95

And then I saw him.

His hair was darker and longer than I remembered, and for a second I was sure once again that I’d hallucinated the sound of my name. He was dressed all in brown, a leather flight jacket, tan backpack, khaki-colored pants. James always wore blue. Always. At least a little bit of it.

Maybe it wasn’t him.

But then the figure waved. He seemed to be haloed in sunlight. I squinted as he started across the street and the figure of this beautiful boy came into focus.

It was him. It was really, really him.

I waved back and James started to run. He dodged traffic, leapt over a railing, and then he was with me, right in front of me, smiling his now oh-so-familiar smile.

He was exactly as I remembered him. Exactly.

“Hey,” he said with a grin.

“Hi,” I replied, as casually as I’d have done if we’d been meeting after school at the Starbucks on the corner of West Seventy-Sixth Street.

And then I fell hard against him, murmuring, “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…” and he held me in his arms and buried his face in my hair.

It felt like we stood clutching each other like that for hours. Nothing else mattered. Not the people trying to brush by us, or the insanity of the past few weeks, or even what our parents had done to us. All that mattered was this pure connection. It was still there, exactly as it had always been. It hadn’t been erased by lasers at Fern Haven. Or by time and distance.

Nothing could change this love. Nothing.

I inhaled the scents of warm leather and earthy evergreen shampoo and held him even tighter.

Finally, James pulled back. He cupped my face in his hands. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s really you.”

“Why?” I asked, my heart thumping dangerously. “Do I look different?”

He grinned and touched the streak in my hair. “I like the hair.”

I reached up to the nape of his neck. “I like yours, too.”

We gazed at each other for a moment, the beaming smiles on our faces full to overflowing. And at that moment, we communicated this telepathically, I know: There is just so much to say to you right now, I don’t even know where to start.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said instead. “I just got off the train and came right here.”

“I don’t care,” I told him, looking up into his gray-blue eyes, the palm of my hand now lingering on his cheek. “I would’ve waited all day.”

James smiled. He lifted my palm and kissed it. “You have absolutely no clue how much I missed you, Tandy.”

James pulled me to him, and with my heart pounding fiercely against his chest, he kissed me, shyly first, then hungrily. At the touch of his lips, something inside me exploded. All the longing and hoping and wishing, all the confusion and anger and fear I’d been clinging to burst like fireworks.

And then, because we were in the Place du Carrousel in Paris and it couldn’t have been more perfect, James lifted me off my feet and swung me around and around. I could feel tourists watching us, a few sentimental bursts of applause from the romantics, not to mention a lot of annoyed or indifferent people skirting around us, but I didn’t care.

I just laughed and laughed, until I was crying.

Finally, James placed my feet firmly on the ground. “I love you,” he whispered into my ear.

“I love you, too,” I replied.

But when his radiant gaze flicked over my shoulder a moment later, his expression went slack.

“What’s wrong?” I whirled around.

I saw that a black car had pulled up on the plaza. Three men got out, and with a sharp, visceral shock, I realized that I had seen at least one of them before.

The broad-shouldered man with clipped graying hair and a flattened nose was one of the men who had handled me so roughly in the SUV that dumped me at Fern Haven.

And I recognized another man from pictures.

He was tall, at least six-foot-two, and had thick black hair that was pure white at the temples. He wore a black trench coat and was carrying a briefcase and a camera case by a strap over his shoulder. He looked focused. And he looked mean.

“James,” he called out. “We have to talk, son.”

James spun me around so that I was looking only at him. “It’s my father, Tandy. You have to run.”

“No. Absolutely not. I’m not leaving you.”

His grip on my shoulders tightened. “Where are you staying?”

I gave him the name of the hotel.

“Please. I’ll find you again. I will,” he said desperately. “But if he gets his hands on you, he’ll hurt you. He’ll crush you, Tandy. Just run.”

There was no way. No possible way that after everything I’d been through, after everything we’d been through, I was going to let another psychotic parent tear us apart. I reached for James’s hand and looked into his eyes.

“I have a better idea.”

With that, I turned to face Royal Rampling. I stood my ground. I knew now what I was capable of. I knew who I was. I had survived Royal Rampling and worse. Maybe he could hurt me, but no one had the power to crush me. Not ever again.

I focused on James’s father and shouted, “We’re not afraid of you!” I pointed at him and looked around at the crowd. “Kidnapper! Kidnapper!”

James caught on to the plan and started yelling, too. “I’m not your property. I don’t belong to you!”

Concerned citizens started to gather, streaming toward the scene we were creating. Camera phones pointed at Royal Rampling, and I saw more than one bystander hastily dialing a phone or raising it like he or she was about to record the scene on video.

It was working. If I had to guess, I’d say the gendarmes would arrive soon.

Royal Rampling and the huge oafs who worked for him stopped cold. Rampling faked a smile, then told his henchmen to stand down. I could hear James’s ragged breathing as we faced off with his father.

“Ce n’est pas fini jusqu’à ce que je dis c’est fini,” Rampling called out. “It’s not over until I say it’s over.”

Then, with a wicked smile, Royal Rampling got into his car, and it peeled out into the chaotic Parisian traffic.

And I was left, for now, in the arms of his beautiful son.