Antoinette was trying to play coy, but Sylvain still had the acute sense that he was in trouble.

She had that way about her when she came into a discussion knowing exactly what she wanted out of it, and you had no choice except to follow her lead. His sense of troublemaking was unhelped by how she’d practically accosted him on his walk home, catching him when he’d barely crossed the gates of La Belle Lavande.

Antoinette said, “I need to know why you gave me that information about your father.”

Ah. The ‘secret’ he wrote for her silly attempt at blackmail. “Why?”

“It’s driving me up the wall.”

“It seems to be far from the only thing lately.”

She scowled. She was wearing her ankle-length wool coat; the wind picked up her hair to reveal already-pink-tipped ears, and she’d folded her arms to tuck away her bare hands.

“Couldn’t you have waited until tomorrow?” he asked. “Would you have run around looking for me if I’d already made it home?”

“I knew you wouldn’t be gone yet.” Antoinette stopped in the middle of the snowy path, knowing he would stop too. “Why not speak to me? What’s your rush?”

“What’s your rush?”

“Sylvain, your one use to me is that I can more or less act unbound around you,” she said with a teasing edge. “So don’t force me to think of a way to justify this. Won’t you answer my question?”

“How much of it do you want to know?”

“I don’t do things halfway.”

Sylvain could never trust that a Delphine was asking for things unselfishly. Ulterior motives ran through her veins. He didn’t know what to do with her; he never did.

“Let’s go inside,” he said. She quickly took the lead.

Soon they were in the Language Arts building, quiet and subdued so long after instructing hours. Antoinette took a seat on a wooden bench between two bronze statues of the school’s founders, shaking the snow off the end of her uniform skirt, and he carefully sat beside her.

“Go on,” she said.

“Not yet. Why are you asking me this? Why are you suddenly interested in me?”

“Blackmail isn’t very useful if I don’t have the whole story,” she said. “Say you double-cross me. What on earth am I supposed to do with ‘Georges Delphine lied to put my father in jail’? Doesn’t that put all the power in my hands?”

“Only if you think that story makes your family look powerful.”

Antoinette narrowed her eyes. “Then tell it to me.”

“Answer my question.”

She opened her mouth, then shut it, seeming annoyed that she had to think up an answer. An Antoinette without a sure response was rare, but an Antoinette who stumbled on the way to find one was even rarer.

Finally, she said, “Remi suggested I ask you.”

“Remi knows about the blackmail?”

“No. Of course not. But just because you don’t say anything doesn’t mean you aren’t practically shouting the fact that you have issues all the time. We know there’s something you’re carrying around and refusing to let go. And Remi’s very concerned about that sort of thing–the letting go, the understanding.”

Maybe there was something in Sylvain’s manner, as well, that made her feel like she was in trouble. Because after a moment of staring, Antoinette said, “And the understanding matters to Chloe too.”

Then he believed her.

What a weird girl. She so thoroughly got on both his and Antoinette’s nerves, and yet also completely won over the hotheaded Antoinette.

She tucked back a piece of snow-damp hair. “I won’t tell any of them a word of this, obviously. It’s for us alone.”

Sylvain sat back on the bench, realizing he had been rigid as a board during that exchange. He idly took in the empty hall–its vaulted ceilings, its gold-and-crystal chandeliers he once overheard a smarmy student calling ‘modest,’ the enormous glass windows with their snow-spattered windowpanes peeking between their heavy velvet curtains. He was definitely not someone who belonged here. The shameless elegance of this hall called attention to it…and his story proved it.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Sometimes he hated Antoinette. Oftentimes he didn’t trust her. But who else would sit next to him and ask, especially in a way so earnest that she felt she had to lie about her reason?

And who else would the story shame?

“I suppose a decent place to start is when my father was working for Aconitum.”

Antoinette folded her hands on her lap and faced him.

“Back then I didn’t quite understand what his position was, and I’m still not sure I do, because he made a habit of doing more than he was asked. Especially socially. He would speak in these flattering ways about the company and especially about Georges, assuring Amelie and I that when we grew up, we’d have an even better spot in the company than my father did, since he was doing all this work to endear himself to the Delphines.”

Even when he was a teenager, Sylvain didn’t entirely believe his idealistic, naive father’s words. Dreaming of guaranteed jobs was obviously folly, but he thought that his father’s stories of being in the room where it happened, so to speak, were exaggerations too. His cynicism was called out when Antoinette knew enough about him to ask him for help with school.

“My father learned a lot, that close to the top. Eventually, he learned things about the company’s workings that he couldn’t stomach supporting. I don’t need to list them to you, do I?”

Antoinette shook her head, stern.

“However, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and of course he started pointing out these issues to your father, as if it would all be a surprise to him. And when he learned it wasn’t a surprise, he doubled down and began to criticize Georges instead.”

The private investigator received quotations from anonymous employees who all asserted that M. Laflamme was intensely vocal about his disagreements with the company. He squandered the goodwill that got him into those board meetings, and Sylvain supposed that if everything ended differently, he would praise his father’s resistance to being walked over.

He said, “I don’t understand why they kept him around after that, but–”

“My father wouldn’t simply fire anyone who annoyed him,” Antoinette interrupted. “He must have been waiting for a much better opportunity to get back at him.”

“Just for criticizing him?”

“Sylvain, I barely got away with teasing him as a little girl.”

“Regardless, you’re right. Georges kept him around for a while longer. At first, my father saw this as a sign that he was making good progress; he would tell me that things would start to change for the better. Eventually, even an optimist like him lost faith. Things were very tense. One day things fell through–I’m not sure why.” Though, he supposed that if Antoinette and Georges were anything alike, it was simply because they’d thrown one too many insults. “My father had a lot of investments back home in property that were faring well, so we came into a bit of a windfall, I suppose? Apparently, he became too loud about it in the office and spoke too much about how I was smart enough to make a competitor to Aconitum until it all seemed a bit too real. Georges threatened to sue him. In turn, my father had a hand in those memoirs written by your extended family–”

Antoinette perked up. “What do you mean, ‘had a hand’?”

Sylvain thought of what the investigator dug up. “He tracked each person down and suggested it, even collaborating with them. He put a part of his earnings towards the publishing company. Have you ever read them?”

“I wasn’t allowed to.”

“Well, there are footnotes to add context to anything related to the organization. My father wrote those.”

“And I assume he wasn’t very flattering.”

“Less flattering than even the scorned Delphines, honestly.”

“Hmm. So there’s an unkindness to the Laflammes, as well.”

“Obviously, Antoinette, after all that stress and who knows how many threats from such a powerful man. It all built up from there. Georges was furious. Eventually they ended up in court.”

“For defamation?”

“One would think. No, it was our money that concerned him. I won’t bore you with the judicial details, but of course once they got into court, the case was rigged.”

“My father has a whole cadre of lawyers that are used to this sort of thing…”

“So it was easy enough for Georges to have my father pinned for financial fraud and breaking various contracts with Aconitum. Petty things sprinkled on top of the real crime he’d staged–for the fun of it?” Sylvain scoffed. Georges was as petty and easily-offended as any La Belle Lavande student. “I don’t know. But that’s about the end of it.”

Antoinette watched him for a moment more, as if anticipating even more to the tale, and then touched her chin in thought. He hoped she was really listening. He hoped she really understood. Though he felt lighter for having told the story to the person who really needed to hear it, the weight was threatening to crush him again if she dared give him a dismissive answer. He hadn’t directly said all he thought about the situation, but hopefully she understood how he was trying to get her to own up to it.

All she did was sigh. “And to think you act so smug, like you’re nothing like the other students.”

He bristled. “What?”

“You’re exactly like the rest of us. You’ve been saddled with your family’s baggage.” She smoothed her skirt. Her tone was quite serious. “I’m very sorry for all of it. But you had nothing to do with what happened.”

“Do you expect me to throw up my hands and give up because it wasn’t my fault?”

“Honestly, sort of, now that I know what had you running in circles for so long! You want to be a doctor for your sister, not a lawyer for your father. You can’t do both.”

His hackles thoroughly raised, Sylvain threatened to stand, but she stood first. Well, if he told her the whole story, the one she didn’t deserve, she would know that Amelie was very much a part of this too.

Antoinette said quickly, “Alright, back to my original question. Why was that the secret you told me? I know you; you would never give me the upper hand, you would never give me something you were actually ashamed of. Why, then?”

“Because the moment I handed over that paper, you knew the most important part of what happened. And if you did nothing to rectify it, absolutely nothing, after all this time, then…” He hesitated. “If that ever came out, all your new friends wouldn’t be very pleased with you.”

She narrowed her blue eyes. Then a little smile crept on her face. “Yes, Sylvain, you’re very much like any other La Belle Lavande student, after all.”