“But . . .”
“And I can’t bring anything valuable to your life. I’m far from done grieving. Chloé is still too present in my thoughts for me to ask you to stay with me.”
“So you’re just making the decision for me?”
The shock that at first froze the blood in my veins has suddenly turned into anger.
“That’s it for us, then?”
Gabriel sighs. “It’s better this way, Emma.”
Furious and humiliated, I get up to leave as the waiter brings us our food. Gabriel tries to keep me from going, but I ignore him.
I hurry back to his house, grab my suitcase from the back of the closet, and start messily throwing my things into it. I take all the important things and fill the trunk and backseat of my car as quickly as possible. I place the keys on the entryway table and give Lucky one last pat before closing the door behind me.
I sit down in the driver’s seat, turn the key in the ignition, then pound both fists on the steering wheel.
I don’t have anywhere to go.
CHAPTER 13
JANUARY 9, 2014
CHLOÉ
I’ve been debating whether to wear my hair down or up in a ponytail for hours. Gabriel has always liked my hair down, but then again, I wear it in a ponytail 75 percent of the time—it’s just so me.
In the end, I pull it through a bright-pink hair tie.
I’m both excited and worried. As I climb out of the van and head up the gravel walkway to Gabriel’s house—our house—my stomach is full of butterflies and my heart is racing. Blood rushes to my temples. Boom, boom, boom. I take a deep, determined breath, smooth a rebellious strand of hair behind my ear, and ring the doorbell.
I get a bark in reply. I’d forgotten about that damn dog.
The wait seems endless. I still don’t know what I’m going to say or how I’m going to act.
Finally, after a few minutes that seem to last hours, a disheveled Gabriel opens the door partway. When he sees me, he freezes. I can almost hear the cogs in his brain grinding away, trying desperately to find some sort of rational explanation for what he must think is a hallucination.
My husband stands stock still.
“It’s me, Gabriel, I’m back . . .” I offer softly, as if speaking to a man I’m trying to talk down from a rooftop. I edge closer. Slowly, to avoid scaring him.
“Chloé?” he mumbles in a hesitant voice. His eyes are open wide. He must be afraid that if he closes them I’ll disappear.
“Yes, I’m here. Everything’s going to be fine now. It’s over.”
I gently place my palm on his cheek. He shivers and takes my hand in his to make sure it’s real. He wants to speak, but the shock is clearly preventing him from forming coherent questions.
“Can I come in?”
My husband takes a step back to let me through the doorway.
Home at last.
I notice the dog make a break for the kitchen. Apparently animals can sense emotions other than fear: from a single glance, he could tell that we’d never be friends.
Gabriel hasn’t moved an inch. A statue.
“Are you coming?”
He jumps at the sound of my voice and closes the front door.
As he turns toward me, he seems to have snapped out of his stupor.
“You’re . . . alive?”
I laugh. “Of course I’m alive. Did you think my ghost had come to your doorstep?”
He studies me, unable to understand what’s happening.
“Come sit down in the living room, sweetheart.”
Robotically, he follows me. I sit on the couch. Even though I’m in my own home, I have the peculiar impression that I’m making myself at home.
I lick my lips as I think about the best possible way to explain what’s happened. I’ve gone over this moment dozens of times in my head, but now that it’s here I don’t know how best to handle Gabriel, who’s staring at me, completely bewildered.
I decide to just go for it. Better to get it over with.
“It was all a game; a reality TV show. They faked my death and orchestrated your meeting another contestant, who had six months to get you to propose to her. Ridiculous, right? When the producers contacted me to explain the rules, I knew right away that we’d win. That you’d be incapable of moving on so quickly.”
Gabriel opens his mouth but nothing comes out.
“And if she lost, we’d win five hundred thousand euros. Can you believe it? Half a million euros for six months of our lives! It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
I can’t help feeling exhilarated, despite the fact that my husband seems totally indifferent. “Do you understand what I’m saying, Gabriel? We won. We’ll be able to make all our dreams come true!”
I don’t know how to get him to react. Especially since I was sure he’d hug me close and spin me around, shouting with glee. Looks like I was wrong.
“Honey? We’re rich. We’re rich!”
And then, the last thing I would ever have expected: Gabriel starts to cry. Not tears of joy, no . . . He’s sobbing like a baby.
Then his tears give way to near-hysterical spasms.
I watch my husband and try hard not to roll my eyes. This is beyond me.
Just then, the cameras burst in.
GABRIEL
“Hello, Gabriel. We know that right now you must feel like your whole world has come crashing down. Could you share your initial reaction while it’s still fresh in your mind?”
He looks up to see two cameramen alongside a blonde bimbo holding out a microphone, a wide smile plastered on her face.
He slowly wipes the tears from his cheeks.
“What emotion are you feeling most intensely now that you have your wife back? And last but not least, what’s it like to suddenly discover you’ve managed to win five hundred thousand euros without even lifting a finger?”
The blonde is getting impatient. She sends several exasperated looks Chloé’s way, but Chloé just raises her eyebrows defeatedly.
The microphone is still bobbing around just under Gabriel’s chin.
He stands up suddenly, forcing the woman to step back. At five feet five inches tall, she realizes that Gabriel is at least two heads taller.
“You can either show yourselves out of my house immediately, or I’ll show you out myself—the hard way. You have five seconds to make your choice,” Gabriel threatens.
“No, wait. Don’t take it personally . . . Don’t you have a sense of humor? I was only ask—” objects the blonde.
“Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.”
Gabriel moves toward the production assistant and grabs her arm. One of the cameramen comes over to defend her, while the second keeps filming.
Chloé tries to intervene.
“Gabriel, it’s stupid to react like this. Really, think about what you’re doing, please . . .”
Gabriel continues to head for the front door, dragging the blonde behind him, then suddenly seems to change his mind and lets go of the woman’s arm. She glares at him for a millisecond, then regains her composure and plasters a toothpaste-commercial smile back on her face.
He climbs the stairs to the second floor. “Come up when you’ve gotten rid of them,” he tells Chloé, without bothering to turn around.
He goes into the bedroom and sits down on the bed he hasn’t slept in for months, ever since he’d moved to the fold-out bed in the guest room with Emma.
A few minutes later, Chloé shows up in the doorway. Gabriel can tell she’s feeling hesitant and a little bit angry. He shakes his head in disdain.
“Do you think this was worth it?”
“You don’t?”
“Did I deserve to believe you were dead for months, just for five hundred thousand euros? You have no idea what I’ve gone through! How you’ve made me suffer. Where were you this whole time, huh? Living the good life in the Caribbean, enjoying cocktails on the beach? While I was wasting away, believing that you had drowned.”
Gabriel is yelling, and he’s clearly furious.
Chloé explains as best she can. “The producers put me up in an apartment near Paris. It wasn’t easy for me either . . . I hardly ever got to go out because they were so afraid I’d run into someone I knew, even though I kept telling them the chances were less than slim. I watched the videos they took of you. Sometimes live, which made me feel like I was still with you somehow, watching your everyday activities. Sometimes after editing, so I could get an idea of how things were going for you.”
“Are you telling me that there are cameras everywhere? This has got to be a joke!”
“No, they put cameras up in the house, on my authorization of course. That’s it. At least I think it is. And the other candidate had a hidden camera on her at all times.”
“Emma?”
“I’d forgotten her name, but yes, I suppose so.”
Chloé stops talking. She seems to be waiting for Gabriel’s questions. He’s wandered over to the window and is staring out into the distance.
“But I saw you . . . I saw you dead. At the morgue, on the autopsy table,” Gabriel pleads as he runs his hand over his mouth and turns toward Chloé with a disgusted look on his face.
“They had pros do my makeup. The same people who do the makeup for the fake cadavers on crime shows. The show paid the coroner to play along and let them use the morgue. He only lifted the sheet for a few seconds, and you turned away so quickly. I was concentrating on keeping my breathing to a bare minimum.”
“Did . . . Did everyone but me know? Am I the punch line of this sick joke?”
“No, that’s why they made me leave Saint-Malo! Nobody knew, nobody at all. My funeral was no masquerade. Well, you know what I mean . . .”
Chloé appears to be losing track of her arguments and feeling less confident under Gabriel’s harsh gaze.
“And how the hell do you think it made me feel to see you flirting shamelessly with that woman just a few weeks after my death? To see her moving into our house so quickly, as if I’d never existed? Do you really think that didn’t hurt? I have feelings too . . .”
“Don’t try to twist things around, Chloé. You’re not very good at playing the victim,” says Gabriel, his voice like ice.
“I did it for us,” Chloé offers resentfully.
“Really? And what about Simon? And the baby? Did you do that for us too?”
Chloé’s jaw drops. She’s speechless.
EMMA
I had no choice but to get a hotel room last night. This morning I called the owner of the studio I’d been staying in before to explain that in the end, if it wasn’t too late, I’d like to rent the place for a while longer. He hadn’t found a new tenant yet, so he immediately took me up on my offer. I moved all my stuff out of my car into a big pile in a corner of the studio. I don’t have the strength to put anything away, since I don’t know how much longer I’ll be staying in the city.
It’s one o’clock, and I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since the glass of champagne last night. Regardless, I couldn’t stomach a thing.
By now Gabriel must have learned the truth. His wife must have shown up at dawn to tell him the good news. He could be in shock, or angry, or disappointed.
But he’ll get over it. For half a million euros, you can get over anything.
He’ll forgive his wife and forget about me quickly, convinced that it was all fake, that I was motivated by greed alone.
“Where Is My Mind?” starts playing, and I hold my breath as I rummage through my purse in search of my phone.
“Mom” comes up on the screen.
She always calls at the worst possible moment. I let it ring until my voice mail picks up. All this for nothing.
He’ll never believe that I’m really in love with him. Sure, in the beginning, it was a game, a stupid game that would have helped me make my dreams come true . . . But as the weeks and months went by, I fell for him.
I forgot about the cameras. I forgot that at midnight on January 8 my dress would turn to rags and my carriage would turn back into a pumpkin if my prince hadn’t asked me to marry him.
Or maybe I didn’t really forget, I just chose to go along with it and enjoy the ride, because I had no choice in the matter anymore. The studio had made me sign a six-page confidentiality agreement, detailing all the things I wasn’t allowed to reveal about the game—under threat of legal action.
I was trapped. I know, it’s easy to say that now. Gabriel would laugh in my face if I sang him my sad little song. I don’t know how to prove that what we had together was real. Especially since he backed away on his own last night when he handed me that plane ticket.
I’ll give it a few days. I need time to think carefully about what I’m going to say, and he needs time to come to terms with everything he found out this morning. Is there any chance he’ll forgive me? I kept blinders on for months, refusing to think about the inescapable end to this whole story, convincing myself that his feelings for me would be enough to conquer all the lies. My lies. “You should have thought of that before . . .” I shake my head to quiet my mother’s chastising voice. I know I should have thought more about the consequences before signing up for the show, that I should have thought about how it would feel for Gabriel instead of just thinking of it as a kind of lottery.
Still, I can’t help but feel like it should be a thousand times easier to forgive me than to forgive Chloé.
I hope that he’ll be able to look beyond the surface, that he’ll have enough perspective to remember what we had with each other. I hope he’ll realize that I gave up the job I was offered to stay with him. That I postponed, yet again, the one thing I’ve always wanted so we could have a chance. He has to take a sacrifice like that into consideration, right?
What we had was real. I want so badly to believe that he won’t let himself be influenced by the money, that he won’t choose the easy way out . . .
I absentmindedly take off the charm necklace containing the hidden camera that’s been filming nonstop for the past six months. I don’t need it anymore.
CHAPTER 14
INTERMISSION
LUCILLE
My name is Lucille Bellanger. I’ve been an assistant director at Interference for just over two years. This is the first time I’ve ever been in charge of a reality show and I’m thrilled, especially since a leading channel has bought the rights for primetime broadcast!
I must say that the game we’ve come up with is truly innovative; it’s not easy to develop original ideas given the number of reality shows already out there. The concept behind Till Death Do Us Part is extremely simple. The first contestant—the wife—makes her husband believe she’s dead. The second contestant—the challenger—then tries to seduce the young widower. She has exactly six months from their first meeting to get him to ask her to marry him. If she succeeds, she wins five hundred thousand euros; if she fails, the wife gets the prize money.
We obviously didn’t choose our contestants out of a hat. Given the number of applications we received, we had any number of choices. I knew right away that Chloé and Gabriel would be perfect. They met all the basic criteria, of course. They’d been married for over five years, which meant we could be relatively sure they were a strong couple. And they were young and attractive—you have to give viewers a reason to keep watching, something to fantasize about.
In addition to all that, Chloé was the ideal contestant: sure of herself and her husband, arrogant and vain enough to agree to the charade we had planned. She wanted the money so badly (how naïve do you have to be to think half a million euros will change your whole life?) that we knew nothing could make her change her mind—not even seeing her husband destroyed by her death.
Gabriel was the faithful and devoted husband, ready to sacrifice everything for his wife. The kind of romantic man who becomes the shadow of his other half. Exactly what we were looking for. We definitely didn’t want a ladies’ man who’d go out and sleep with ano
ther woman the night of his wife’s funeral. We wanted some degree of resistance and emotional strife to keep things suspenseful, to keep viewers glued to their screens for the next episode.
As for Emma . . . Physically, she was exactly what we were looking for: very attractive in her own right, but Chloé’s polar opposite. Naturally pretty instead of elegantly made-up. A kind of gamine rebel who reminded us of Jean Seberg. With that impish, spontaneous air about her that so many men adore—don’t ask me why. But her naïveté was what first attracted our attention. She was totally sincere when she said she wanted to win the money to travel abroad as a photojournalist. We only half listened to her little speech about freedom, independence, and her passion for her art—that’s not what interested us. It was the fact that she would do anything to make her dreams come true and that she seemed totally oblivious to the moral repercussions of the show. She never showed any sign of understanding that we were asking her to lead someone on, to use his weaknesses, to manipulate him. Her innocence was so extreme it was laughable. I never would’ve thought that anyone could be so incredibly naïve in this day and age. I don’t think she ever even considered the consequences of what she was about to do. What really sealed the deal, though, was that behind all that talk about being committed to her art, she was clearly the kind of girl who would fall hard for the first nice, lonely guy she met. I like to call it the Mother Teresa phenomenon: the urge to save every unfortunate man who comes her way. The very first time I met Emma, I knew she’d grow to care about Gabriel, despite her best efforts not to. The show’s psychologist had a session with her up front and did a personality test that confirmed all my suspicions. We didn’t want a heartless temptress. The goal was for the viewers to watch as the love story blossomed between the two characters, for them to believe in it.
Don’t act all shocked: everyone knows perfectly well that the plot is planned out before things get under way for this kind of show! There’s no room for improvisation; we can’t just let the cameras roll without knowing what will happen. There’s a lot of money on the table. You have no idea how much it costs to produce a show like Till Death Do Us Part! With the hidden cameras, Chloé’s upkeep for over seven months, and the salaries for the editors, extras, makeup artists, producers, and more, it all adds up to several million euros.
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