Chapter One

 

 

 

“Ms. Reynaud.” The crackle of static on the line let through a gruff, male voice. “I’m aware that you haven’t answered my last twenty-four messages, and I know I probably shouldn’t insist, but…”

I hit the delete button on my cell before my caller could proceed to do just that. A robotic female voice assured me that the message had been deleted. The next had been recorded at eight-forty-two last night. I cast my memory back to a takeaway dinner—spring rolls and stone oven pizza, a veritable ode to multiculturalism—the containers of which still crowded my kitchen counters, and listened for the next voicemail.

“Hello, my name is Josh Barnes. I’m calling about your father—”

There was no point in letting the recording play out till the end. I recognized the voice. Anything Barnes had to say to me on message twenty-six could only be a variation of the tested and tried, We’re running a story about your father and we’d like your input.

The calls were a year-long annoyance, but they got especially bad around February. March usually marked the apogee.

“End of messages,” said the robotic female voice.

Nothing from Javier. Nothing from Melanie. I smothered the spark of disappointment already kindling in my chest. It was a relief. That meant Javier and I were still on for tonight. And I could call Mel at my own leisure.

I tossed my cell to the couch and dragged my feet into the bedroom, coffee mug in hand. My reflection stared back at me from the vanity mirror. Bags under the eyes, pillow wrinkles etched onto my cheek, my hair riotous and tangled—I looked like I’d had a wild night. Me and Hugh Grant, a flat screen between us, separated for all eternity.

I took a fortifying sip of coffee. It was just bitter enough to wake me up without making me grimace, although post tooth brushing, the taste was nothing to write home about. I started with a layer of foundation rubbed deep into the skin. The rosy patches vanished as if by magic, leaving my reflection sickly pale and making my nose stand out. I bent close to the mirror to dab concealer under my eyes, my back creaking like snapping twigs.

I really needed to stop sleeping on the couch.

Then came powder, bronzer and blush for contour. I left the eyes for last, Melanie’s advice be damned, and carefully wove my way through a long stripe of liquid liner across my lids. Practice made perfect and I’d been playing with crayons since I was a kid.

By the time I’d finished, my coffee had cooled and the woman staring back at me from the mirror looked sophisticated and ready to take on the world. I hardly recognized myself.

The phone rang in the other room, startling me from the staring contest.

I contemplated not answering. Could be Javier calling to cancel. Could be Melanie blowing me off again. Or it could be work, I reasoned. Maybe there was a strike again, the city center paralyzed by disgruntled teachers, doctors or farmers, and I could sleep in.

One look at the caller ID stole the wind from my sails. I made a mental note to change the ringtone to this particular number from Beethoven to Wagner and pressed ‘Answer’. “Grandmother, you’re up early…”

“Good morning, Laure. You’re awfully chipper for the hour.” Her own voice was crisp and disapproving, a tone I’d come to associate with a long-suffering obstinacy in doing her duty.

“Oh, you know me,” I deflected. “Eager to get to work.”

“Ah. You’re still at the shop?”

The note of surprise stung every time—not least because ‘the shop’ was Paris’ largest department store. We sold everything from Calvin Klein to Vivienne Westwood. It wasn’t Prada or Versace, sure, but our clientele was wealthy and the commission I made was more than generous.

Were I willing to rent in a less prestigious part of town, I could easily have lived within my means.

I swallowed my ire, made my voice saccharine and pleasant to a fault. “Yes. In fact, I was just about to run…” What do you want?

I suppose there must have been a time when my grandmother and I were close. I couldn’t fathom why else I’d elected to leave the only country I’d ever known and move to Paris with her and Grandfather. I was hard-pressed to recall my prepubescent motives twenty years after the fact.

Grandmother cleared her throat on the other end. I guessed I wouldn’t like what she had to say. “For tomorrow night… Are you certain you’ll be able to make it? It’s just that your grandfather has invited the Komorovs and I wanted to make sure we weren’t an odd number. It’s important,” she added, “for the seating.”

Coffee threatened to rise up in my throat. I knew what she was asking—was I going to show up for dinner by my lonesome again or had I been successful in acquiring a steady boyfriend?

The answer to that question was obviously no. The same no I’d delivered for nineteen years, barring those few times when I was in high school and I insisted on dating boys whose names sounded about as French as falafel.

“It’ll be just me… As usual.”

“Ah, all right.” Judgment was never overt with my grandmother, but I could hear it in her tone. You’re not getting any younger. What’s wrong with you that you can’t find a man?

I could provide her with a list.

“I really need to go…”

“Yes, yes. We wouldn’t want you to be late, would we? I will see you tomorrow, Laure.” The line went dead before I could respond. I had been dismissed.

Tempting as it was to slam my head into the wall, I’d worked too damn hard caking on the warpaint to ruin all my efforts in a fit of pique. I did hurl my pajamas at the bed while imagining it to be my grandmother’s head, which felt slightly cathartic.

A glance at the clock told me that I truly was running late. I grabbed the first clothes I found in my wardrobe—a spaghetti strap top and an Oscar de la Renta ribbed black sweater that folded over to reveal my shoulders. Black trousers and a pair of red pumps completed my armor.

I snatched my purse off the couch on my way out and nearly forgot my cell phone. I turned back just as I was about to lock the door behind me. I was a twenty-nine-year-old woman. Being parted from my cell was like being hobbled.

Well, there was that, and I still held out hope that Javier would cancel that evening’s rendezvous.

I shrugged into my trench coat with one hand while struggling to sneak my keys into my handbag with the other, a perilous balancing act that took up most of my focus. I didn’t see the man coming up the stairs until we nearly collided. He tilted back, narrowly avoiding my fist. I probably would’ve struck the wall with my head as I tried to right myself if he hadn’t caught me.

For a moment, we stood like that, his arm around my waist, our syncopated breaths catching in our throats—the prototypical rom-com scenario. Or it might have been, were he not the perfect image of a kindly old dentist. He wasn’t much taller than me, but his face was testament to a lifetime of zero moisturizer. Wrinkles creased the corners of his eyes and deepened the pleats in his brow. His hairline was receding at the temples, something I found all-around unattractive in men.

I pulled back with a stilted chuckle. “Oh, wow, you should be more careful.”

“I should be more careful?” His accent shone through his outrage. American, I figured, and felt my skin prickle with discomfort.

“The number one cause of household accidents in Paris is high heels. I thought that was common knowledge?” I stuck to French not to torture him but because I didn’t want to blow my cover.

Wisdom dictated that I should be on my way, not making small talk with a man who, admittedly, I’d nearly pushed down the stairs.

A man who laughed—presumably at me. “The guidebooks certainly don’t mention that.” He rubbed the back of his neck with the hand that wasn’t holding the plastic bag.

The smell of fresh croissants enveloped me. My stomach gurgled mortifyingly in response.

We both pretended not to notice.

“I’m Ashley,” my would-be victim said, holding out his free hand. “Ashley Compton. I just moved in down the hall. Four-D.” He gestured vaguely with the shopping bag.

I wasn’t generally a big fan of unisex names, but there was nothing even vaguely androgynous about Ashley. He struck me as the typical alpha-dog type—one more bullet point in my ‘reasons never to speak to him again’ column.

“Laure.” Even though I had no desire to give my name out to strangers, good manners compelled me to reciprocate. His hand was big and warm around mine, the pads of his fingers much softer than I’d anticipated. I let go as soon as I could. I needed to get a move on. Instead, I found myself saying, “Welcome to the neighborhood. And to France, I guess…”

“Oh, no. I was in Nanterre for a bit. Too quiet in the evenings, you know?”

I didn’t, but I nodded anyway. The last time I’d taken the train out to La Defense, Melanie had wanted to meet for lunch but couldn’t step out for more than thirty minutes. As easy as I found it to make my way through the labyrinthine streets of the capital, so too did I get lost in that austere chrome and glass tangle of skyscrapers and high-rises.

“You won’t have that problem here,” I said, for the sake of conversation. “The Marais gets pretty lively.” Too lively, by Javier’s tastes, but I didn’t mind him having one less reason to want to spend the night.

Ashley held my gaze, a strange little smile tilting up the corners of his lips. “That’s good to know…” He seemed to snap out of his trance when I cleared my throat, which was more than I’d come to expect when strange men gawped at me. “Sorry, you were walking with a great sense of purpose. I’ll let you run. It was nice meeting you.”

“You, too.”

“Maybe I’ll see you around.”

I smiled in a way I hoped was polite but not eager. “Maybe.”

“Well. Goodbye.”

We skirted around each other—him making his way down the hall and me trying not to take the stairs two by two as I replayed our encounter over and over in my head. Had he said anything to make me feel wary? No. But that was no reason not to speculate.

More importantly, had he seen which door I’d walked out of?

I shoved the thought out of my mind as I pushed through the front door and onto the sidewalk. The chime of idling engines and tut-tutting scooters greeted me like a fanfare.

The morning gridlock was already in full swing, Paris paralyzed into a maze of choked streets and impatient motorists vociferating in the privacy of their vehicles.

The subway platform was no less congested, but at least I didn’t have to wait long before I could cram into a car with the other commuters and drive away. We zoomed beneath the city at great speed, leaving behind Île de la Cité and Notre Dame. I changed lines once, my heels marking a dull counterpoint to the buskers playing We Will Rock You on a trio of djembe, guitar and violin in the depths of the subway tunnels.

The train disgorged me onto the platform at Babylone with five minutes to go before my shift began. I was at my post within three, albeit with heart thumping violently against my ribs. I checked my makeup in a changing-room mirror. A rosy flush stained my cheeks, but that was about the extent of the damage. I dabbed a fresh coat of lipstick on and tugged on my sweater to banish all creases.

“I have a bottle of Caligna with your name on it,” Yvonne said, her voice not quite a sing-song as she peeked around the corner. She did a double-take when she saw me. “Look at you… Date tonight?”

“How did you guess?”

Her answer was a hitch of slim shoulders. “It’s a talent. Also, you’re wearing your favorite push-up.” Yvonne held her wrist up to her nose. “Why don’t I have a hundred euros to blow on perfume?”

“Because you spent it on that Hermès scarf?” I suggested.

Yvonne scoffed. “The answer is that I need a hot-blooded Latin lover to keep me in the lap of luxury. You know, like you.”

I had mentioned Javier to her a grand total of one time. And, fair enough, I might have exaggerated our chemistry. I’d been regretting it ever since. Yvonne had turned me into something of a Wailing Wall as a result. I found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between ‘my boss Yvonne’ and ‘my maybe-friend Yvonne’.

I let her spritz me with perfume even though L’Artisan’s grassy concoctions weren’t my fragrance of choice by any stretch of imagination. Give me a 1944 Bandit or a Chanel No. 19 and I was in heaven. I went as gaga about vintage perfume as men do about vintage cars. Unfortunately, I couldn’t wear any at work because my tastes tended to veer toward the daring overdose end of the spectrum.

Yvonne got to add the finishing touches to my take on ‘Laure Reynaud, shop assistant extraordinaire’ while inside ‘Laure Reynaud, daughter of a serial killer’ quietly seethed.

At ten on the dot, the doors of the store opened.

 

* * * *

 

I hated February. The nights were still so long that sometimes I didn’t see the sun for days at a time. My willingness to go out of my comfort zone to socialize was low the rest of the year, too, but in the winter months getting out of the house felt like a sentence. I’d narrowed down my circle of intimates for whom I would compromise to just two people—Melanie and Javier. And Javier was waiting for me at the Belle Constance.

Every text message designed to make me hustle only served to slow my steps. Every call I dodged ratcheted up stress levels. I contemplated pleading a backache after a long day’s patrolling of the Paul Smith counter, but I was fairly sure I’d already offered that excuse once.

I made myself press on.

The Belle Constance was one of Javier’s favorite haunts in the city. He must have told me some ten or fifteen times already. I couldn’t relate. During the day, it was tolerable. I’d stepped in once or twice when I wanted to play at being intellectual. There was something wonderfully decadent about indulging in a glass of wine as I perused the library stacks. But the wine was overpriced and the bar itself was about the size of a shoebox, so I never stayed long. And I never went there after nine.

The smokers packed like grapes before the blue-framed glass door reluctantly made room for me to pass. I knew the type—the bohemian-chic progeny of families who couldn’t abide the rabble of the inner city—they flocked to Le Marais in droves seeking independence and proof that they wouldn’t turn into their parents. I felt a touch of kinship with their ilk.

This was my clan, my disenchanted kin.

I still wrinkled my nose as I stepped into the sardine can of patrons inside the bar. The noise levels were off the charts, the lights low, putting paid to the theory that anyone came here to enjoy a quiet hour with a good book. I sighted Javier at the bar, digging into spare ribs and chatting up the waitress while people mingled around him, oblivious.

“Thanks for waiting,” I drawled, in English, in lieu of hello.

Javier perked up at the sight of me. “Oh, Laure. Hey.” He made to kiss me, but I withdrew before his greasy lips could touch my cheek. A bar stool had freed up right beside his and I hurried to claim it for my own.

I sighed with relief. Tomorrow night was going to be ballet flats and jeans if it killed me. Grandmother could scoff at my dress sense all she pleased.

“Sorry,” Javier said, swallowing around a mouthful of wine. “I skipped lunch to work. You want a bite?”

The ribs looked delicious, but I shook my head. “A glass of Côtes du Rhone.”

“Red or white?” the waitress asked.

I shrugged. “Whatever you have is fine.” I wasn’t in the mood to be choosy.

“Bad day?” I could and did fault Javier for many things, but he had a knack for reading me when I let my guard down. He wiped his hand perfunctorily on a paper napkin before patting me on the back the way he might have done a study friend.

Yvonne must have heard Javier and pictured Antonio Banderas. The reality was that Javier looked more like the lead in a comedy sitcom—the bumbling, nerdy protagonist with the hot but slightly ditzy girlfriend. He wore denim shirts and skinny jeans with Converse shoes, a messenger bag filled with spiral notebooks and a myriad of pens never far from reach. It was his eyes—big and black as coals—that had made me fall in love with him.

Or at least decide I was in love with him. More and more, finishing our phone calls with I love you felt like a chore.

“My day was fine,” I lied. “I just… I thought you’d wait for me so we could have dinner together.”

Javier dropped his hand. “You said you weren’t hungry.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“All you ordered was a glass of wine…” He sucked his bottom lip between his teeth in a gesture that always told me he was trying hard not to get annoyed with me. Sometimes I appreciated the effort. Not tonight.

“Maybe I’m not in the mood to spend twenty euros on a salad.”

Javier exhaled, nostrils flaring. “Do you want to leave?”

“I just ordered, didn’t I?” I hated myself when I got like this, but like a hamster caught in a spinning wheel, I didn’t know how to stop.

Between the two of us, Javier was often the adult, the one who rolled with all my punches and soldiered heroically through my outbursts. His sainthood didn’t endear him to me as it should have. Instead, I both loved and despised him for putting up with so much.

“Laure, I just found out I have to rewrite, like, half of my thesis,” he snapped. “I’m really not in the mood.”

That small, well-adjusted part of me that understood all about relationships being a two-way street ached for him. I knew how much work he put into his dissertation, how badly he wanted to get his degree. The rest of me smarted with the implication that his hardships were more important than mine.

My grandmother’s indictment—still at the shop?—rang out in my ears like a foghorn.

“You’re not in the mood?” I volleyed back before I could think better of it. “I spent ten hours on my feet today.” With a purportedly genuine smile in place and the utmost willingness to attend often unpleasant clients. And tomorrow I had to do it all over again.

Javier leaned both elbows on the bar, giving me his profile. “Keep your voice down.”

I glanced around. No one was looking our way. We might as well have been whispering with the racket around us. “What? Am I embarrassing you?”

“Yes.”

I opened my mouth to shoot back a riposte and promptly lost my train of thought. “I’m embarrassing,” I repeated.

“When you’re like this, yes. You’re being irrational…and you’re belittling my work because you think yours is more important.” He sneered at me. “You sell clothes, Laure. It’s hardly rocket science.” As opposed to what he did, which was literally that.

The waitress arrived with my wine, sparing me the burden of a knee-jerk retort. I fingered the stem of the glass, my stomach pitching violently into my knees. “Is this how you felt every time I covered your tab at Le Connétable?” Another one of Javier’s favorite haunts, a place where even I had enjoyed myself once or twice. The live music was pretty good. I hadn’t minded paying for us both whenever we went—but that was before.

Javier pursed his lips. He had a lovely mouth. I’d kissed it often enough. Right now, though, I had to refrain from punching it.

I wasn’t a violent person. If I started hitting all my dates because they were assholes, my knuckles would be torn to shreds.

“It’s not like we’ve never split the tab,” was his counterpoint, the kind of academic footnote that would go over well in one of his papers.

“What about the Suzanne Vega concert tickets?” I’d paid for those myself, out of my own bank account. Javier had yet to offer to pay me back.

He rolled his eyes. “What is this? You are trying to make me out to be some kind of mooch? You’re not above taking handouts,” he recalled. “You told me about the envelopes. Every two weeks at your grandmother’s, right? If you were a shop girl trying to make ends meet, that line of argument might have some merit. But you’re as bourgeois as they come! Your mother was—what? A Regnault? That’s practically blue blood. If she hadn’t married your dad…”

He trailed off a beat too late to retain the shaky moral high ground.

The peril of dating one’s best friend is that they’re privy to more information than may be convenient. It was my own damn fault. I had put this weapon in Javier’s hand. I’d just never expected him to press the trigger.

“I should go,” I said, fiddling with my purse strap.

Javier was back to not looking at me, a vein pulsing in his neck. “I think you should.”

My pride in tatters, I levered to my feet. “Don’t call me again,” was about all I could grit out before I bolted. It occurred to me that I hadn’t paid for the wine.

Let him cover my tab for once.

As much as I wanted to believe that it served Javier right for treating me so badly, my thoughts were circling a different drain, consumed by an entirely other fixation. I elbowed past the thicket of smokers outside the bar, heedless of their scandalized clucking, and took the first shortcut I could think of. Thankfully my apartment was just a block away—a journey I further abridged by cutting through a paved courtyard flanked by compact apartment buildings. I emerged on the other side with a knot in my throat and tears blurring my vision. Streetlights splashed my shadow across the pavement.

Javier knew full well that few hot-button topics were as off limits with me as my family. I resented him for the cheap shot, but I hated myself for the shakes I could feel coming on, unstoppable like a hurricane.

I was barely through the front door of my building before my knees gave out. I landed on hands and knees by the mailboxes. Classy. Breaths wheezed in and out of my throat. I couldn’t seem to get enough air into my lungs. My throat was closing up as if squeezed by a metal claw and no matter how many deep, gulping breaths I swallowed down, it didn’t seem to help.

I needed to make it up the stairs and lock myself into my apartment, but I wasn’t going to make it that far.

“Christ,” I heard behind me. “Laure? Are you okay?”

My name on a man’s tongue had never sounded weirder. It took me a moment to decipher who was saying it. The American. My new neighbor. I tried to turn my head, but suddenly there were hands on my shoulders, bidding me to curl up.

“It’s okay,” Ashley said. “It’s a panic attack. It’ll pass.”

No, I thought, it won’t. I’d been dealing with irrational anxiety since I was twelve—it hadn’t been irrational before that, according to my grandparents, who at some point had decided I should get over what happened. Three years was enough time to wallow.

Here I was, at twenty-nine, still wallowing. Still choking back sobs.

“You again,” I got out haltingly between one harried exhale and the next.

“Me again,” Ashley repeated, the corners of his lips tugging down. “Do you think you can stand?”

I didn’t, but I gave it a shot anyway. I found myself resting my weight on Ashley as he helped me to my feet. Gravity pulled at my knees. The pumps certainly didn’t help make me feel more stable as I braced myself against the grid of metal mailboxes.

Quick, name three species of monkey. I wracked my addled brain, grasping at straws to center myself. Chimpanzee, baboon, orangutan. Deep breath, feeling the clutch around my throat slacken fractionally. Five shades of blue, go!

Periwinkle, navy, powder blue, Spanish blue, ultramarine…

My breathing eased as I dredged up useless trivia. Of all the coping techniques I’d learned over the years, this alone worked without fail.

I wish it had been a shrink who’d taught me.

“Bad night?” Ashley asked, sotto voce.

I nodded. Bad night, bad day. I was nothing if not proficient in the art of whining about my life. Javier was right. At heart, I really was just another spoiled brat. “We need to stop meeting like this,” I drawled. “People will talk… Were you, uh, were you going somewhere?”

Ashley waved a hand. “Just thought I’d get a taste of the nightlife. I hear it’s pretty lively.” My own words fed back to me, with a matching smirk.

I wiped at my cheeks. My fingertips came away tinged with black ink. Note to self, wear waterproof mascara.

“I’ll walk you up, if you want.”

The offer surprised me. “I don’t want to keep you.” I didn’t have the strength to refuse outright, much less claim that I didn’t need the help.

“I doubt the bars will vanish without me.” Ashley held out a hand—not for me to take, but to gesture me toward the stairs. “Please. I couldn’t live with myself knowing I’d abandoned a neighbor in her hour of need.”

I snorted mirthlessly and obediently took the lead. I kept a hand on the cast-iron banister, but my moment of weakness had passed. I heard Ashley’s footsteps behind me, reason enough for a more immediate sort of fear to kindle in my chest, banishing the numbness.

Four flights of stairs later, with blood roaring against my eardrums, I fumbled for the house keys. “Thanks. You really didn’t have to bother…”

“You know,” Ashley said softly, “whoever he is, he’s an idiot.”

My head snapped up. “Excuse me?”

“Or her. I’m not judging. Just—you deserve better than this.”

I tried to see myself through his eyes. I pictured a well-dressed woman in her prime, albeit with no ring on her finger, making a fool of herself. My pride smarted worse than my bruised knees. You don’t know shit about me. How dare you judge me? It took me a moment to quell the urge to launch into another quarrel. “Thank you for your help,” I said crisply. Ashley didn’t deserve my ire.

I wasn’t sure Javier deserved it, either, but that was over and done with.

Ashley held my gaze for a long moment. Were his eyes blue or green? I couldn’t tell. The wall fixtures cast a dull light over us both. I revised my assessment. It was much likelier that Ashley saw me as a broken doll, something that with a little spit and superglue could belong in a shop window. Something lifeless but pleasant to look at. Even with my mascara tears, I was still a prime specimen of womanhood.

Polite, boundary respecting, feminist lit reading Javier would never dream of treating me as such.

“Do you want to come in for a drink?” I asked, cocking a hip and canting my head to one shoulder.

Ashley looked as taken aback as I felt making the offer, but what better night to be reckless? I knew what happened once I closed the door and locked it, once I found myself alone in the apartment.

My hair trigger was so sensitive that barely a week went by without at least one descent into hysteria.

Ashley’s dithering gave way to a crooked smile. “Sure…”

I decided he was handsome enough—dark and brooding, nothing like my blue-eyed Spaniard—and well worth the inevitable awkwardness of running into each other in the hall. I could be an adult about this. I could patch up my dignity with proof that I wasn’t such a broken automaton, that I didn’t need Javier to hold my hand.

I took my own lovers, made my own money.

I jumped all on my own when the door clicked shut behind us.

“Cool place,” Ashley said.

“Yeah? Sorry it’s such a mess…” It wasn’t false modesty that prompted the apology. Empty takeout cartons were still on the kitchen counter. I hadn’t done dishes in a week. Magazines and nail polish and bottles of liquor crowded together on the coffee table. True, the table was an imitation Noguchi and the couch was a Catherine Memmi design. Above it hung a trippy Tim Lane titled Keeping Theseus that featured floating skulls and outstretched arms reaching from the body of the Minotaur.

But I hadn’t invited Ashley inside to look at my etchings. I rounded on him as I stripped off my trench coat and cast it idly onto the couch. “Do you want something to drink?”

Ashley glanced at the half-to-three-quarters empty bottles of Jack and Jim laid out on the coffee table as if trying to pick between them.

“Or we could skip the pretense,” I drawled. He looked up and I thought I spied a touch of surprise in his gaze. He opened his mouth—perhaps to tell me I had the wrong idea—but he seemed to lose his train of thought once I tugged off my sweater and tank top.

I stood before him in my bra, my heart about to burst through my ribcage like something out of Alien, neither of us saying anything for a fraught, tenuous moment. Then I took a step forward, and Ashley met me halfway. Our lips connected in a brutal kiss.

My bad day was about to get a lot better.