Part Four: Renaud
He had been sitting at the head table in the specific position of a new husband at his wedding — visible, prominent, part of the architecture of the day. He had been watching the speech with the expression of a man who had heard enough to understand where it was going and had been hoping it would go somewhere else.
He stepped forward.
He looked at his wife.
Then he looked at Thomas.
He said, in a voice that was quiet enough that the MC moved the closest microphone slightly toward him: “That man is my boss.”
The room received this in the way that rooms received information that rearranged what had just occurred.
A murmur — not the polite murmur of a room following a narrative, but the specific murmur of a hundred and twelve people simultaneously revising a perception.
Isabelle turned to her husband.
“What?” she said.
“My boss,” Renaud said, again. He was not angry, or if he was, the anger was below the surface of a more pressing feeling, which appeared to be something between mortification and the specific embarrassment of someone who understands they are connected to something they cannot undo. “Thomas Lefebvre. He owns the firm.”
He paused.
“The firm where I work,” he said. “Which is his company. Which he founded.” He looked at Isabelle with an expression she had not seen on him in fourteen months of engagement. “Which is not small.”
