I’m aghast at this. “Sandrine was awful back then, worse than now. She was trying to rebuild her relationship with Albert and she didn’t want anyone to get in the middle of it. She was horrible to Mellie and me too.” She thoughtMelliewas a gold digger. Until she accepted that Mellie was just a friend and in no way a threat, we felt very unwelcome.
Étienne glares at me. “What shewantedwas to make sure her precious son was definitively next in line for the throne.”
Étienne is a month older than Jackson, I realize. And Jackson is a Cole. If Sébastien had lived and married Estelle, Étienne would have been born an Osier. He would have likely inherited everything.
Étienne is an Osier…
“She needn’t have worried,” he continues. “We wanted nothing to do with them after that.”
“I’m so sorry,” I murmur. “I can’t imagine how horrible that must have been.” I reach for his hand, but he moves it away. His rejection of me makes my blood run cold. “So where do I come in?” I ask uneasily. “You said your mother worked out who I was?”
He nods. “When you went upstairs to say goodbye that day.”
Estelle had called out as Étienne and I were about to paddle back to town and I’d gone to say goodbye to her in her room. She looked so thin under the covers, but she smiled when I cooed over the picture on the dresser of her and Étienne as a child. When I think of it now, I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him sooner as the boy who’d come to Château Angèle, but he’d been laughing in the photo and that day he looked so distraught.
“As you were leaving,” Étienne continues, “you said, ‘Right, I’d better get back to the château.’
“My mother asked what château, and when you replied, ‘Château Angèle, on the hill,’ I remember her going very quiet. When we both realized that you were the little girl who’d seen me bleeding and crying, that you were close to a family that we loathed, that you were in love with a boy who—” His face warps with disgust.
“You really do hate them.” My stomach is roiling.
He nods, scowling. “Every time you and I are in town together I’m on edge in case you see them.” I’m taking it he means Albert and Sandrine—I’ve unwittingly tried to introduce him to his grandfather at least once. Christ. “It’s why I’ve avoided you over the years. I’ve seen you with them and have turned and walked the other way. It makes me feel sick.” I blanch at his words. How could he be with someone who makes him feelsick? It doesn’t get much worse than that. “As long as you’re connected to that family, we never could have lasted,” he says miserably as I reach the same conclusion.
The vise around my heart clamps down.
“So this was what?” I try to sound steady as I indicate the two of us. “You were just using me to screw with Jackson because he’s Sandrine’s son? It was revenge?”
Étienne’s fury morphs into something more uncomfortable.
“Did you want to hurt me too? Because I’d hurt you by association?”
“It might have started out a bit like—”
I cut him off, my vision swimming. “Is this the real reason why you warned me not to fall in love with you?” I look past him at the photos of him and Eve on the wall. “Because what you had with Eve was big and real and authentic and everything about us has been based on a lie?” My eyes snag on a picture of Eve with Lise. “Oh my God, did Lise know that you were playing me?” I’m appalled.
“No!”
“Did any of your friends?”Were they all in on it?
“No,” he repeats firmly.
It’s a small mercy.
But at the end of the day, Jackson hit the nail on the head: Étienne was fucking me to fuck with him.
I feel like such a fool. But I’m more than embarrassed, I’m devastated.
I get to my feet and stalk to the door.
I’ve been the pawn all along.
36
Étienne shouts out my nameas I leave, but I don’t look back. As soon as I’m on the road, I begin to cry and I don’t stop until I reach the mountain pass. This is where the snow sometimes used to make it impossible to get through. It’s where Sébastien and Josie died.
It was winter, it was icy, the person coming in the other direction lost control and crashed into them, causing them to fly straight off the edge of the mountain.
My dad feels like a shadowy figure to me, I remember Étienne saying.His family wanted nothing to do with my mum after he died. He came from a wealthy background and she was a factory worker. They thought she was beneath him. They sure as hell didn’t want to be burdened with her son.
