Chapter 5: The Papers Alexandre Kept
The nurse had dimmed the hospital room lights, but the adjoining records area stayed bright enough to make every page look accusatory. I sat at the small table with one hand beneath my stomach and the other resting on the stack Alexandre had brought from the manor. The baby shifted when I touched the top folder.
Alexandre stood near the door, lean shoulders drawn tight beneath his formal shirt. He had changed nothing since the courtyard. His cuffs were still fastened, his trousers still creased, as if order could be maintained by keeping his clothes in place.
The first papers were ordinary: copies of my marriage documents, a clinic intake form, a receipt for prenatal vitamins. Then I found a letterhead I did not recognize. The date was nearly a year before my wedding. Beneath the manor's crest, a secretary had recorded my name, the country I had given on my first employment form, and a request for information about my birth registration.
The wording was careful. It did not call me a thief or an impostor. It asked whether records existed under alternate spellings, whether a woman of my age had been reported missing from a private clinic in Paris, and whether a distinctive wrist ornament had appeared in any related file.
My fingers stopped moving.
Alexandre did not come closer. His silence answered before he did.
I turned the page and found a second reference, this one marked with a narrow red line. It directed the reader to correspondence stored in the east archive room at the manor. The file description included the name of the Paris clinic and a date from twenty-nine years earlier.
For a moment, the hospital sounds disappeared. I saw Victoria on the courtyard stones, her silver hair unmoved by the wind, her pearl necklace bright against her coat. She had known what she was looking at when she looked at my wrist.
I asked Alexandre whether he had seen the inquiry before our marriage. He lowered his eyes and admitted, without saying it plainly, that he had known his mother distrusted my background. He had not known how far she had taken that suspicion, he implied, or perhaps he had decided that not knowing was safer.
I understood the difference between fear and innocence. Fear had kept him from confronting Victoria. It had not stopped him from keeping the papers.
Chloe was asleep in the observation room beside mine, curled beneath a hospital blanket with one shoe still on. I looked through the glass at her small body and felt the shape of my marriage change. Alexandre had feared a family conflict. I had been living inside its consequences.
He reached toward the folder, but I placed my palm over it first. I was not ready to let him collect the papers again.
The copied reference was not proof. It could have been a false lead, an old misunderstanding, or an inquiry built around someone else. I told him, quietly, that resemblance was not enough and neither was Richard's certainty. Every document had to be checked by people who did not belong to either family.
Richard arrived in the adjoining records area with a legal adviser and two people from his office. He did not touch the papers. When I showed him the red-marked reference, his expression tightened. He recognized the numbering and abbreviated archive notation as consistent with material gathered during his long search for his missing daughter. That made the page more important, not more conclusive.
He began to indicate how quickly his staff could go to the manor, but I stopped him with a raised hand. No one from his side would enter the house and remove anything. Victoria might have destroyed the correspondence, or someone might later claim that Richard's people had altered it. I needed the record preserved under legal authority.
The adviser prepared a preservation request for the manor's correspondence, including the east archive and any files connected to the clinic. I read every line before signing. The request named the papers without claiming what they proved. It protected the originals and required an inventory if anything had already been moved.
When the pen left my hand, Alexandre looked at me as if the signature had created a wall between us. It had. I could not tell whether that wall would protect me or only prove how far he had allowed his family to push me.
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A clerk took the request to be filed. Outside the records area, a phone began ringing and stopped before anyone answered it. The manor remained sealed by uncertainty, Victoria remained somewhere beyond its locked doors, and the DNA result was still pending.
I gathered the copies against my chest. For the first time, the papers were not in Alexandre's keeping.
