Renée's POV
The confession presses against my teeth, desperate to escape, but I clamp my jaw shut and swallow it whole.
I cannot tell him.
Not now, when the fragile, impossible thing growing between us will shatter into pieces too small to ever reassemble the moment he knows what I did.
"I don't know who the strategist was." The lie emerges smooth and steady, each word a small death. "Frank kept me out of those decisions because he knew I would have objected to the methods he was willing to use."
Estienne's jaw tightens, the muscle jumping beneath his skin.
His pale eyes bore into mine with an intensity that makes me want to look away, but I hold his gaze because looking away now would be an admission of guilt.
The distance between us feels unbearable—three feet of hotel carpet that might as well be an ocean.
My body still remembers the weight of him from last night. Now those same hands hang at his sides, clenched into fists that want nothing to do with my skin.
"You expect me to believe that?" His voice carries a sharp edge of disbelief. "You are Léonard Pasquier's granddaughter—that company is your birthright, your blood. You're telling me Frank's wife, the heir to the entire Pasquier legacy, had no idea her husband was systematically destroying the neighboring estate?"
He is right. He is absolutely right, and he knows it.
"Frank never told me anything about competitive strategy." I keep my voice level, building the deception brick by careful brick. "I was his wife, not his partner. He made that distinction very clear from the beginning of our marriage."
"Convenient." The word drips with skepticism.
The morning light catches the stubble along his jaw, and I ache to cross the space between us, to press my palm against his cheek the way I did last night when the truth seemed like something that could wait forever.
"I should have known." I meet his eyes, forcing myself not to flinch from the accusation I find there. "The fact that I didn't is a failure I will carry for the rest of my life."
That much, at least, is true.
"I will find out," I say, and the promise burns in my mouth like acid. "When I take my company back from Frank, I will find whoever was responsible for the campaign against Domaine Côté, and I will make them answer for what they did. I swear it."
The vow hangs between us, heavy with implications I hope he does not fully understand.
Estienne stares at me for a long moment, and I can see him weighing my words against his instincts.
The passport still dangles from his fingers, my photograph and my real name visible on the open page, evidence of the deception I can no longer deny.
He does not believe me. He should not believe me. Everything I have told him since that first night has been built on foundations of sand.
So I give him the rest—the parts that are true, the pieces of myself I have kept locked away for so long that speaking them aloud feels like ripping open old wounds.
"My father arranged my marriage to Frank when I was twenty-two years old." The words come slowly, each one dredged up from a place I rarely visit. "He never cared whether I wanted to spend my life with a man twenty-five years my senior. All that mattered to him was ensuring that I would never hold power in my own name."
Estienne's expression shifts, the anger giving way to something more complicated.
He does not move closer, but he does not step away either, and I take that small mercy as permission to continue.
"Frank started hitting me six months after the wedding." My voice cracks on the confession, and I do not try to smooth it over. "The first time, he apologized. He brought me flowers and promised it would never happen again. I believed him because I was young and stupid."
The hotel room feels too small suddenly, the gray morning casting everything in light that makes the truth harder to hide.
"It got worse after that." I press my palm flat against my chest, feeling my heart pound against my ribs. "He learned which bruises could be hidden and which ones required excuses. He tracked my cycle like I was livestock, obsessed with producing an heir that would solidify his position."
"Renée." Estienne says my real name, and the sound of it in his voice makes tears spring to my eyes before I can stop them.
The way he says it—soft, almost tender despite the betrayal written across his face—makes me want to collapse into him.
To bury my face against his chest and let him hold me the way he did in the shower when the hot water ran over us both and nothing existed except skin and steam and the impossible relief of being touched by someone who wanted me whole.
"I ran because I could not survive another night in that house." The words tumble out now, unstoppable, carried on a wave of grief I have been suppressing for years. "I climbed out a window in my bare feet and ran until a stranger in a car stopped to pick me up. I did not know it was your estate until you told me your name, and by then I was too afraid and too exhausted to do anything except pretend to be someone else."
The tears fall freely now, tracking hot paths down my cheeks, and I do not wipe them away because I need him to see that this, at least, is real.
"I didn't come here to hurt you." My voice breaks on the last word. "I came here because this was the last place Frank would ever look for me. And then I saw what my company did to yours, and I wanted to fix it. I want to help you, Estienne, because I have loved you since I was ten years old, and you are the only good thing I remember from my childhood."
The confession hangs in the air between us, raw and exposed.
Estienne exhales slowly, and I watch some of the anger drain from his posture, replaced by something that looks almost like exhaustion.
He runs a hand through his dark hair—that familiar gesture from twenty years ago—and the passport falls from his other hand, landing on the carpet with a soft thud.
My fingers twitch at my sides, desperate to reach for him, to smooth the furrow between his brows, to trace the line of his collarbone where my mouth learned the taste of his pulse just hours ago.
"That summer," he says quietly. "Little Renée Pasquier who ruined her white sneakers with my blood. That was you."
"That was me." I nod, my throat tight. "I recognized you the moment you told me your name, but I could not figure out how to explain who I was without revealing everything else."
He studies my face with new eyes now, searching for the girl he once knew beneath the woman standing before him.
I do not know if he finds her. I do not know if she still exists.
"If you want my help," he says finally, his voice carrying the weight of a decision made against better judgment, "and if you want to stay at the estate, then you have to meet my grandfather and apologize for what your company did to ours."
________________