It was hard to remember now, but Simone had been thrilled she’d been offered the apprenticeship at the Pirripin brothers’ atelier menuiserie off rue Tourneux. The French school system had no use for her once she became a teenager, and she’d worked hard to grasp a new purpose; long hours at the drafting table after vocational classes ended for the day, her hands stained from cyanotype paper and her pencil wearing a groove into the side of her finger, followed by work at the jigsaw and miter saw until sawdust filled her lungs. But she’d wanted it so badly. The vocational schools had taught her, had put her hands to use, when France itself would not. She ached to shape wood into something else altogether, leave her fingerprint in the slate-roofed palaces on the Champs-Élysées or in the mosques of her fragmented memories of Algiers.

She’d wanted something, like she feared she might never want something again.

But the atelier was nothing like what she’d expected. Jean-Pierre had no intention of giving his secrets away, and his brother, Jean-Claude, no interest in advancing the career of an “invader,” or so he said. She became little more than their errand runner, sorting lumber, haggling with vendors, organizing the desk drawers bursting with crumpled receipts that were the atelier’s recordkeeping system.

So when they came to her with a new project—a project all her own, to manage unsupervised!—she was already looking for the catch.

She found it as soon as she reached the client’s address.

“I want you to understand something, mademoiselle,” Monsieur Gaturin drawled, steering Simone through room after room of saccharine opulence with an iron grip on her shoulder. “The bones, yes, the bones of Château à Pont Allemagne are flawless. I don’t want you injecting your foreign . . . sensibilities . . . into this storied estate.”

Simone could already spot several flaws in the “bones” of the monstrous mansion that, unaddressed, would lead to complete foundational collapse, but Monsieur Gaturin left her no opening to speak.

“I told those damned brothers this is to be a cosmetic repair only, to restore the carvings to their former glory and save us from this regrettable water damage. You, however, do not appear up to the task.”

“I have completed all the requisite exams, monsieur.” Simone’s grip on her satchel tightened as she felt her old anger rising. Blistering the air around her. “But if you would rather let your home crumble around you—”

His nostrils flared like a cobra readying its strike. “Do you dare to speak back to me?”

“Papa. Are you tormenting the help again?”