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Vivienne was at the banquette in the red lounge the following night with Isabella on her right and a glass of Armagnac in her hand and Avery, in a flat black jacket on the chair one seat removed.

She wasn’t too happy about Leo’s disappearing act, but she chose not to overthink it.

Vivienne took her phone out of the inside pocket of her black wool dress.

She turned the screen so the room could not see it.

Three messages on the encrypted channel. No name on the sender. The cadence was the cadence she had identified four weeks ago and had not, since, been able to unidentify.

_I have been thinking about your mouth and how much you like to eat pussy._

_How you used to hold the back of my neck when you came. Whether you still like to hold the back of someone's neck like that when you come?_

_There is a photograph from the Zurich apartment. I have it. I am sending it to your private. Because you should remember what we were before they put it on a front page._

A small image attachment loaded under the third message.

She did not open it.

She closed the screen and turned the phone face down on her thigh under the fold of the wool, and her right hand, on the stem of the Armagnac, tightened by a fraction and held, the way it did when her body needed her to keep her hand on a glass and her face on a story.

"Vivienne."

It was Isabella. Isabella, who had finished laughing at the velvet and who had, at the change of light in Vivienne's face that nobody else in the room would have read, dropped her voice.

"My love."

"Mm."

"Your face."

"My face is fine."

"Your face is the face you had at the Bellini call in October when the deal had already collapsed. Are we collapsing again."

"Not at this banquette."

"Then in the car."

"Mm."

Isabella tapped her one fingernail at Vivienne's wrist, three soft strikes against the bone, and Vivienne let it happen, and put the glass down on the low table without spilling.

"Avery,” Vivienne called out across the room.

"Yes."

"I am leaving."

"Copy."

"Now, please."

"Copy."

Avery was up. Colette, at the door of the anteroom, had heard the word leaving without having been spoken to, because Colette heard everything in this house, and the coat was at the door of the lounge inside thirty seconds, and Vivienne was inside the coat inside another five, and her hand on Isabella's hand was the only goodbye she let herself.