— I didn’t sign anything.
— We think so too.
Camille’s heart pounded harder.
For six years, she had been treated at a private clinic in the 16th arrondissement, the Clinique Saint-Lazare Reproduction. The Valmonts had paid for part of the treatments through their foundation. She had believed it to be a sign of family generosity. She now understood that in their family, nothing was truly altruistic.
“Was Chloé being followed there?” she asked.
Maud did not reply.
That was an answer.
The next day, Julien asked to see her. Camille agreed to a 5-minute meeting in a glass-enclosed room, with a social worker and her lawyer, Sofia Benamou, on the phone.
Julien had lost his swagger. His jacket still cost 3,000 euros, but it no longer protected him.
– I’m sorry.
Camille looked at him.
— For which part?
He lowered his head.
— I lost control.
— No. You made a choice.
The silence took his breath away.
Then she asked:
— Did Chloé go through Saint-Lazare?
Julien froze.
— My mother paid for her treatment.
Camille felt the ground disappear beneath her.
— Did your mother orchestrate your mistress’s pregnancy?
He closed his eyes.
— She wanted an heir.
— And she used my name?
— I didn’t know everything.
Camille gets up.
— That sentence has ruined more lives than the truth.
Julien then whispered:
— My mother used to say that the family had paid enough for a grandson that the identity of the one carrying him didn’t matter.
Camille remains still.
Then she said:
— Sofia, ask for all the files. All of them.
PART 4
The files arrived six days later, sealed, in the office of a family court judge. No journalists. No staged scandal. Only Camille, Sofia, two representatives from the clinic, a bioethics expert, and lawyers whose faces already betrayed their wish to be elsewhere.
Camille had prepared herself to discover that Chloé might be carrying her remaining embryo.
This fear had kept her awake. It had forced her to place her hand on her stomach several times a night, as if her baby could answer her from inside:
I am here. I am mine.
The first report was clear: Camille’s preserved embryo still existed. It had been moved without her consent to a private unit linked to the Valmont Foundation, but it had not been transferred.
Camille cried with relief, her hand over her mouth.
Then the expert turned a page.
— However, Ms. Chloé Martin’s pregnancy is indeed linked to a protocol funded by the Valmont Foundation. The forms contain serious anomalies.
Chloe’s lawyer turned pale.
Chloé, sitting at the other end of the table, had lost the triumphant air of the party. She looked like a pregnant young woman who had been thrown into a world of monsters.
“I was told everything was legal,” she whispered.
Camille looked at her for a long time. She could have hated her. It would have been easier. Simpler. But Chloé was trembling, one hand on her stomach, exactly like Camille had been 6 days earlier on the dance floor.
Then Camille asked:
— Who told you that?
Chloe lowered her eyes.
— Eleanor.
The name is enough.
The investigators then went back further than expected. Behind the foundation’s accounts lay an old medical registry created 28 years earlier: the Whitmore-Valmont Maternal Registry. In France, this type of structure should have been regulated by committees, consent forms, and controls. But the Valmonts had treated the boundaries between medicine, money, and family as if they were a private matter.
The most intimate shock came from Camille’s mother.
Claire Whitmore, her mother, arrived one evening with an old box of archives. She placed an envelope in front of her daughter.
— Your grandmother left it for you. She wanted you to receive it if you became pregnant.
Camille laughed without joy.
— Everyone always waits until the damage is done.
She opened it.
Her grandmother’s handwriting was fine, slanted, almost elegant.
The letter told a story Camille had never heard. Her grandmother hadn’t just taught piano, as the family said. Before that, she had been an obstetrician. She had lost a sister during a complicated pregnancy. Éléonore, too, had lost someone: her younger sister, Mara, who was said to have died in childbirth.
Two grieving families. Two women convinced that medicine could prevent further tragedies. They had created a maternal risk registry.
Then Eleanor had changed.
The letter said:
Fear can resemble love when it wears white gloves. Beware of people who claim to protect women by taking away their right to choose.
Camille had to stop.
She thought of Julien. Of Chloé. Of her own misplaced file. Of all those forged signatures.
The situation was even worse: her grandmother had removed Eleanor from the registry’s governance after discovering a request for non-medical embryo selection. The file bore a number.
CAS 17.
Sofia requested the opening of the archives.
Case 17 concerned the design of Julien de Valmont.
Éléonore and Armand had used assisted reproductive technology. A donor had been used after Armand’s sperm sample failed due to a heart condition. The registry also indicated that Thomas Whitmore, Camille’s father, had checked certain documents.
For 24 hours, a terrifying phrase hung in the air: what if Thomas had been Julien’s biological father?
Camille rejected the hasty conclusions.
“We won’t destroy another generation with an assumption,” she told Sofia.
Julien agreed to an independent genetic test. They found themselves in a doctor’s office without marble, without aggressive lawyers, without a family name hanging on the wall.
The advisor spoke to them softly.
— The results exclude any half-sibling relationship between you.
Camille burst into tears. Julien covered his face. For a few seconds, they were no longer broken husband and wife, nor victim and perpetrator. They were two adults who had just escaped an unspeakable fear.
But another result confirmed what the old file suggested: Armand was probably not Julien’s biological father.
