Prologue
Twenty years earlier
“Maman, stay! Wait.”But the beautiful Elodie de Garmeaux could wait no longer. Her eyes were heavy, the damage wrought by the accident weakening every system in her body. She lay in the pristine hospital bed bruised and broken, barely aware of the crying frame of her son, huddled at her side. “Please, maman.”
Matthieu’s grandparents—his father’s parents, for his mother did not know to whom she’d been born—wore faces etched with grief and sadness. As much as they’d come to hate Elodie and the destruction she’d brought to their son’s life, they loved their grandson with all their heart. No little boy should know the pain of losing his mother, particularly not from an entirely preventable accident.
“Matthieu,” Lucien moved towards the boy, but he didn’t look up. His body stayed resolutely glued to his mother’s side. The child loved his mother, naturally. They had worked hard to protect that love, shielding him from the worst of his mother’s traits. They wanted him to know the joy of feeling safe and secure in his parents’ love, even when one of those parents was so undeserving.
“Please don’t leave me.” He whispered the words and yet they slammed through the room with the force of a freight train. Lucien felt them bang into his heart. “Please stay.”
But Elodie was powerless to obey his request.
Her sports car—yet another part of the never-ending divorce settlement—had been driven at speed, recklessly, late at night, after she’d been drinking champagne at one of Cannes’ hardest to get into nightclubs. It was a miracle she’d survived this long—two days—with the aid of the world’s best surgeons and doctors. But their son, Matthieu’s father, had been insistent.
She had to be kept alive long enough to say goodbye.
Their son would never forgive him if Elodie died before he could see her.
“It’s time, Matthieu.” Henry de Garmeaux, tall, handsome, with a face that would look at home on any billboard in Times Square, stepped out of the shadows, his own emotions impossible to discern at that moment.
Lucien turned to look at his son, cursing him for the foolish, headstrong nature that had brought Elodie into their lives. Cursing him for marrying her even when they’d warned him off her. Cursing him until he remembered Matthieu and then, all his anger disappeared. How could he wish for a different outcome, when the ill-advised marriage had brought them their grandson?
“No, it can’t be,” Matthieu sobbed. He was not a small child. At nine years of age, he towered over his classmates. But seeing him curled around his mother like a conch shell caused Lucien’s chest to heave.
And just then, Elodie’s hand moved, just a little, finding Matt’s. She looked awful. The doctors had said she would not regain consciousness, and yet she shifted, ever so slightly, her cracked lips parting sufficiently enough to say, “I love you, mon ange.”
Matt pulled up, his little face alight with hope. But seconds after uttering those words—words that would one day become a balm to his soul—all the life left Elodie de Garmeaux: her short, chaotic, dazzling existence extinguished with one final closure of her eyes.
For as long as he lived, Lucien would never forget the sound of his grandson’s cry, the haunted, guttural noise that filled the room, underscored by the ethereal flatlining beep of the machines that had been monitoring Elodie since the accident.
And Lucien swore that he would do everything he could to give Matthieu the best in life. He deserved more than this. Elodie and Henry’s relationship had been disastrous from the start, their marriage doomed to fail, that failure changing them all in different ways. As Lucien de Garmeaux stood in that large hospital room in the south of France, he made a promise to himself: Matthieu’s life would be better than this. He would not make the same mistakes Henry had, for Lucien would take an interest in everything Matthieu did. There would be no neglect. No abandonment. His grandson would have the very best in life, he would protect him from the excesses that had derailed Henry.
This would never be allowed to happen again.