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“Don’t you dare,” she objected with a defensiveness to match the overt
accusations in my voice. “I promised my father on his goddamned
deathbed. I said I’d take responsibility for the name. That I’d stay
connected to it.” She launched off her chair and crossed the distance
between the table and the sliding glass doors with her arms crossed, spun,
then came back. “She can’t do this. She can’t cut me off like a… like an
employee.” At the edge of the table, she pointed at me as if I were Bianca,
grinding every word through her teeth. “I am Basile Papillion’s only child.
Do you hear me?”
She was a warrior without weapons.
A princess who needed a champion.
“Hell hears you right now.”
She threw herself into the chair and used another to mirror my reclined
posture. “We’re going to rip that company from under her, I swear to God. I
want her to beg me not to, then I’m doing it anyway.”
“Vindictiveness isn’t good business.”
“That office has been my home since I was a kid. I don’t know what I’m
supposed to do with myself.”
“You could just be my wife. If you take that on full time, it’ll make us
credible to my family.”
She slid down the chair and crossed her ankles. In profile, there was
something missing from her face. A lost piece from that side, specifically. I
studied her as she spoke, trying to place it.
“The nineteen-fifties called,” she said. “They want their culture back.”
Found it. The nose ring was the missing piece. She hadn’t put it back in
yet, and in casual clothes, she didn’t look right without it.
“It’s just a job,” I said, sticking to a point that pissed her off because I
was right. “You’ve still got your name, or mine if you want it.”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
She took her feet off the chair and faced me. “When my parents got
Christmas cards, some of them were addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Basile
Papillion. I asked my mother if she’d changed her first name too. She said
no, but some people are old-fashioned and that’s the way they did it. When
my dad got remarried, you know who the cards were addressed to? Mr. and
Mrs. Basile Papillion. Same. My mother was just replaced. Poof. Like she
never even existed.”