Chapter 71
Maxime
I texted that I was coming. By the time I parked outside Sciences Po, she was already asleep in the library—I could see her through the window, head pillowed on her arms at one of the long tables, her textbook open beside her like a failed attempt at companionship. The October afternoon light came through at an angle that made the whole scene look like something out of a painting, all amber and stillness, and I stood there for a moment before going in, watching her sleep with the particular unguarded quality she only had when she thought no one was looking.
I'd stopped at the café first. Her usual order—black coffee, no sugar, the kind of bitter that most people couldn't tolerate but that she drank like water. I carried it up the library steps, pushed through the heavy doors as quietly as I could manage, and made my way to her table. She didn't stir when I set the cup down. She didn't stir when I pulled out the chair across from hers. It wasn't until I said her name, quietly, that her eyes opened—slowly, with the kind of reluctance that suggested she'd been somewhere far away and wasn't entirely ready to come back.
"I texted that I was coming." I slid her coffee cup toward her. "It's cold now, probably."
She wrapped both hands around it anyway, the way she always did when she was waking up, using it as an anchor rather than a drink. "What time is it?"
"Almost two. Your seminar's at three."
She made a sound that was not quite a word and rubbed her face with both hands. When she lowered them, she blinked at me with an expression I couldn't immediately read—something between recognition and distance, as if she were trying to remember what terms we were on. Then I saw it: the brief flicker of memory crossing her face, the recalibration that happened when she recalled how we'd left things the night before.
Last night. The car. The failed kiss. The things I'd said that I shouldn't have said, about Étienne, about the way she looked at him, about the fact that she was pretending with me and we both knew it.
She looked away first, down at her coffee, and I watched her arrange her face into something more neutral. "Sorry. I didn't mean to fall asleep."
"It's fine." I leaned back in my chair, giving her space. "Long morning?"
"Training ran over." She said it carefully, the way you might test the temperature of water before committing to getting in. Then something shifted in her expression—not quite relaxation, but a loosening, as if she'd decided that whatever had happened last night could be temporarily set aside in favor of something simpler. "Something happened this morning."
I looked at her. The brightness was there now, the particular quality she got when something had gone right in training, held-in satisfaction that she didn't always know she was showing. "How did you know?" she asked.
"You look like you do after a good session." I leaned forward slightly, accepting the implicit truce. "What was it?"
And then she told me—the three-and-a-half rotation throw, the harness work, the twenty solo attempts before breakfast, the three clean landings at the end. She used terminology I didn't fully follow, something about rotation axis and the difference between a catch that was technically correct and one that was actually controlled, and for a moment she was talking the way she did when she forgot to be careful, her hands moving in the air to demonstrate angles and trajectories, her whole body leaning into the explanation as if the physics of it were written in the space between us.
I found myself watching her face more than I was tracking the content. This was the version of her I'd always liked best—the one that forgot the performance, the one that just wanted to tell someone about the thing that had worked. But even as I watched, I could see the moment she remembered: the slight hesitation in her gesture, the way her eyes refocused on me as if she were suddenly aware of who she was talking to, the small adjustment in her posture that meant she was pulling back.
"You're not following any of this," she said, and there was something in her voice now—not quite embarrassment, but a kind of retreat.
"I'm following that it was good," I said.
She tilted her head, half-amused, half-resigned, and the brightness dimmed slightly. "It's complicated to explain if you don't—"
"I know." I did know. I'd accepted early on that there was an entire dimension of her life that I would never fully enter, not because she kept me out intentionally but because the language of it—the specific technical vocabulary, the embodied knowledge of what a particular movement felt like from the inside—didn't translate. I could watch her train and see that she was extraordinary. I couldn't see what she saw. "Tell me the part that matters."
She considered this, and I watched her choose her words more carefully now, the way she did when she remembered the distance between us. "I did something today that I've been trying to do for eight months," she said finally. "And it worked. Three times."
"That's good," I said, and meant it.
She nodded, and the brightness in her face settled into something quieter and more private, the way it did when she was filing something away. The moment of unguarded enthusiasm was over. She reached for her textbook and closed it, stacked it with the notes she'd been taking before she fell asleep, began the small organizing movements that meant she was shifting back into the practical logistics of the afternoon.
Her bag shifted when she moved the textbook, and the corner of the black box appeared again.
I looked away before she noticed, and I didn't say anything about it, and we walked to her seminar building together in the thin October sunlight, and she talked about the international law professor who had a voice like a metronome set to a frequency specifically designed to induce sleep, and I laughed in the right places, and the whole time I was thinking about the receipt and the dimensions of the box and the fact that she still hadn't mentioned it.
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By the time I dropped her at the door of the Beaumont house that evening, it had been seven hours since I'd found the box in her bag, and she still hadn't said a word about it.
We'd had dinner at the brasserie near the school—she'd ordered the grilled fish, picked at most of it, and had maintained a conversation that felt more like an exercise in politeness than genuine engagement. She'd told me about the seminar, about a case study involving an obscure maritime dispute that had apparently generated an argument between two of her classmates. She'd smiled at appropriate moments. She'd asked me about my thesis defense timeline with what seemed like real interest. It had been a perfectly pleasant dinner, the kind of pleasant that felt like a performance we were both giving for an audience that didn't exist.
Neither of us mentioned last night. Neither of us mentioned the things I'd said in the car, or the way she'd looked at me when I'd said them, or the fact that we both knew I'd been right. We just sat there in the warm light of the brasserie, eating our respective meals, maintaining the fiction that we were a normal couple having a normal dinner, and the whole time I could feel the weight of everything we weren't saying pressing down on the space between us.
I pulled up to the front gate and left the engine running. She gathered her bag from the footwell, her movements efficient and practiced—she always had the bag ready before the car stopped, always made the transition from passenger to pedestrian in a single clean motion, as if she'd learned early that drawing out departures was inadvisable.
She leaned over and pressed her cheek briefly against mine, the way she did when she was tired and the formal version of affection was the most she had available. "Thank you for dinner."
"Anytime," I said.
She opened the door, stepped out, and I watched her cross the small distance to the gate, her bag over one shoulder, the black box still somewhere inside it. She typed her entry code without looking at the keypad—muscle memory, the same code she'd apparently used for years—and the gate clicked open, and she went through without looking back.
That gift wasn't for me. So who was it for?
I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.
The gate was already closed by the time I turned the corner.