Page 113 of Under Her Protection

"Sit down, Vivienne."

Vivienne did not sit.

She stood in the middle of the small sitting room in the camel coat with her hands in the pockets of the coat because her hands, in her own pockets, were not visible, and her stomach, under the wool of the dress, had begun, in the last forty seconds, to do a thing she had not, in her own body, had to manage for twenty-five years. She was going to be sick. The nausea came up slow, from the bottom of her stomach to the back of her throat. Her hands, in the pockets, had gone cold and were shaking.

She kept her face on. Something she was very good at.

"I chose the company."

"Yes."

"I chose the company because the company was the thing I had built and you were the thing I had been given. I did not, back then, know how to keep both. I cut you off because I could not bear to do the other thing, which was to tell you the truth, which was that I had decided. I wrote you a letter that did not say that. The letter was a coward's letter. There. You have it."

A beat.

"That is the answer."

"Yes."

"Twenty-five years."

"Yes."

"For that."

"Yes."

Lara's face, on the sofa, did not move.

It did not move and it did not move, and Vivienne, who had spent a year in 1998 in a flat on the Bahnhofstrasse learning to read every movement of that beautiful face, watched the face not move and understood that the woman on the sofa was not, this evening, going to let her leave the flat.

"Lara."

"Mm."

"I am leaving now."

"No."

"Lara."

"You are not leaving now, Vivienne. We have not finished. I have a server I am running from the bedroom of this flat. I have, on the server, the contents of your private mail account. I have it timed to publish at midnight unless I unlock it from this flat by hand at eleven. You are going to sit in this room with me until we have finished, or it will publish."

She poured herself the second glass.

"Sit down."

Two long seconds.

The bedroom door, which had been open, opened wider. Two men in dark suits stepped into the doorway. One on the left side of the frame, one on the right. The one on the left had his right hand inside his jacket. The one on the right had both hands at his sides, loose, the way Leo's hands had been loose at the lodge door in November.

Vivienne stood very still.

The nausea came up and stayed at the back of her throat. The cold in her hands became a different cold. Her knees, which had held in the library on a Wednesday night, gave for half a second and then locked again, and she steadied, and they held.

She did not move.

She did not, she registered, in the part of her brain that was still doing the work of being Vivienne Strauss, have her phone. Her phone was at Maison Noire in her handbag on the banquette next to Isabella, because the protocol at the door of the red lounge was that no telephones came past the door, and she had, this evening, used the protocol as she used everything, which was to her own purpose.