“Mhm.”
“I will finally get to shop at Adalene Reneau’s boutique?” She squealed again.
“Or…” He slid his hands in his pockets. A slow smirk formed on his lips as his gaze met hers. “You could open it with me anddesignin Adalene Reneau’s boutique.”
Celine paused in her excitement. She jerked her head to peer over her shoulder in case someone else had materialised behind her and Bastien was addressing them. But the space remained empty, just a shelf of drawers holding sewing supplies.
“Me?” Was he being serious? “You wantmeto design for you?”
“Assuming we don’t win Monsieur Baudelaire’s competition, yes. I want you to open this place with me and be a designer here. I have seen all of your works, Celine, your style is incredible. I know how much you want to do this. And it doesn’t have to be Maison Reneau—I don’t want to revive the studio as it was. We can call it whatever we want. We can make it better.”
We.
Celine gaped at him, joy and stupefaction flitting across her face like ripples in the water. What sort of epiphany had struck Bastien Ménard?
“Are you sure you didn’t fall from my window last night and suffer a concussion?”
“I’m perfectly fine, Celine,” he assured.
But she shook her head in disbelief. “What could have possibly inspired you?”
“Claude Baudelaire might have suggested something. And…” he trailed off. “You. All you’ve done these past few weeks is run around, being headstrong about becoming a designer despite your mother’s aversion. It’s rubbing off on me. I want to do my own thing now, too.”
“This place must hold a lot of memories for you,” Celine said softly, running the pad of her finger over the dusty balance wheel on the sewing machine. She took another look around, and now that the daze had somehow evaporated, she noticed how still everything stood in the room, as if frozen in time, including a piece of fabric fed halfway through the needle in the machine. He had preserved all of it—she realised with a start—after Adalene’s death. “Are you sure you want to change it?”
“Change doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” Bastien replied truthfully. “My mother would have hated to see this place stagnant. I’m looking forward to revamping it.”
She could tell how giddy and nervous he was in the way his shoulders were holding his posture up stiffly while his bottom lip was being tormented between his teeth—waiting for her answer. She had never seen Bastien this way before. He was always so nonchalant and uncaring that this excitement of a little boy who has just been given a treat made him look like a completely different person.
“You do know,” Celine started, “you won’t be able to get away with triggering the sprinkler system in your own atelier. And if I’m the designer, I won’t be as lenient as Monsieur Baudelaire about wet fabrics.”
Bastien pushed off the elevator door, walking over to her. His grey eyes were two bright stars.
“Ouratelier, and you won’t have to worry about that,” he said, placing his palms on the desk, the sewing machine standing between them. He wasalmostat eye level with her, even by leaning down a bit, but Celine had thrust her nose up in the air and that made her feel better about the height difference. “I will find reliable models to replace me.”
“And what willyoube doing in the meantime?”
“Dealing with our customers, of course. Someone will have to.” He pulled a face. “Your people skills aren’t really up to par, considering.”
Celine narrowed her eyes at him. “Consideringwhatexactly?”
“The fact that you are a desperate people-pleaser,” he put forth bluntly.
“I still haven’t said yes, Bastien. You might want to tone down the insults.”
It seemed to please him when she saidstill. Before Celine could say anything else, he stepped away from the station, and disappeared into a small storage compartment. “There was something else I wanted to show you,” he shouted from the otherroom. “In case you needed more convincing.” She heard him shuffle around for something and when he came out again, he was holding a stack of bound notebooks in his arms.
Bastien plopped them on the working table with a loudthud, dust moats flying from the edges.
Celine held back a sneeze. “What are these?”
“My mother kept a replica of all her sketches in here.” He flipped through the notebooks, pages sticking haphazardly out of them.
“It feels like I’m in a dream,” Celine said, marvelling at the pages. All of the designs were in the style that had swept the world before the war, but Adalene had a way of making them feel timeless.
“She kept fabric samples, too,” Bastien said, flipping open another folder. “She loved collecting unique patterns from Tehran whenever she travelled back to Persia. She has all the fabric rolls stored in here. You can have your pick—I will bring them to the old house for you.”
Celine was at loss for words. No one had ever done something of this scale for her—not when fashion was concerned.
