The Scent Keeper(90)

She’d used me, too, I thought, just like she had my father. Spun her scents to get what she wanted—my father’s machine, my fragrances for her company. I should have known. My father’s stories had told me. Claudia had warned me. Even Victoria had let me know.

A woman can’t leave anything to chance.

I hadn’t listened.

“What are you doing?”

Victoria was standing in the doorway. She scanned the room, taking in the bottles spread around me, the Chanel No. 5 on the dresser.

I stood up, holding up one of the small, plain bottles. “How could you do this?” I asked.

Her pale skin went a shade whiter.

“I wanted you to feel at home,” she said. Her voice was careful, gentle, but she didn’t even bother to pretend that she didn’t know what I was talking about.

Home isn’t perfect.

Oh, but it can be.

“I’m not a customer,” I said. Victoria’s eyes widened.

“No. You’re my daughter.” She took a step forward. “I’m your mother.”

That first day I’d met Victoria, I’d hardly dared hope that that extraordinary woman would ever claim me as her daughter. Now I blazed out at her.

“Do you even know what being a mother means? You’ve manufactured everything. Nothing here is real.”

I could see red rise across Victoria’s face, as if I’d slapped her. Then she laughed once, a hard sound.

“All right, Emmeline,” she said, and I could hear the irony of my other name underneath it. You’re not just one thing, either, it said. She picked up the Chanel bottle, hefting it derisively. “You want to know about a real mother? How about this? The only time my mother ever stuck up for herself was when she kicked me out.”

I paused, taken aback. “What?”

Victoria’s hand closed tight around the bottle, raised it up. “This was the perfume that was going to catch the guy—but she had it wrong. Again. She always concentrated too much on the top notes. Missed what was going on underneath.” Victoria gazed at the amber-gold liquid. “Inside every fragrance Coco Chanel made, every little black dress or suit she designed, there’s a base note of steel. That’s what the guy wanted—the strength, not the flowers. I understood Chanel, and he knew it. My mother saw that much, at least. She didn’t want competition, so she threw me out. I was eighteen.”

She looked at me, defiant, beautiful.

“So I took the bottle,” she said, “and I took him. He got me to Paris, and I got my training.”

She put the bottle down on the dresser with a sharp click. “Now, wasn’t that pretty? Nobody wants the real story, Emmeline. Nobody. I did what I did for you.”

And just like that, we’re back to lies, I thought, anger rising up again, washing away my sympathy. “If I was so important, why didn’t you look for me?”

She stared at me. “I did.”

“How long?”

“Jesus, Emmeline.” She pushed her hand through her hair. “Your father killed my company. Do you have any idea what that’s like? The lawsuits? The debt? I didn’t have the luxury of sitting around for the rest of my life mourning a daughter I couldn’t find.”

The words hurt, but even as I tried not to hear them, I knew she was speaking the truth.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” I asked.

Victoria sighed, exasperated. “Because people want their bodies to smell like oceans they’ll never have time to visit. They wear a perfume that promises sex, when all they really want is someone to snuggle on the couch with in baggy pajamas. We’ll all choose a good story over the truth any day.”

“Not me,” I said. I was sick of stories that weren’t real. Sick of clues instead of answers. Tired of love that was hidden like a base note you’d never live long enough to smell.

“Just wait until you’re a parent, Emmeline. What’ll you tell your daughter?”

Your daughter. Those last two words shifted my world. Time slowed, changing direction, becoming a thing that moved forward, not just something to stare at over your shoulder. My daughter.

“I’ll tell her everything,” I said.

“And when she hates you for it?” Victoria asked. “What’ll you do then?”

“I will love her,” I said. A promise.

I met Victoria’s gaze and held it. In her eyes, I saw something I never would have expected—desperation. She wasn’t afraid of being left, I understood then. She was afraid of losing me.

It struck me then—in all those months I’d lived in my mother’s home, we had never had a guest. I’d never seen her go to lunch or dinner with someone who wasn’t a client, never heard her voice rise in the joy of friendship on the phone. There wasn’t a single personal photograph on the walls. I assumed her mother was dead, but for all I knew, she might not be. Victoria lived on more of an island than I ever had. And she had let me in. Perhaps her reasons were twisted into the only kind of love that made sense to her, but I was there, all the same.

Now she turned away, her shoulders straightening, her hand going to her hair, rearranging herself back into Victoria Wingate. Watching her, I realized that there was only one language she truly understood, one way I could reach her. I needed a whole truth, a pure and complicated moment of my life, a memory where nobody chose what went in and what didn’t.