Girl in the Afternoon by Serena Burdick Page A

when it was reluctant. He never considered if there were tactical calculations behind Colette’s behavior. He took what he could get when he could get it. He knew she’d inevitably cool again.
    Lately, all the women in his household seemed annoyed with him. Just this morning he’d asked Aimée to see her work, and she’d rushed from the table, exasperated, saying that she was going to be late for class. His maman looked as if he’d insulted her as well, setting down her fork and leaving the table without so much as a word. Colette, in turn, offered a raised eyebrow as she spooned sugar into her coffee.
    â€œHow am I supposed to know what’s going on around here if no one tells me?” Auguste shouted, slamming his fist on the table.
    All the silverware jumped, but Colette didn’t flinch.
    Auguste stormed out of the room. A decent breakfast ruined by unpredictable women.
    *   *   *
    It was her son’s inability to question anything but the most obvious and superficial that angered Madame Savaray.
    She had taken to eating pastries in the kitchen in order to avoid him and the rest of the household, settling in with the iron pots, black bottomed with soot, and the shelves of spices, knives, choppers, ladles, and crockery. The servants, as they came and went, gave her weary looks, but for the most part, ignored her. She found the bustle and clutter almost as comforting as the pastry she sank her teeth into, the sweet, chocolate icing breaking away to a slightly crunchy, buttery crust, and then onto the gooey custard center. It was a satisfaction worth the thickening of her middle.
    Little else satisfied her these days. For a month, at least, Colette had stopped raging, but Madame Savaray knew that wouldn’t last long. Colette preferred to be wildly unhappy. Tidy emotions did not suit her. Her most recent attempt to rein them in only confirmed Madame Savaray’s suspicion that Colette had seen Henri’s painting.
    If the truth came out, Colette had more to lose than any of them, and even though Madame Savaray swore she’d take the secret to her grave, watching her son lured in by Colette’s petty show of domestic normalcy was infuriating. If Auguste would just open his eyes he’d see exactly how manipulative his wife was being. And if he paid any attention at all to his daughter, he would see that Aimée was hiding something too. The girl’s serious face had given way to a lingering smile, and Aimée practically skipped off to class in the mornings. Whatever it was, Henri was at the heart of it, of that Madame Savaray was certain.
    One particular morning Madame Savaray sat in the kitchen feeling worse than usual. It was hot, and she had no appetite. The cook was out getting provisions for the evening meal, and the kitchen was distressingly quiet, and unusually tidy. As if things weren’t troublesome enough, she managed to catch the lace cuff of her dress on a rough piece of wood along the arm of the chair.
    â€œBother,” she said, turning the cuff over in order to pull the snag through to the other side. The more she pulled, the worse it got, and in an instant she saw her whole life in that lace, the delicacy of it, how easily it snagged, how totally out of her control it all was.
    She let the thread go, feeling the fragility of her family in every shrinking, aged bone in her body, and the sense that they were careening toward an unforgivable end.
    Once the truth came out—and she was certain now that it would—there would be nothing she could do to hold this family together.

 
    Chapter 12
    Boulevard Malesherbes was unusually crowded as Aimée walked toward the académie, the great dome of the l’Église Saint-Augustin like an overturned bowl in the sky, the rosette window an enormous, watchful eye at the street’s divide.
    She had finished her painting of Leonie, and with no specific reason to go to Henri’s,