THE HONOUR OF THE DAWN

© 2026 Gee Gee Masson. All rights reserved.

The Honour of the Dawn

Chapter Four: Tell Me Honestly

Part One — Forty Minutes

The door had barely closed behind Madame Lefèvre before Afërdita glanced once more at the clock on the mantel.

Six fifty.

Wonderful. She had somehow managed to transform a simple invitation to an apéritif into a matter requiring strategic consideration — and had precisely forty minutes in which to resolve it.

“Pull yourself together.”

The room offered no response. Rooms rarely did, but this one seemed particularly unsympathetic about it.

She crossed into the adjoining bathroom, turned the shower to something close to scalding, and stepped beneath the spray. The day had been long — the drive back from the university longer, all sun-bleached motorway and the hum of the engine — and ever since breakfast her thoughts had developed an irritating habit of circling back to the same subject, the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth whether it means to or not.

Étienne Dumas.

Five years. Five years he had heard every word of it, every careless syllable, and the humiliation still had the power to make her flinch under hot water in a château bathroom on the other side of Europe from home.

She stayed beneath the spray longer than necessary, letting the heat work loose muscles she hadn’t realised had tensed somewhere between breakfast and now. It did wonders for her shoulders. It did absolutely nothing for her thoughts.

Twenty minutes later she emerged wrapped in a towel and stood in front of the wardrobe like a woman facing a tribunal.

Most of what hung there existed because of Lira. Or, more precisely, because Lira Berisha Krasniqi flatly refused to allow any woman she loved to dress badly, and considered the matter non-negotiable. Being one of Europe’s most celebrated designers gave her the eye for it. Being First Lady of Dardavia simply gave her more occasions to exercise it.

Lira had an extraordinary instinct for colour, cut, fabric, occasion — she could take one look at a person and know, with infuriating accuracy, exactly what would suit them. Over the years, entire sections of Afërdita’s wardrobe had been quietly replaced without her quite noticing it happening.

“This one for conferences.” “This one for lectures.” “This one for formal receptions.” And, delivered with a theatrical sigh, “This one because you insist on dressing like an exhausted academic.”

“I am an exhausted academic,” Afërdita had pointed out, not unreasonably.

Lira had been entirely unmoved. “That is precisely the problem.”

Her gaze settled now on a slim black dress — simple, elegant, deceptively plain in the way only very good design ever managed to be. Naturally, it was one of Lira’s.

“Black,” her sister-in-law had once announced, with the absolute conviction of a woman delivering a state address, “is never a mistake.”

“Normal people,” Afërdita had told her, “do not conduct philosophical debates about colour.”

“Colour matters.”

“Not that much.”

“It absolutely does.”

“You make getting dressed sound like statecraft.”

“It is statecraft.” Lira had said this with the serene patience of someone explaining something obvious to a clever but occasionally slow child. “What you wear tells a room how to read you before you’ve said a word. You, of all people, should appreciate that — you spend your whole career arguing that evidence shapes conclusions.”

“That’s different.”

“It is exactly the same.”

“For normal people it isn’t.”

“Normal people do not spend their weekends reading academic journals for pleasure, Afërdita.”

She’d narrowed her eyes. “Most problems can be solved through proper research.”

“And the ones that can’t?”

“Those are Arben’s problem.”

Lira had laughed so hard she’d nearly sent coffee across the breakfast table, and the argument had gone on for another twenty minutes after that, circling and re-circling with the happy uselessness of arguments between people who loved each other and had nowhere else to be. Neither of them had won. Neither of them had expected to.

The memory pulled an unwilling smile out of her even now, standing damp and undecided in front of the wardrobe. The infuriating truth was that Lira had been right about most things.

Including clothes.

Especially clothes.

She took the dress down and, working with the focused efficiency of a woman racing a clock she has set for herself, stood fastening a pair of pearl earrings and studying her reflection with the suspicion of someone checking a translation for hidden meaning. The dress fit as though it had been built around her, because in every practical sense it had.

Her attention moved to her hair. She left it down first — dark waves falling loose across her shoulders — studied the effect, and shook her head almost immediately.

No. Too deliberate. Too polished. Too much, for an apéritif with a man she had spent five years successfully not thinking about.

With the ease of long practice she gathered it instead into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, and let several strands escape on purpose, framing her face in a way that looked entirely accidental and was, in fact, the product of considerable effort. Better. Less considered. Less as though she had spent any time at all thinking about how she would look walking into that room.

Because she absolutely had not.

For a moment she held her own gaze in the mirror, and then sighed, the breath fogging faintly against the cold glass.

The truth was embarrassingly simple. If she hadn’t opened her mouth five years ago, on an evening terrace not unlike the one downstairs, none of this would be happening. No years of stiff family gatherings conducted around the fact of him. No carefully maintained distance, measured out like a chemical compound. No pretending, at every wedding and christening since, not to notice exactly where he was standing in a crowded room. No breakfast conversations gone suddenly careful. No analysing a single handwritten note as though it were a diplomatic cable requiring decryption.

Every bit of it traced back to one careless conversation. One foolish, sweeping judgement, delivered with all the confidence of a woman who should have known better.

“Well done, Afërdita.”

Her reflection offered no sympathy whatsoever.

The worst part — the part that still kept her awake some nights more than the embarrassment did — was that Étienne had done nothing to deserve it. She had judged him before she knew him. Worse, she had judged him publicly, where it could be repeated, where it could be heard by exactly the person it was about.

As an academic, she demanded evidence from everyone — from her students, her colleagues, her own half-formed theories before she’d let them near a page. And yet, when it had come to Étienne Dumas, she had apparently decided evidence was an optional extra.

The hypocrisy of it was difficult to look at directly, even now.

She drew a steadying breath, smoothed the dress once — unnecessarily, the dress needed no smoothing, but her hands needed something to do — and left the room.

The château was hushed as she made her way toward the main staircase, the kind of hush that comes from a house built for crowds and currently holding none. Most of the family were hundreds of miles away in Savallas, and yet traces of them seemed to be everywhere she looked — framed photographs along the gallery wall, fresh flowers arranged with more care than an empty house strictly required, a child’s crayon drawing pinned crookedly to a sideboard between two oil portraits three centuries its senior. Not a house that had been left. A house that was simply, briefly, waiting for its people to come home — and carrying their warmth in the walls in the meantime.

By the time she reached the ground floor, evening had settled fully over Provence, thick and gold and smelling faintly of cut grass through the open windows. Late light streamed through the tall panes overlooking the western vineyards, catching dust in the air and turning it briefly to something like gold leaf.

The drawing room doors stood open.

She paused at the threshold — one hand raised, about to knock on the open door, which was perhaps unnecessary but felt, under the circumstances, appropriate. Across the estate, faintly but unmistakably, the chapel bells began to chime the half-hour.

Seven-thirty. On the dot.

She knocked.

From somewhere beyond the open French doors, without turning: “Come in.”

Étienne. One hand resting lightly on the stone balustrade, a glass set down beside him, untouched, the endless gold-green vineyards rolling away below.

For a moment she simply stood in the doorway, unable to make her feet do anything useful.

Five years. How could a man look more handsome five years later? It was, frankly, deeply unfair of him.

The last of the sunlight found the darker gold strands hidden in his brown hair, the way the lantern light had found them once before, on a terrace very like this one, in a memory she had spent five years trying not to revisit. His jacket was gone. His sleeves were rolled to the forearm. All the rigid formality she had built her memory of him around had softened, here, in this particular light, into something far harder to keep her distance from.

Her heart, with absolutely no regard for the careful composure she’d assembled upstairs, forgot how to behave.

Wonderful.

She was five foot seven — a perfectly respectable height, by any reasonable measure, until she found herself standing anywhere near a Dumas man. Comte Henri filled every doorframe he walked through. Armand towered over most rooms he entered. The entire family appeared to have been designed, generation after generation, with cathedral ceilings specifically in mind.

Étienne was no exception.

As though he’d felt her there, he turned. Their eyes met across the width of the drawing room and the open terrace doors, and the world did not stop, and the vineyards did not vanish, and nothing remotely dramatic happened at all.

And yet something shifted between them all the same — quiet, certain, impossible to point to directly. For the first time in five years, neither of them looked away first.

“Good evening, Afërdita.” His voice carried easily across the room — warm, civil, entirely free of the careful distance that had stood between them for so long it had come to feel like furniture.

Her fingers found the edge of the doorframe and tightened, just slightly.

“Good evening, Étienne.”

And just like that, there was nowhere left to hide.