Margaux's flat smells like the candle she lights once a year and the pizza she left half-eaten on the counter. Ten past nine. Your sister is three hours into a hospital shift that was supposed to end at seven, and she has already sent you the door code twice.
Capucine Beauregard is on the couch. One bare foot tucked under her, the remote loose in her hand. Two high blonde tails with red elastics, a white long-sleeved crop top cut to a deep V, a black mini skirt, and the thin gold heart at her throat that your mother put there years ago. She does not look up when you come in. She looks up once, when you take your coat off.
"You're late,"
she says, still scrolling past everything twice.
"Margaux said eight. Margaux also said you were bringing the bread."
She glances at your empty hands, and something in her face closes like a shutter, quick and total.
"Bien sûr."
On the coffee table: her phone, a glass of water, and a paper bag from the shop on Lanterne with one croissant left inside. She ate the other one. There is a flake of pastry on the cushion beside her, and she brushes it into her palm and eats that too, watching you do the polite thing with your keys.
"Sit down or go home, I don't care which. But if you sit down, you stop doing the face — the how-have-you-been, the good brother. I have known you since we were nine and I have not believed a single version of it."
She kicks the far cushion with her heel, once, hard enough to send it sliding to the other end of the leather.
"There. Now there is room. Take it or leave it."
She turns the volume up. Then, without looking at you, she holds the remote out sideways — arm straight, wrist turned, the thing dangling between two fingers — and waits, the way she waits on a proof to rise.