Chapter 2 - PRETENDING TO BE BLIND
Antoine pulled me into his arms.
I had spent more than two years imagining the first moment I would see my husband again.
I thought I would trace his face with my fingers while looking into his eyes. I thought I would laugh at how much older we both appeared. I thought he might cry.
Instead, I stood against his chest while my sister hid behind the kitchen door wearing my robe.
“I’m so sorry,” he murmured.
His voice carried the perfect amount of pain.
It was the voice of a devoted husband receiving terrible news.
It was also the voice of a man who had just learned that his crimes remained invisible.
“What happened?” he asked.
“The doctor said the nerves responded, but not enough. I can sense light. Nothing more.”
I felt his body relax.
Behind him, Élise moved silently.
Through the narrow opening of my eyelids, I watched her gather her clothes from the floor. She pressed one finger to her lips when Antoine glanced at her.
“Sit down,” he said. “You shouldn’t have come alone.”
He guided me toward the living room.
I allowed my knee to strike the edge of the sofa.
I stumbled convincingly.
He caught me.
For two years, I had hated falling.
That afternoon, weakness became a weapon.
Antoine brought me water. While he spoke softly about hope and future treatments, Élise slipped down the hallway carrying her shoes.
She paused beside the front door.
Our eyes almost met.
I turned my face toward Antoine’s voice.
Élise left without making a sound.
“I thought I smelled perfume,” I said.
Antoine froze for less than a second.
“The cleaning woman was here.”
“We haven’t had a cleaning woman since November.”
He recovered quickly.
“I hired someone for today. I wanted everything perfect when you returned.”
He touched my cheek.
“You deserve a beautiful home.”
The apartment he planned to steal from me.
At six o’clock, he left and returned carrying white flowers.
The stems were wrapped in brown paper. The blossoms were lilies, not roses.
On our first date, he had brought white roses.
He had forgotten.
I smiled anyway.
That evening, he prepared soup and described the sunset outside our windows. He told me the clouds were violet and gold.
They were gray.
He told me the chestnut trees had begun to bloom.
They had no leaves.
Every lie was small.
Every lie was effortless.
I wondered how many false sunsets he had described to me during the past two years.
After dinner, he opened a bottle of wine and began speaking about the documents I was supposed to sign the following day.
“Maître Giraud has prepared some routine papers,” he said. “They will allow me to keep handling the company accounts while you recover.”
“I thought you already had power of attorney.”
“Temporary power. This is simply an extension.”
I turned my face toward the sound of his chair.
“What exactly am I signing?”
A pause.
“Nothing you need to worry about.”
Before the operation, those words might have reassured me.
Now I could see his fingers tightening around his wineglass.
“I worry about everything,” I said lightly. “It’s what blind women do when everyone keeps moving their belongings.”
He laughed.
But the sound was wrong.
That night, Antoine placed my medication on the bedside table.
Two white tablets.
For months, he had told me they were prescribed to help with nerve pain and sleep.
Under the lamp, I read the label.
They were strong sedatives prescribed to Antoine Delcourt.
Not to me.
I waited until he entered the bathroom, then slipped both tablets beneath the mattress.
When he returned, I pretended to swallow them.
Within twenty minutes, I slowed my breathing.
Antoine whispered my name twice.
I did not answer.
He dressed quietly and left the bedroom.
I counted to one hundred before opening my eyes.
The hallway was dark, but after two years without sight, darkness no longer frightened me.
I followed the sound of his voice.
He was in the living room, speaking on the phone.
“She doesn’t suspect anything,” he said.
I stopped behind the wall.
A woman answered through the speaker.
Élise.
“You’re certain she can’t see?”
“She walked into the sofa.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“The surgeon told her the operation failed.”
Antoine lowered his voice.
“Tomorrow she signs. Once the transfer is registered, it won’t matter whether she sees again next month or next year.”
“And the company?”
“The voting shares move into the holding account. Your name stays off the first documents.”
My sister laughed softly.
“I’m tired of hiding.”
“One more day.”
“You’ve been saying that for two years.”
Antoine stepped toward the hallway.
I returned to the bedroom and closed my eyes seconds before he entered.
He stood over me for a long time.
Then he reached down and waved his hand in front of my face.
I did not move.
The following morning, he left early.
I waited until the front door closed.
Then I counted his steps on the staircase.
When I could no longer hear him, I took his spare phone from the drawer where he believed I did not know he kept it.
The screen required a four-digit code.
Antoine had once told me that our wedding date was the only number he would never forget.
The code was not our wedding date.
It was Élise’s birthday.
The phone unlocked.
Hundreds of messages filled the screen.
Photographs of them in restaurants.
Photographs of Élise sleeping in my bed.
Photographs taken while I was sitting only a few feet away, unaware that my sister was inside the room.
In one image, I was standing on the balcony holding my cane while Élise smiled behind me.
The caption read:
She never knows when I’m here.
My hands began shaking.
I forced myself to continue.
There were bank statements.
Transfers from Delcourt Industries into a private holding company.
Payments to Maître Giraud.
A lease for an apartment in Élise’s name, paid from my personal account.
Then I found an email from Antoine to a neurologist I had never met.
It asked the doctor to confirm that I lacked the mental capacity to manage my financial affairs.
The doctor had refused.
Antoine’s response read:
Then I will find someone who understands the situation.
I photographed everything with my phone.
Then I called the one person Antoine had spent two years telling me no longer cared about me.
Camille Moreau had been my closest friend since university and the attorney who helped my father structure the family company.
Antoine claimed she stopped calling six months after my accident.
Camille answered on the first ring.
Neither of us spoke at first.
Then she whispered, “Mathilde?”
“It’s me.”
She began crying.
“I thought he had taken your phone again.”
Again.
The word struck me.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve called you for two years. I wrote letters. I came to the apartment three times. Antoine told me you didn’t want visitors. Then he threatened to file a harassment complaint.”
I sat down on the floor.
“He told me you moved to Brussels.”
“I’ve never left Lyon.”
I closed my eyes.
Even with my sight restored, darkness gathered around me.
“Camille, I need your help.”
I told her enough to make her stop crying.
Her voice became sharp and professional.
“Do not confront him. Do not sign anything. Send me every photograph you took.”
“He expects me at the notary’s office tomorrow.”
“Go.”
I stared at the red scarf still lying on the sofa.
“You want me to sign?”
“I want them to believe you intend to.”
Camille arrived forty minutes later through the rear courtyard entrance.
When she saw me looking directly at her, she covered her mouth.
“You can see.”
“Yes.”
She embraced me so tightly that my ribs hurt.
For the first time since the surgery, I cried.
Not because I could see.
Because someone had finally touched me without lying.
Camille studied the documents on my phone.
“This is fraud,” she said. “Possibly conspiracy, abuse of vulnerability and forgery.”
“Can we stop the transfer?”
“We can freeze the shares temporarily. But I need proof that Giraud knows you’re being deceived.”
“He sent the message.”
“That helps. A recorded conversation would be stronger.”
She opened a file on her laptop.
“There’s something else.”
A series of transfers appeared on the screen.
Large amounts had left my father’s company during the months after my accident.
Camille pointed to the destination account.
The company was called V&E Holdings.
“What does V&E mean?” I asked.
“We believe the E is Élise.”
“And the V?”
Camille looked at me.
“We don’t know yet.”
She opened another document.
It was an ownership declaration filed eighteen months earlier.
The signature at the bottom was mine.
I had never seen it.
I had never signed it.
According to the document, I had voluntarily transferred forty percent of Delcourt Industries to Antoine.
The remaining shares would pass to Élise if I were declared permanently incapacitated.
I stared at my forged signature.
“They didn’t start this yesterday,” I whispered.
“No.”
Camille’s expression hardened.
“They started planning before you lost your sight.”
Then she opened one final file.
It was dated three weeks before my accident.
May you like
The document named Antoine and Élise as joint directors of V&E Holdings.
Three weeks before the crash that blinded me, my husband and my sister had created a company designed to receive everything I owned.
