Page 47 of Dagger’s Shield

“How can you?” I stood and walked over to the window. “He’s humiliated you for all these years. Surely if a daughter knows, the whole village must.”

“They knew, and they also knew it was best not to look for things they didn’t want to see.” She sighed. “I am telling you this because I want you to know your father is a good man.” She turned to me and held both my hands as if she knew I’d let go. “I made my peace with his indiscretions a long time ago, because it was what I decided to do. It was my choice, Maëlle. I could have left. Maybe not when you were a baby, but in the years that followed.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She squeezed my fingers. “Because I love him and he loves me.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because there is more than sex in a marriage, ma chérie. Your father makes love to me. I know the difference. He also cares and provides for me. I’ve wanted for nothing.”

“I couldn’t accept that. No matter how much I loved someone. In fact, loving them would make it harder to endure.”

“The world is different now than it was then.”

“It’s been thirty years, Maman. Not one hundred. And you say he cares for you, but instead of making sure you got the treatment you need, he told you the illness would pass. That isn’t love.”

“It’s the worst part of love. It’s when the idea that you may lose the person you hold most dear becomes a vise on your heart so tight that you cannot bear it. So you tell yourself it isn’t true, because you cannot bring yourself to accept that it is.”

She let go of my hands and looked toward the window. “He is gentler now than he was. He does not travel the way he once did. For years, it felt like he was in Switzerland more than he was here.”

“Switzerland?”

“There was a business deal that took him there. It was the biggest Domaine Valais has ever had. From what I understand, our sales quadrupled because of it.”

“Do you know who the deal was with?”

“Of course. Maison Fontenay.”

11

DAGGER

Maëlle came back from speaking with her mother, and I knew before she got the door shut that something was off. An hour ago, she’d all but told me to go to hell. I’d waited in her room intentionally, hoping we could resolve things between us. Now, she stood pressed against the wall, with her chin raised. She looked out the window, then at the floor—anywhere but at me.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“My Maman said my father often traveled to Switzerland, which gave me the opportunity to ask why.” She sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at me. “She said it was for business, the biggest customer Domaine Valais has ever had.”

“Interesting.”

She nodded. “She said that our sales had quadrupled because of it.”

My eyes widened. “Quadrupled?”

“I asked if she knew who the customer was, and she said it was Maison Fontenay.”

“This is big. We actually have something to go on.” I walked over to my laptop bag and pulled it out.

She half smiled, but caught herself, obviously still mad at me. However, rather than trying to force a conversation now, it would be better if I focused on the work.

I sat down next to her and opened my computer. “If sales increased that much, it certainly explains why he traveled to Geneva so often.”

“In part,” she said, almost too quietly for me to hear. Still, I knew she was referring to the photos where her father was with women other than her mother.

I ran the name Maison Fontenay through a search while she watched.

It was a Swiss company, based in Geneva, and one of the largest wine and spirits distributors in the world. They bought from producers and sold to shops, hotels, restaurants, and importers across Europe, the States, Asia, and the Gulf. It had been founded decades ago, and their sales ran up to two billion Swiss francs a year, give or take.