Page 37 of Under Her Protection

She took the phone out under the edge of the table.

One message. Six words.

> It has been a very long time.

No signature.

No number her phone would recognize.

Vivienne did not move.

She knew the voice of those six words the way a pianist knew the hand of a phrase. The cadence. The spacing. The small choice not to sign. This was not a guess. This was Lara.

Vivienne put the phone face-down on the table beside her glass.

She did not look up.

She did not look toward Leo at the wall.

She did not put any of the thing on her face, and if her face was doing anything in the low light of the red lounge, she was not going to let the three women at the table see it. She felt, underneath her sternum, the small sickening drop that her body had learned to translate years ago as I was right and I wish I had been wrong.

Twenty-five years of silence, and six words.

Leo would have to be told. Leo would have to be told tonight. Leo had asked for exactly this sentence at the kitchen counter on Friday, and Vivienne had not given it to her then, and she was not going to give it to her now, not in this room, and not within Isabella's hearing, and not with her own hand still cold against the phone. Vivienne was not ready. She was going to be ready. She was not ready yet.

She picked up her glass. She drank. She smiled at a small comment of Sienna's and did not remember, thirty seconds later, what the comment had been.

In the corner of her eye, Leo, at the wall, angled her head an inch toward Vivienne.

Leo had seen her read the message. Leo had seen her not react.

Leo did not come forward.

Leo waited.

A part of Vivienne wanted to hand the phone to Leo across the table without a word. A part of Vivienne wanted to stand up and walk out through the velvet and tell Leo on the pavement exactly who had sent the message and exactly what it was likely to mean. A part of Vivienne, a part she did not like, wanted to put the phone back in her bag and pretend for one more evening that the last twenty-five years had left her alone.

None of those parts of Vivienne was the part that decided, in her life. The part of her that decided was the part that had built an empire, and that part said that the news of Lara would be delivered to Leo at the time and in the place and with the framing that Vivienne, and only Vivienne, would choose.

Tonight was not the time. The red lounge was not the place. Isabella's hearing was not the framing.

Tomorrow, perhaps.

Vivienne carried the six words in the pocket of her jacket and the six words in the small locked room at the back of her skull, and she drank her Armagnac, and in forty minutes she excused herself cordially and let Leo walk her to the car, and on the ride home she sat in the back in the dark and did not put the phone back in her bag and did not put it on her lap and did not look at it; she held it in her right hand, screen-down, for the length of the rue de Rivoli and the length of the Avenue Marceau and into her own courtyard; and she did not tell Leo, tonight, what the message had said, or who had sent it, though Leo would sit in the front seat for the whole ride and would not turn her head once, and would wait.

Tomorrow, Vivienne thought.

Or the next day.

Not tonight.

---

When they arrived at the rue de Chaillot, Leo opened the car door and waited. Vivienne stepped out. In the gravel courtyard she paused a half breath, looking up at the façade of her own house, and she was aware that Leo was watching her and aware that Leo was not going to ask.

She considered, for a breath, telling Leo right here on the gravel. She considered it and she did not share.

"Thank you, Mademoiselle Cole."