Read Chapter 18: Deadline

Love did not improve Luc's deadline.

If anything, the festival made it worse.

His publisher expected final art for the new book by the end of May. Luc had lost days to the flood, festival planning, events, and the ordinary human distraction of being in love.

By the second week of May, he began disappearing upstairs again.

At first Clara understood.

She brought food. She kept customers from knocking on his door. She answered event questions without involving him. When he said he needed three uninterrupted days, she arranged three uninterrupted days.

Then three became five.

Messages went unanswered for hours. He missed dinner twice. On the sixth night, Clara went upstairs at eleven and found him working in the dark except for his desk lamp.

"Did you eat?"

"Yes."

She saw the untouched sandwich she had left at six.

"That's a lie."

Luc kept drawing.

"I forgot."

"You also forgot the call with Camille."

"I apologised."

"And the printer needed your final file today."

"I sent it."

"At ten thirty."

He put down the pen.

"What do you want, Clara?"

The tone stopped her.

Polite.

Anaïs's word returned: He became polite.

"I want you to look at me."

Luc did.

His face was exhausted and closed.

"I have nine days," he said. "I am behind. I need to work."

"I know."

"Then why are we doing this now?"

"Because you're disappearing."

"I am upstairs."

"You know what I mean."

He stood and walked to the window.

"I cannot perform emotional availability every hour because we decided we love each other."

Clara flinched.

"I didn't ask you to."

"You are standing here at eleven checking whether I ate."

"Because you lied about eating."

"I am an adult."

"Then behave like one."

Silence.

Wrong sentence.

Clara knew it immediately.

Luc's face shut down.

"Go home," he said.

"Luc—"

"Please."

Polite again.

Clara left.

The next day they did not speak except about the shop.

On the second day, Clara became angry.

On the third, she became frightened by how familiar the pattern felt: work as refuge, silence as punishment, two people waiting for the other to make the first vulnerable move.

She refused to repeat it.

At six, she closed the shop early and went upstairs.

Luc opened the door after one knock.

"I am not here to check whether you ate," Clara said.

"Good."

"I am here because rule three was no disappearing. That includes me."

Luc looked tired.

She continued.

"I was controlling. You said you needed time and I turned care into supervision. I'm sorry."

His shoulders lowered slightly.

"But you were also doing exactly what Anaïs described. Becoming polite until the problem starves."

He looked away.

"I know."

"I don't need constant access to you. I do need you to tell me when you are overwhelmed instead of making me guess whether I've become a burden."

Luc rubbed a hand over his face.

"I am overwhelmed."

"Good start."

"I hate the book."

Clara blinked.

"What?"

"I hate it. I moved the orange scene. I cut Dijon. I rebuilt the middle. It is better and I hate it."

"Those things can coexist."

"I know."

He sat on the edge of the sofa.

"The last book sold well. Everyone expects this one to be more ambitious. My publisher uses the word mature, which means sad but marketable. I cannot see it anymore."

Clara sat beside him.

"Do you want me to read it?"

Luc was quiet.

"As an editor?"

"Only if you ask."

He looked at her.

"Yes."

So Clara read.

Not that night. They set boundaries. Luc finished a complete rough sequence and handed it to her two days later. Clara read once as a reader, once as an editor. She wrote questions, not commands.

The book was beautiful.

It also ended wrongly.

Élise arrived in Marseille, scattered her mother's ashes, and returned to Paris. The action was complete. The emotional movement was not.

Clara wrote one question in the margin of the final page:

What has she learned that changes what she will do next?

Luc stared at it for a long time.

Then he tore out the last six pages.

"That was dramatic," Clara said.

"Auteur de bande dessinée."

"Right. Not cartoonist."

He finished the new ending three days before deadline.

Élise did not return immediately to Paris. She stayed in Marseille, rented a room for a week, and called her estranged sister.

Not repaired.

Changed.

When Luc sent the final file, he came downstairs at four in the afternoon and lay flat on the bookshop floor.

Customers stepped around him.

Clara stood over him.

"Alive?"

"No."

"Coffee?"

"Later."

"Food?"

"Eventually."

"Emotional availability?"

He opened one eye.

"Limited but sincere."

Clara sat on the floor beside him.

That was enough.