“Never?” he asked her. She shook her head. Matthieu had been Mike’s age when she married him, and he had never had the wild abandon or sexual skills that Mike did. Or maybe she had been different then. Mike brought out something very different in her. She had been a young girl with Matthieu, and then a mother. Mike made her feel like a woman. She loved how powerful and manly he was. It pained her at times now that she was no longer a mother—she had lost a major part of her identity, as Matthieu’s wife and Axel’s mother—but she was growing into it with Mike, being “just” a woman. It was a new role for her, and there were things she liked about it, aside from the losses, which were devastating.

They went out that afternoon for a walk and stopped by her office. Everyone was relieved to see her. No one knew the details of the poisoning, and she had decided they didn’t need to. They only knew that she’d been ill with a severe flu. And Daniel had caught it too.

She introduced Mike to her assistants and some of the key people in her operation, then showed him their full offering online. He was surprised by how many employees she had, that she had started the business at twenty-two, and how much it had grown in fifteen years.

“How sophisticated is your security here? To keep the wrong people out of the building?”

“It’s probably not tight enough,” she admitted, “but we’ve never had a problem.”

“That’s the trouble in security. You don’t have a problem until you have a problem and then it’s too late. With all the crime that happens in Paris, and the trouble in Europe these days, it sounds like you need a better system and procedures. You have a lot of people working here. You need to protect against a hostage situation run by some nutcase. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and your systems at home. What you have relies more on humans than on technology. Sometimes technology is more reliable. I want to give you some suggestions, but I haven’t had time to work on it. We’ve been a little crazy at the office.” She knew he wouldn’t tell her why, so she didn’t ask.