Page 15 of Under Her Protection

"She will be at your residence at fourteen hundred."

"You have already instructed her?”

“Of course I have."

"Of course you have."

"Vivienne."

"Yes."

Dominique's voice did not change. "You should know that I have put Leandra Cole on this because she will not back down from you. She is not easily managed. You will not enjoy her. I do not need you to enjoy her. I need you to let her work."

Vivienne looked at the pages on her desk. She looked at the Tuileries. Dominique had described Leandra Cole in terms that were neither praise nor reassurance: a woman who did not back down, who was not easily managed, who would require Vivienne's full attention. Vivienne had not thought she wanted that. She was no longer certain. She looked, briefly, at the small reflection of her own face in the black glass of her monitor, a woman she had built thirty years ago and had not allowed anyone to revise.

"Fine," she said.

"Thank you."

"Fourteen hundred."

"Fourteen hundred."

"Dominique."

"Yes."

"I do not want her in my house."

"I know."

"I am telling you anyway."

"Yes. You are."

"You will not reassign her."

"No."

Dominique, drily: "You would have been disappointed if I had."

"I would have been."

"Fourteen hundred, Vivienne."

She hung up.

She sat with her hand on the receiver for another beat, and then she picked up the memo again and began reading it from the top, slowly, line by line, because if she read it slowly enough she would not have to think about the other thing she was now fairly sure of, which was the identity of the hand behind it. The memo could not tell her that. The memo could only tell her what she already knew, which was that this was a person who had once read her private handwriting on private pages in the bed they had shared, and who had remembered the shape of the way Vivienne wrote a number.

Twenty-five years, Vivienne thought.

She crossed the corridor to her private study, a small dim room at the rear of the suite that no one entered without her express invitation. She closed the door. She put her palms flat on the antique desk that had belonged to her grandfather and rested her weight on them a breath.

In the drawer, under a folder of personal correspondence she did not keep at home, was a single black-and-white photograph she had not looked at in twelve years. She did not open the drawer. She knew it was there. It had always been there. She had considered burning it, quarterly, for two and a half decades and had never in fact done so. That was an inconsistency in her own character which she had chosen not to examine.

If it was Lara, she thought, then the photograph in the drawer would be the least of her problems. If it was Lara, the photograph was not actionable. The memoir in Lara's head was actionable. That was the fight.

She lifted her hands off the desk. She left the drawer closed. She smoothed the front of her jacket, which did not require smoothing, and let her eyes rest for a breath on the single object she kept on the study's mantel, a small brass paperweight her grandmother had left her, unremarkable to anyone but her. Some objects she kept near her because they were beautiful. This one she kept near her because her grandmother had once told her, at twelve, that a woman's face was the only room she got to decorate with her own hand, and that she should decorate it accordingly.