece live and Avery in the lodge already at the switch-over that would go live at six in the morning, looked straight ahead through the windscreen at the gravel.

The house lights came up.

Vivienne got out of the car.

Leo followed her in.

She saw Vivienne into her bedroom.

She closed the door. Vivienne did not question her.

Leo went down to the lodge.

Avery was sitting on the one chair in the lodge with two coffees on the table and a file open on the desk, waiting. She looked up. She did not ask.