Read Chapter 10: A Taste of Peace

The taxi pulled up to a Haussmann building on the Rue de Grenelle, its limestone façade glowing amber in the evening light. Meiling checked the address Antoine had texted her twice before stepping out. A private dinner. To mend fences. The olive branch felt suspicious, but after the week they'd had—the leak, the strike, the ninety-day promise she'd made on his behalf—she couldn't afford to refuse.

The elevator opened directly into his apartment. Antoine stood by a marble counter, sleeves rolled to his elbows, stirring something in a copper pot. He looked different here, unguarded. The sharp lines of his suits were gone, replaced by a charcoal sweater that softened his shoulders.

"You cook?" she asked, stepping onto the parquet floor.

"My grandmother insisted." He gestured to a stool. "She believed anyone who designed clothes without understanding food had no sense of texture. Sit. It's almost ready."

She perched at the counter, scanning the room. The apartment was spare but deliberate—a single Degas sketch above the fireplace, shelves lined with leather-bound books, no photographs anywhere. The absence of personal history felt like its own confession.

"What are we having?" she asked.

"Daube de boeuf. Her recipe." He lifted the lid, releasing a cloud of wine-scented steam. "She said patience was the only ingredient you couldn't fake. The meat needs three hours minimum. I started it this morning."

"Before or after you publicly blamed me for the factory leak in a board meeting?"

Antoine's jaw tightened, but he didn't take the bait. He plated the stew in silence, setting a bowl before her with a roughness that suggested apology. She took a bite. The meat dissolved on her tongue, rich with orange peel and bay.

"Your grandmother," Meiling said slowly, "she taught you to sew?"

The question seemed to catch him off guard. He sat across from her, his own bowl untouched. "She taught me everything. The cutting, the draping. How to read a seam like a sentence." He swirled his wine. "My parents wanted me in finance. A Lumière in banking, they said. Respectable. But Grand-mère would take me to the atelier after school, and I'd sit under the worktables while she pinned hems. She used to say the hands remember what the heart refuses to forget."

Meiling set down her fork. "What happened to her?"

Antoine's gaze drifted to the window, where the Eiffel Tower blinked against the violet sky. "She died when I was twenty-two. My father liquidated her private archive within the month. Sold her pattern books, her sketches, her correspondence." His voice tightened. "He said it was sentimental clutter."

Correspondence, Meiling thought. Her pulse quickened, but she kept her expression neutral. "Did you keep anything?"

He reached into his sweater pocket and withdrew a worn thimble, silver with a dented rim. "She used this for forty years." He rolled it between his fingers. "After my father sold her things, I went to the auction house. This was all I could afford."

Meiling watched the way his thumb traced the dent, and for the first time, she saw the weight he carried. Not arrogance. Grief. The house Lumière wasn't a business to him. It was the last living piece of the woman who'd made him who he was.

"It's beautiful," she said quietly.

Antoine looked up, and something shifted between them—a crack in his armor wide enough for her to glimpse the man beneath. "She would have liked you," he said. "You have the same stubbornness. The same certainty that you're right."

"I am right."

"That's exactly what I mean."

She laughed despite herself, the tension in her shoulders easing for the first time in weeks. They ate in companionable silence, and when she finished, Antoine refilled her glass and told her about his grandmother's final project—a gown she'd never completed, designed for the 1998 collection. He'd found the half-finished bodice in a trunk years after her death.

"I still have it," he said. "I've never let anyone see it. I don't know why I'm telling you."

"Because you needed someone to listen," Meiling said softly.

He held her gaze a moment too long. "Maybe."

The quiet between them stretched, carrying more than words. Meiling thought of Léa's revelation in the archive—the promise transferring the house to the artisan's descendants if the family failed. She thought of the scarf's hidden message and the shell company in Liège. The truth she was chasing would destroy everything Antoine loved, everything his grandmother had built.

"I should go," she said, standing. "It's late."

Antoine rose, walking her to the elevator. He pressed the button, and they stood side by side, his presence close enough that she could smell cedar and wine on his collar.

"Meiling." He turned to face her. "The investor—Devereux. He's been patient, but his patience has limits. I've been borrowing against the house's assets to keep the doors open. If we can't show recovery soon—" He stopped, rubbing the back of his neck. "I don't know how much longer I can protect it."

The elevator arrived with a chime. She stepped inside, the doors sliding between them. Just before they closed, he added, "Thank you. For tonight. For listening."

The doors sealed. Meiling leaned against the elevator wall, her heart pounding. She had come to Paris to save a brand. But the more she uncovered, the more she realized the house itself might not be Antoine's to save. And if the ownership claim was real, everything he'd sacrificed—his family, his future, his grandmother's legacy—had been built on borrowed ground.

When she reached the street, her phone buzzed. She expected a text from Léa or another anonymous warning. Instead, it was an email from Brussels, flagged urgent. The lab had completed a second analysis of the scarf's embroidery thread.

The thread was not from the founder's era.

It was modern. Less than five years old.

Which meant the hidden message claiming the house belonged to someone else had been sewn in recently, by someone with access to the scarf's archive history and a motive to destabilize the Lumière family.

Someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

Meiling stood on the Paris street, the city lights blurring around her. The scarf wasn't a historical artifact uncovering a forgotten truth. It was a weapon. Planted deliberately, engineered to destroy.

And she had just told ninety atelier workers that the house was theirs to save—for a lie she might be unwittingly enabling.

She typed a reply to the lab researcher: *Can you date the stitching method? Determine how recently it was made?*

The reply came within minutes: *Working on it. Estimated window: eighteen to thirty-six months ago.*

Eighteen to thirty-six months. Around the time the Milan outsourcing began. Around the time someone started positioning themselves to take the house from the inside.

Meiling looked up at the glowing windows of Antoine's apartment. He thought he was protecting his grandmother's legacy. But someone else had been planning to steal it long before Meiling ever set foot in Paris.

And she had just unwittingly given them the stage to do it.