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CHAPTER 1

Léonie

“When are you due?” my cousin Margot asked, shaking out her bright red hair and scanning the chattering crowds gathered for my baby shower.

“37 weeks, not too long to go now—” I said, but she wasn’t even listening.

“Your house is so beautiful, of course, but it doesn’t bother you to live under the same roof as your mother-in-law and the woman your husband used to run around with?”

Her tone was sharp, but her eyes were on my husband Étienne, circulating around the yard, that long-sleeved white shirt open to the throat, head and shoulders taller than everyone else in attendance.

“No, of course not,” I laughed, keeping an eye on my mother-in-law and her assistant walking toward me. Hopefully she hadn’t heard what Margot had said.

Margot was just trying to get a rise out of me, I guessed we had never fully outgrown that competitive cousin dynamic.

“That was a long time ago, and Placidie isn’t as awful as she seems,” I whispered. “She’s just protective of her son.”

It did seem a little bit strange to see Bastide and Pinoteaux families mixing together. As a rule, we didn’t mix.

But my baby was a special event.

“Ready to open the presents, Léonie?” Placidie asked.

My mother-in-law was a very beautiful woman, running a manicured hand through her flowing black hair with its dramatic snow-white streaks, while her assistant Faustine was dressed in a tight-fitting short cream dress.

Bold choice with the full wineglass she was holding, but I wasn’t going to say anything.

In fact I wondered if she was a little bit drunk the way she was slinging it about.

“Yes, of course, I’m very excited,” I said. “Let me just get Étienne.”

“I’ll get him,” Faustine said eagerly, whipping around so fast that the bright scarlet liquid slopped out of her glass and landed all down the front of my pretty pale green maternity dress.

“Oh! I’m sorry, Léonie,” she said.

“What a mess. You’re going to have to go get changed,” Placidie said, her voice brittle with barely-suppressed disdain. “You can’t be seen around everybody looking sloppy and filthy.”

So much for my hope that my elegant mother-in-law would like me a little more by the time our baby came.

“All right,” I said, glancing back at my husband, but he wasn’t looking at me.

I can’t wait to have his baby, I thought as I hurried inside.

Actually I’d been dreaming of having his baby from the first moment I’d ever seen Étienne Bastide. He didn’t know about the years of my secret longing, but from that first day, he was like a god to me.

But for a long time he didn’t notice me at all, even though at 18 and 19 we were both together at all the major festivals and feast-days.

I had the kind of quiet personality it was easy to overlook.

At the time, I was such an innocent, living in the Pinoteaux compound and having very little contact with the outside world.

There were a lot of other women who held his attention.

Not me. Painfully shy and awkward, with translucent freckled skin and pale lashes, a thick mass of bright red hair I didn’t know what to do with. I was the last girl Étienne would ever look at.

He favored the bold, confident women. Ones like Faustine, who was his age, but who got to do everything my strict daddy wouldn’t let me—dye her hair platinum blonde, wear makeup, go out on dates.

I wanted to be her so badly. But the Pinoteaux family was strict—no dating for me. My brother or my cousin or some other male relative was always watching. And by then Gran wasn’t around to advocate for me. . . fight with Da that I deserved a little more freedom.