Read Chapter 6: Family Dinner

The car pulled up outside a narrow house in the eleventh arrondissement, its limestone facade unremarkable but for the wild tangle of geraniums spilling from every window box. Elise’s stomach tightened. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming. That was the point.

Theo turned off the engine and studied the building. “Charming. Very French.”

“It’s my father’s.” She didn’t move. “He doesn’t know about you.”

“You mean he doesn’t know about us.” Theo’s voice was light, but there was an edge beneath it. “You said family was important. That meeting them would sell the story. Our story.”

“I said it would sell *your* story.” Elise pulled her coat tighter. The silver earring was back in her lobe, a small anchor of her mother’s presence. She hadn't told Theo that. She hadn't told anyone. “My father reads the papers. He’ll have seen the photographs. He just won’t believe them.”

“Then we’ll make him believe.”

She turned to face him fully. In the dim streetlight, his features looked sculpted from patience, which she found more irritating than outright arrogance. The arrogance she could fight. The patience was a cage.

“One hour,” she said. “We stay for one hour. You say the right things. You compliment the food. You laugh at his jokes, even the terrible ones about English weather. And then we leave.”

“And if he asks how serious we are?”

Elise’s jaw tightened. Her father would ask. He always went straight for the wound. “Then we tell him we’re serious.”

“Good.” Theo opened his door. “Because that’s the only part of this that can’t look like a performance.”

Her father answered the door in a faded cardigan, pipe smoke curling around him like an old friend. He looked smaller than she remembered, diminished by the years since her mother’s death and the distance she’d put between them. His eyes moved from her to Theo, and she watched calculation settle behind them like sediment.

“Élise.” He kissed both her cheeks, his skin rough with stubble. “You didn’t call.”

“Surprise.” She stepped inside, forcing warmth into her voice. “Papa, this is Theo. Theo, my father, Jean-Pierre.”

Jean-Pierre looked Theo up and down with the frank assessment of a man who’d spent forty years selling wine and could spot a vintage from across the room. “The actor.”

“Yes, sir.” Theo extended his hand. Jean-Pierre took it after a pause long enough to make a point.

“Come in, then. I’ve made coq au vin. There’s enough for two, even if I didn’t know I was feeding three.”

The kitchen was exactly as Elise remembered—copper pots hanging from a ceiling rack, the same chipped enamel table, the photograph of her mother on the wall above the stove, forever young in a summer dress. She avoided looking at it for too long. That was a different kind of pain, one she couldn’t perform her way through.

Jean-Pierre ladled wine into three glasses without asking. “So. You’re the man who made my daughter laugh.”

Theo smiled, easy as water. “She’s not as hard to amuse as she pretends.”

“Oh, she is.” Jean-Pierre set the bottle down with more force than necessary. “She’s been impossible since she was twelve. I blame myself.”

“Papa.” Elise’s voice carried a warning. “We came here to have a nice dinner.”

“Did you?” Her father’s eyes moved between them. He sat down heavily, gesturing for them to do the same. “Or did you come here so I could see you together? So you could prove to the papers that this isn’t some arranged affair for publicity?”

Theo’s laugh was genuine, and Elise hated him a little for it. “Sir, if this were for publicity, we would have chosen a restaurant with better lighting and a photographer on retainer.”

“And you would have smiled more.” Jean-Pierre’s mouth twitched. He reached for his glass, studying Theo over the rim. “My daughter—she doesn’t perform well with her family. She always thought she had to. After her mother died, she kept trying to show me she was fine, when she wasn’t. It’s a habit she never broke.”

Elise’s throat closed. She hadn’t expected this—her father being perceptive, being kind, dismantling her defenses with the same quiet force he used to open stubborn wine bottles.

“I’m fine now,” she said, too quickly. “I’m working again. The film is back on track.”

“Is it?” Jean-Pierre turned to Theo. “Will you be in this film, then? Together?”

Theo’s pause was almost imperceptible, but Elise caught it. She caught it and something cold moved through her chest.

“That’s not how it works,” Theo said carefully. “We’re together off-screen. On-screen, we’re separate professionals. It keeps things—” he glanced at Elise, “—balanced.”

“Balanced.” Jean-Pierre repeated the word like he was tasting it. “That’s an interesting word for two people in love.”

Elise had to end this now. He was circling, and Theo wasn’t deflecting properly. She reached across the table and took Theo’s hand, threading her fingers through his with a familiarity that surprised even her. Theo’s hand was warm, steady, and he didn’t flinch.

“Papa, it’s new. We’re still figuring it out. But I wanted you to meet him because I—” The lie stuck in her throat. She swallowed it. “I wanted you to know I’m serious.”

Jean-Pierre looked at their joined hands. He looked at his daughter’s face. And she saw the moment he chose to believe her—not because he was convinced, but because he wanted to be.

“Fine.” He raised his glass. “Then let’s drink to serious things done properly.”

Dinner passed in a blur of forced laughter and careful conversation. Theo was flawless—complimenting Jean-Pierre’s food, asking about the vineyard, even venturing a plausible opinion on the 2019 Bourgogne. Elise watched him work, and despite herself, she was impressed. He was better at this than she was. He made the lie look like breathing.

It filled her with a strange, unnamed dread.

As they cleared the plates, Jean-Pierre pulled her aside in the narrow hallway. His hand was heavy on her shoulder, and his eyes were bright with something she couldn’t name.

“Your mother,” he said quietly, “would have liked him. He’s got kind eyes. But he’s not telling you something, Élise. I can smell it on him like cheap cologne.”

“Everyone’s hiding something, Papa.”

“Not in love.” He squeezed her shoulder. “In love, you show your wounds. That’s the point.”

She found Theo in the living room, studying the photo of her mother. His face was unreadable in the low lamplight.

“You have her jaw,” he said without turning. “The stubborn lines.”

“She wasn’t stubborn. She was determined.”

“Same thing.” He finally looked at her. “Your father’s a good man. He worries about you.”

“Don’t.” The word came out harder than she intended. “Don’t psychoanalyze me, don’t charm my family, don’t pretend you see things I don’t. We have a contract. That’s all. You don’t get to care.”

Theo’s expression flickered, something raw moving beneath his composed surface. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “I don’t. But your father believes we’re serious. And when this ends, he’ll blame me for breaking your heart—not for lying to him. You gave me that gift tonight.” He stepped closer. “I just want to know why.”

Elise couldn’t answer. The truth—that she’d lied not to protect Theo, but to protect her father from yet another disappointment—was too tangled to say aloud. So she said the next truest thing.

“Because he needs to believe I’m okay. And for the next six months, I am. With you, I am.”

Theo’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He glanced at it, and his face tightened.

“Simon. He needs us at the office tonight. Something about the tabloid editors wanting a follow-up piece on tomorrow’s La Mer Blanche meeting. He says there’s a problem with the narrative.”

“What problem?”

Theo’s jaw worked. “He didn’t say. He just said to come now.”

Elise looked back at her father watching them from the kitchen doorway, his eyes sharp despite the wine, and she felt the walls of the lie closing in around her.