Page 13 of Under Her Protection

"Vivienne."

"I have engaged counsel. I have told them to prepare engagement documents. I have not signed."

"Why not?"

"Because I do not want a bodyguard in my house."

Isabella looked at her as if she had said she did not want oxygen in her lungs. "Vivi.”

“Dominique said they needed to be in my house. I will not have that. So the finer points are still for clarification.”

"You do not want anyone in your house. You do not want anyone in your life. That is not a reason. That is a wall."

"It has kept me alive so far.”

"It has kept you alone so far.”

The word stopped in the air between them. Neither of them moved it away. Vivienne looked at her friend and allowed herself, for three seconds, to feel what Isabella had just said. Then she put the feeling where she kept those feelings and looked back at the Tuileries.

"I will think about it," she said.

"You will sign it."

"I will think about it."

Isabella did not press. She was not that kind of friend. She was the kind who said the sentence once, in the right room, and then stood up to leave when she had said it.

She stood up to leave.

She paused with her hand on the door, half turned. "Tell me one thing."

"Yes."

"Do you have any guess of who it is? Any at all?”

Vivienne looked at her. For half a breath she considered telling Isabella the thing she had thought in the anteroom at Maison Noire last night, the quiet one, the one she had locked away. For half a breath she considered saying a name she had not said aloud in twenty-five years.

She did not.

"I have a list," she said. "When it is short enough to matter, you will be the first person I tell."

Isabella's dark eyes moved over her face, and whatever they saw there was a thing Isabella elected not to say. Vivienne watched her friend's mouth form and discard a follow-up question, watched it form and discard another. It was rare that Isabella discarded questions. Vivienne loved her a degree more for each one that did not get asked, and did not say so.

Isabella nodded once.

"Call me," Isabella said. "Even if it is late."

"Always."

Isabella left.

Alone.

Vivienne sat alone in the office with the cold coffee and the windows and the morning traffic beginning to thicken below on the rue de Rivoli. She did not move for a minute. Isabella had left the word alone on the desk between them like a paper knife, and Vivienne, who prided herself on the degree to which she did not flinch, was aware that she had flinched. It had not shown on her face. That did not mean it had not happened.

Alone was a word she had not permitted anyone to say in her hearing in two decades. She had not even permitted herself to say it. She said it to herself now, once, in French, the way Isabella had said it, and found that the word had a different weight at seven-forty in the morning than it had at two a.m. The morning weight was bearable. She let the word go.

She was forty minutes into the next thing, a call with her general counsel, when Fournier knocked twice on the door and slid in without waiting.