The first time Victor Delmas saw his great-grandson, he glanced at the baby’s threadbare blanket before looking at his face, and Léna understood immediately that, in this family, even a newborn could be judged by the quality of the fabric protecting him from the cold.
Rain lashed against the tall windows of the townhouse on Avenue Foch, blurring the lights of Paris behind a gray haze. In the marble vestibule, beneath a chandelier too bright for such a somber evening, Léna Delmas stood in a tired coat, her hair still damp, her three-week-old son pressed against her chest. The little boy had pale cheeks, an oversized hat, and tiny fingers clutched the edge of a worn cotton blanket, washed far too often in an apartment sink.
Victor Delmas, founder of a real estate and hotel empire, a billionaire known for making government ministers tremble with a single phone call, narrowed his eyes.
“€582,000 a month, wasn’t that enough?”
Silence fell abruptly. Near the fireplace, his eldest daughter, Claire, froze. Camille, Léna’s cousin, slowly placed her champagne glass on a console table. Isabelle Montreuil, the mother of Adrien, Léna’s husband, smiled too quickly, like a woman who has just heard a glass crack.
Léna looked up at her grandfather.
“I never received a single euro.”
Victor barely moved. But something gave way in his face, a fine crack in the stone.
“Say that again.”
“I never received a single euro.”
Adrien Montreuil stepped forward then, elegant in his navy blue suit, handsome like those men who know how to smile even when they’re lying. He hadn’t visited Lena once during the last month of her pregnancy. He hadn’t asked how the birth had gone. He hadn’t even seen the baby until tonight.
“Lena is exhausted,” he said gently. “She just gave birth. Postpartum confusion can be overwhelming.”
She almost laughed. Three weeks earlier, she’d given birth at the public maternity hospital because the deposit from the private clinic had been refused. Two weeks earlier, her landlord in Montreuil had put an eviction notice on her door. One week earlier, Adrien had sent her a message: “You should have learned to be grateful.”
And now, here they all were, perfumed, polished, expensive, surrounded by gilded decorations, playing the worried ones.
Victor slowly turned his head toward Adrien.
“I had the money transferred every month.”
Adrien tilted his chin slightly.
