Page 68 of Under Her Protection

"You will not."

"I will."

"No."

"Mm."

A pause.

"Leo."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"For what."

"For saving my life.”

"Mm."

"And for not saying anything about what I am saying now."

"Copy.”

Outside, at the gate, Beaumont on his folding stool was on his fifth hour of a wet November night. The north rooftop camera was clean. The south was clean. Dominique had a call with the Circle at nine. Gaudin was in Zurich. Lara was somewhere in the city. Leo had put a bullet chip on a police-evidence slip with her own name on the chain two hours ago.

None of that was in this room, and Leo, for the first time in three years of doing this job, let none of it in.

"Vivienne."

"Mm."

"Sleep."

"Yes."

She slept.

Leo did not, not right away. She lay on her back in the small lamp light with the grandmother's photograph on the bureau watching them both, and Vivienne's breath slowing at her sternum, and Vivienne's dark hair on Leo's shoulder, and she looked at the ceiling and thought, in a very small private honest voice, that the window her sister had warned her about had, at some point in the last two hours, opened into a room she was not going to want to leave.

She closed her eyes.

Vivienne, against her sternum, made the smallest adjustment a sleeping body could make, and moved her hand up half an inch, and put it against the side of Leo's throat, and held it there, asleep. Leo did not take the hand away. Leo lay in the grey linen in a bedroom she had not, ten hours ago, imagined lying in, with a woman's palm at the side of her throat, and she breathed.

The house held.

13

Vivienne woke into a room with the wrong weight in it.

The wrong weight was not unwelcome. It was, she registered at a long slow count under the linen, a hand, flat on her stomach, below her navel, not moving. The hand was not her own. It had been there, she guessed, for some part of the night. It was not asking anything. It was simply on her, because somebody had fallen asleep with her hand there, and the somebody had not, in the dark, taken the hand back.

Vivienne opened her eyes.

Morning came into the room through the grey linen curtain at the French door, pale, December-edged though it was still November, the particular low November light that belonged to this bedroom and to this view of the courtyard gravel and to the Paris she had lived in for thirty-two years. The light was on the silver frame of her grandmother's photograph on the bureau. The light was on the edge of a dark head on the pillow next to hers.

Leo was still asleep.