Chapter One - Part One
© 2026 Gee Gee Masson. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
The Art of Leaving
Part One: The Wrong Corridor
Paris and Provence
The first time Amnora Berisha saw Vicomte Armand Dumas, he had appeared half-dressed and thoroughly unapologetic in the background of one of Manon Dumas’s FaceTime calls from Provence.
She would later blame Manon entirely for everything that followed.
The two young women had met in their very first week at the Sorbonne, in the chaos of enrolment, both hopelessly lost in a corridor that seemed to lead everywhere except the lecture hall printed on their timetables. Manon had been loudly blaming the architecture; Amnora had quietly pointed out that the map was upside down. By the end of that afternoon they had found the lecture hall, missed the lecture, and discovered that they found the same things funny. Friendship between them had arrived not gradually but all at once, the way it sometimes does when two people recognise something essential in each other from across a crowded room.
Neither of them could have known, on that bewildered afternoon, that a chance meeting in the wrong corridor would one day bind two families, two cultures and two countries together, in a bond that time itself would not undo.
Nor had either of them planned to share a home. Amnora was still living at home with her family, forty minutes each way on a crowded train, trying to study at a kitchen table that was never once empty. Manon was living at the Dumas house in the sixteenth arrondissement, a tall cream-stone mansion behind iron gates, with a housekeeper who waited up for her and a driver who would not hear of her taking the Métro. Armand kept an apartment of his own overlooking the Seine for the nights he needed it, but that autumn he and Étienne were away in the vineyards for the harvest, and the great quiet rooms of the family house echoed around their sister. It was beautiful, and it was a very long way from the Latin Quarter. By the third week, both girls had had enough.
Within the term they were sharing a small student apartment in the Latin Quarter, a few minutes from the lecture halls, where the radiators knocked all winter and the kitchen window looked out onto a courtyard full of pigeons and someone else’s potted herbs. They were bound together by shared lectures and gallery visits, by cheap coffee drunk too quickly between seminars, by long evenings bent over textbooks.
Manon was warmth and chaos and impossible laughter, a woman who entered rooms slightly too loudly and filled them entirely without apology. She had been born into one of the oldest families in France, and she wore it the way she wore her favourite scarf: carelessly, and without once thinking herself better than anyone else because of it. She talked to the concierge about his grandchildren. She knew the name of every waiter at the café on the corner. She was forever lending money to hard-up classmates at the end of the month, and never once asked to have it back.
Amnora, though quieter, matched her effortlessly. She was the kind of beautiful that made people look twice and then keep looking: dark hair that fell past her shoulders in soft, heavy waves, dark eyes that seemed to see a great deal more than she said, and skin that turned golden at the first touch of sun. She moved with an easy, unhurried grace that nobody had taught her, and she dressed simply, yet on her even simple things looked expensive. Her wit was dry and she used it rarely, so that when she did, Manon dissolved completely. Where Manon filled a room, Amnora noticed it: who was lonely in it, who was pretending, who was about to cry. Between the two of them, very little was ever missed.
She had been barely ten when the war reached their village in Dardavia. She remembered very little of the leaving, and that little far too well: her mother’s hand clamped round her wrist, the smell of smoke drifting through the walnut trees, her father walking the last stretch of road in silence because there was nothing left to say.
Then came the camp. A sea of white tents on a muddy hillside across the border, queues for water, and winter closing in. And the whispering. Lira, her dearest sister, was barely more than a girl herself, unmarried and expecting a child, and in a camp full of frightened, conservative people with nothing to do but watch one another, that was enough. Women drew their shawls aside at the water tap. Old men muttered about shame. Children, who repeat everything, repeated it. The Berishas closed around Lira like a fist, and never once spoke the name of the boy who had fathered her child.
That winter, a relief agency began airlifting the most vulnerable families to France. A young girl, pregnant and so far from any hospital, counted among the most vulnerable of all, and so the whole family went with her. Amnora pressed her face to the cold window of the plane and watched the only world she had ever known vanish beneath the clouds.
They came to France with almost nothing. In the years since, they had found their feet: her brothers had built a construction business in Bordeaux, her father his consultancy, and Lira, with her gifts and her sheer hard work, had carried them all. Amnora had learned French as though her life depended on it, which in a way it had.
She paid her own way now, and was quietly proud of it. She would sooner have gone without than borrow a single euro from anyone, Manon included.
✦ ✦ ✦
Manon’s father was Count Henri Dumas, one of the richest men in France, and one of the least impressed by it. The Dumas vineyards had grown in Provençal soil for more than three hundred years, and under Henri’s hand they had grown into an empire: wine that travelled to the finest tables in Europe, cellars that stretched across southern France and into Spain and Portugal. Yet the Count still walked the rows himself at harvest, still crushed a grape between finger and thumb to taste the sugar, and still came home with dust on his boots and the smell of warm earth on his hands. His sons had since carried the business further still. With the coming of the digital age, Armand and Étienne had taken Dumas wine onto the world stage, into markets where, only a generation before, nobody had ever heard the name: from Singapore to São Paulo, from Lagos to Seoul.
Her mother, Countess Martha Dumas, had been born into an old English family, the elder of two daughters, and her younger sister had married Earl Carrington-Wright of Wrightmoor. Two of that sister’s daughters, Martha’s nieces, had in turn married into the royal family of the Kingdom of Savallas. Martha had pale gold hair and a cool, clear way of speaking that softened the moment she laughed. She had married Henri more than thirty years before, against the gentle warnings of both families, and they were still, quite visibly, in love. Henri spoke to her in English when he wished to be tender. He called her his English rose. Every morning in June he cut the first open rose from the garden and left it on her breakfast tray, and every morning in June she pretended to be surprised.
Their two sons had grown up among the vines. Armand, the elder, had studied at the Sorbonne and then at Oxford; Étienne, two years behind him, at the Sorbonne and then at MIT. Both had come home to the business, and between them they now shouldered much of the weight their father had once borne alone. Manon, the youngest and the only daughter, had never been able to choose between her two great loves, art and the family, so she had simply refused to choose. She was reading fine art and marketing together, with a quiet plan, shared with no one yet, to bring both one day into the heart of the Dumas business.
The Dumases kept a fully staffed house in Paris, a white villa above the sea at Nice, and, at the heart of everything, the Château de Saint-Étienne in Provence, which had been the family’s home for generations and which Martha ran with the calm authority of a woman who had never once mislaid a set of keys.
It was Manon who first brought the two families together, though she never once claimed the credit.
That winter, Amnora lent her a dress for a dinner at home. It was one of Lira’s: midnight-blue silk, cut close at the waist, with a line of tiny covered buttons down the back that took ten minutes to fasten and were worth every one of them. Manon wore it to her parents’ table on a Saturday night, and by Sunday morning her mother was on the telephone.
“Who made it?” Martha wanted to know. “Not a house I recognise. And I recognise all the houses.”
“Berisha Couture,” Manon told her. “Amnora’s sister.”
“Ah.” There was a small, satisfied pause on the line. “The sister. I heard you talking about her once, darling, when you thought I was not listening. You said she could make a plain length of silk look like a poem.” Another pause. “That young woman will go far.”
“Oui, Maman,” Manon said, smiling into the telephone. “I think she already has.”
Within the month, Martha had bought half the new collection. Within the year she had bought all of it, and had begun, very quietly, to tell her friends.
It was not only the clothes she admired. It was the woman who made them: a young refugee whose son had been born in Paris, while his father was left by the war on the other side of a closed border. Lira had raised him alone, kept a whole family fed, and built a fashion house with her own two hands. Martha, who had been born into comfort and had the good sense to know it, thought that remarkable, and said so to anyone who would listen.
After that, whenever Berisha Couture showed a collection in Paris, the Countess came up from Provence and opened the Dumas house in the city, so that she would never miss a show. The staff learned to air the rooms and fill the vases with fresh lilies a week ahead of every season. She sat in the front row, bought what she loved, and afterwards sent Lira a handwritten note on thick cream paper, never more than three lines long. The Berishas were touched, and a little wary. A countess was a countess, after all. But notes became coffees, and coffees became long conversations, and over the years a friendship began to grow between the two families, slowly and quietly, the way the best things between very different people so often do.
Through all of it, one member of the Dumas family remained a stranger to Amnora: the eldest son, whom Manon described, depending on her mood, as a genius, a menace, or both.
