The design

Julien Béranger had lived in the neighboring estate since before I was born.

His father was the Armand family’s longtime private attorney, a quiet man named Marc Béranger, my father’s closest friend since their university days in Lyon.

Julien was two years older than me, and since we were children he’d had a habit of climbing over the low wall dividing our two gardens to find me, always bringing cookies his mother had baked or a new comic book.

At my mother’s funeral, he was the only person outside the family who didn’t offer a single hollow word of comfort.

He simply sat beside me on the church steps, silent, then handed me an old handkerchief.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said, his voice still cracking with adolescence.

“But I’ll be here.”

When Ophélie and Maxime moved in, Julien was the first to sense something was wrong.

“He looks at your house like he’s calculating how much it would sell for,” he told me one afternoon, as we sat in the old oak tree at the end of the garden, the place we always climbed up to whenever we needed quiet.

“You’re too suspicious,” I laughed, though something in me had felt the same unease.

“I hope I’m wrong,” Julien said, his eyes drifting toward the house.

“But if anything happens, remember I’m right on the other side of that wall.”

In the early years, Ophélie played the part of the perfect stepmother.

She remembered my teachers’ names, asked about my homework, even sewed me a dress for my fourteenth birthday party with her own hands — though the stitching was clumsier than anything my mother had ever taught me.

But I began to notice the small things.

The way she always spoke of “our new family” without ever once mentioning my mother’s name, as if she had never existed.

The way she praised Maxime in front of my father with stories I later learned were exaggerated or entirely invented — how a teacher had once praised his leadership, how he’d generously given up an award to a classmate in need.

And the way that whenever I brought up my mother, my father’s face would darken, and Ophélie would gently steer the conversation elsewhere, like an invisible hand redirecting the current.

“You shouldn’t keep reopening your father’s wound,” she told me once, her voice so gentle it was hard to push back against.

“He needs to move forward with his life, Cécile.”

I didn’t know how to argue with something that sounded so much like love.

Only Julien, when I told him about it, frowned.

“That’s not about letting your father move forward. That’s about erasing your mother from this house.”

That winter, when I was fourteen, our family hosted a New Year’s dinner, inviting a few of my father’s closest business associates.

Ophélie sat at the head of the table beside my father, dressed in an elegant red velvet gown, telling the guests about the “journey of blending our families” in the tone of someone recounting a touching fairy tale.

“Maxime has really helped Cécile open up,” she said, her hand resting on her son’s shoulder.

“She used to be so withdrawn after her mother passed, but ever since she’s had Maxime as a brother, she’s become so much happier.”

I sat there, my fork and knife frozen in my hands, unable to understand how a story so completely fabricated could be told so smoothly, in front of an entire dinner table.

Maxime, sitting across from me, gave a faint smirk, his eyes flicking toward me as if he were enjoying my reaction more than his half-finished soup.

“That’s right,” my father nodded, fully believing every word.

“I’ve noticed Cécile’s been doing much better lately.”

After dinner, once the guests had left, I slipped away to Julien’s house, sitting in the kitchen with Madame Béranger, his mother, who always had a plate of almond cookies ready for me whenever she sensed I needed somewhere to breathe.

“You don’t have to smile along with stories that aren’t true, Cécile,” she said, pouring me a cup of hot chocolate.

“No matter how sweetly they’re told.”

“I don’t know how to argue against it,” I admitted, my voice catching.

“Everything she says sounds so reasonable, even when I know it isn’t.”

“That’s the most frightening thing about people like her,” Madame Béranger said, an unusually serious look in her eyes.

“They don’t lie outright, where you could catch them right away. They just carefully rewrite the truth, piece by piece, until no one remembers it was ever any different.”

Julien sat beside me, silent through the whole conversation, but when he walked me to the gate, he paused a moment before I climbed back over the low wall between our gardens.

“Just hold on to your own version of the story, Cécile,” he said.

“Even when the whole world around you is telling a different one.”