Chapter One: Le Contrat

The rain had been falling since dawn — not in a storm, but in the kind of soft, stubborn drizzle that felt like grief humming against the cobblestones of Amboise.

Inside the mairie, Éloïse Marceau sat beside a man she no longer called friend.

Lucien Vallois.

Childhood companion. National novelist. Now, husband by paper.

A quiet pen scratched the marriage registry.

One year.

A contract.

No promises.

Her signature bloomed elegantly, right above Lucien’s, both names now tethered in cursive ink.

Outside, someone closed an umbrella with a gentle snap. Inside, Éloïse stood without looking at him.

“C’est fait,” she murmured. “Let’s get this over with.”

Lucien didn’t flinch. He simply nodded and offered his arm — the same way he used to offer her his umbrella when they were thirteen and she hated the rain.

She took it now, out of habit. Not affection.

They walked out into the wet grey of a French autumn.

There were no flowers, no lace, no music. Just the soft percussion of rain and the clink of two rings that meant nothing to one of them.

Theirs was not a marriage made from vows whispered beneath starlight.

It was a solution. A truce.

A contract born out of debts and dying businesses — not romance.

But Lucien had signed without hesitation.

Because Éloïse had always been his story.

Even if she didn’t know it.

They arrived at his countryside home in Chinon by late afternoon — a quiet stone house wrapped in ivy, smelling of lavender and woodsmoke. She barely glanced at the old cherry tree in the garden, though he remembered her climbing it barefoot every spring.

She used to call it l’arbre des secrets — the tree of secrets.

Now, it was just another shadow she didn’t bother to notice.

Later that evening, as Éloïse unpacked her things in a separate bedroom, Lucien sat in his writing study — dimly lit, lined with books, and hauntingly quiet.

He opened the drawer on the left.

Out came a leatherbound notebook — its pages filled with her name in different ink shades over the years. Scribbled poems, pressed flower petals, stolen glances remembered in verse.

“Je t’ai aimée longtemps en silence,” he wrote once.

“Et peut-être… je t’aimerai mieux dans l’oubli.”

(I have loved you long in silence. And perhaps… I will love you better in your forgetfulness.)

He placed the journal back carefully, like a wound that needed to stay stitched.

She didn’t love him.

She didn’t even know.

But he would love her anyway.

Even if it killed him to pretend they were nothing more than strangers wearing rings.

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                                                                       Teaser

🖋️ From Lucien Vallois’ Journal

(Dated: 3 years before the contract marriage)

She is not a painting I wish to possess,

but a moment I want to live in, again and again.

The kind of girl who forgets umbrellas,

but remembers the way the river sounded in April.

She walks like the sky owes her light,

and laughs like the world is still beautiful.

I wonder, if I vanished,

would she remember the boy who saved her scarf from the Seine?

Would she recall the letters I never gave her—

or feel the weight of words I wrote with trembling hands?

I write her in ink because she already lives in my bones.

And maybe that is enough.

Maybe love doesn’t need to be returned to be real.

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