“Marie,” said my father, quietly, frowning.
My mother’s face was a ghostly mask. The shock was too much. He turned to me.
“Fleur. My clever, clever daughter. It is lovely to see you again.” He leaned over and greeted me with a trio of kisses.
I didn’t move, or respond. I was paralyzed by horror. Tears were forming in Marie’s eyes as she turned her glazed lenses onto me. He leaned over, without hesitation, and kissed her square on the lips. She didn’t move. He whispered something.
Laurent sat down with us, two mannequins, took out his serviette, placed it on his knee, and proceeded to pour champagne. “You will need this, Marie. And to celebrate our reunion, I think,” he said, winking at me.
Marie was beginning to accuse me with her eyes, like she had with Louis, and this time I had no defense. I felt like an executioner. A repentant executioner.
“Do not look at our daughter that way, Marie. She had no idea until recently, c’est vrai?” he asked me. “I did not intrude on her life or interfere in any way, did I?”
I shook my head. I would delve into how he had tracked me, how he knew about my MeetUp tutoring and the dinner with Chloé, another time.
“Not that I didn’t want to, Fleur,” he added. “I apologize for the deception of our one encounter. I simply had to see you, touch you”—I thought of his warm hand on my arm—“hear your laughter. But I stay away because I knew it was Marie’s wish. It was, after all, why you stole my child from me all those years.”
He’d turned on Marie, and slowly she focused away from me and onto Laurent. I watched her clasp her throat, as though she were choking.
I never once thought Marie had given me away to punish Laurent. But now . . .
I’d never seen Marie scared before. I wanted to throw myself at her feet and tell her everything was going to be okay. I wanted to beg her to tell me everything was going to be okay.
“Let’s go,” I stood up quickly. “I’m sorry. I thought this was . . . Marie?” She stared up at me from her chair as though I were a stranger. She shook her head.
The woman who gazed over Laurent was not the woman I knew. She was young and so vulnerable. Her face was plastered tense, with one question: Why?
“But . . . you’re dead. I checked the body myself,” she said in French.
I sat back down, helpless. I had brought us here. What did I think would happen? I had hit the button marked “blow-up.”
“I wanted to retire.” He shrugged. “Dying was necessary to create the illusion. Imagine my surprise when one week after my funeral, the love of my life flies to America, and soon brings back a beautiful young woman she introduces to the world as her daughter.”
Marie hardened. She glanced at me protectively. “I wanted to keep her safe—from you.”
Laurent scoffed, looked at me, and down at his empty plate.
“No. You wanted to punish me.”
“No. I wanted to save her from a life of lies with you.”
Laurent smiled coolly at me, eyes astute.
“She worries I will corrupt you. Fleur, are we here tonight because of me? Or because of your mother?”
I gasped.
My mother’s back stiffened.
“Why did you call this meeting so suddenly?” he asked. “Tell us. We would both like to know, I think we both deserve to know,” said Laurent.
Anxiety burned up my gut, spilled into my throat.
I stared back and forth at my parents, and felt tears run down my cheeks. My mother said, “You found him?”
I nodded, wiping them away.
“I made the connection. With petite palourde, here at the restaurant, at the chef dinner, and with the letters you showed me, Mom.”
Laurent turned to Marie. “You kept my letters.” He was pleased. Marie was a wall, fortifying her nation. She turned back to me.
“But why, Fleur? Why this way, now? Did you wish to see him? I would not have stopped you,” she said quietly.
“You stopped her for twenty-three years!” he barked, and she jumped in her chair.
“Leave her alone!” I shouted, surprising myself. “You abandoned her. Do you know the damage you did? Do you have any idea? You have no right to cast judgment!”
I heard Marie gasp, and I glared at his light green eyes—the same color as mine. I liked to believe I saw pain inside, but there was anger, too.
Oh God, it was going the exact opposite way I had hoped. A soap opera.
“I did what I thought was right for your mother,” he answered firmly. “She was unhappy with my lifestyle. I told her I could not change who I was, as I could not change who she was. I don’t understand your reaction. She has had a highly successful career, which is what she always wanted.”
Oh God. I stared at Marie, who stared at her plate.
“Is that what you told yourself?” I asked him.
His eyebrows clenched together.
He was wrong. That was not what she’d always wanted. I remembered her words, “I never knew goodness was a choice.” It had been a way, thrust upon her, by someone else’s choice.
“Marie,” he said quietly. “I stayed away because I thought you were happier without me. But . . . I never gave you up. I checked in from time to time. I was at your father’s funeral.”
She gaped at him—pale. Maybe she could see what her life to date had been like, shown to her by a ghost of the past, and she didn’t like what she was seeing.
“You stayed away because you didn’t love me,” she whispered, like a young girl damaged by an older man who should have known better.
“No, I stayed away because I didn’t care for your judgment. You expected me to live with someone who could never accept me?”
“I would have!”
And I exhaled. She wanted a second chance. Goosebumps spread.
“I was so young, Laurent. You think I knew what I really wanted? You made the choice for me. I would have accepted you. I would have,” she whispered, sobbing quietly.
I shuddered from the weight of my mother’s despair, and wished I could leave them alone. “I should leave,” I whispered. “But,” I swallowed, “there’s something else, the reason why we are here.” I absorbed the shock on Laurent’s face. And the loss. Two decades of lost time.
“I need your help. Mom is about to make a terrible mistake. And I am not sure I can stop her.”
Marie’s head popped up. She stared at me red- and wet-faced, and I watched her eyes flicker with darkness. That’s okay, I told myself, longing for a flak jacket. She won’t see me as the enemy later—I hoped. I opened my satchel and with shaking hands, took out my laptop.
She stared at me genuinely confused. Our eyes held an invisible line, a rope, of love, trust, and faith.
I opened it, clicked open the files, so they would play right to the time-stamp when she transfers the drugs, and turned it toward her. She viewed the screen for three seconds, and all light left her face. She closed the lid, quickly, gently, eyes cast down.
“Don’t go through with it,” I said. “You can’t. You can’t let them win. He didn’t hurt me, Mom. He made me stronger.”
Her brows dug deeper and then elevated sky-high. She shook her head as if to say impossible.
I got up and went over, kneeling at her chair. I placed my hand on her thigh. “It’s not too late. You have to fix this. You can finish his brother another way. Another day. But you can’t do what you planned.”
She was crying heavily now. “Remember, you once told me if I wasn’t careful, the bad will eat the good. You do have a choice this time. Please, Mom,” I added.
Laurent was watching us with what I suspected was grifter astuteness.
I had thought he could help. His aged eyes were cast with lines that represented years of excess.
Why? Why had I thought someone who robbed for a living could save Marie?
Because—I closed my eyes tight—I wanted the world to be a place where loyalty, trust, and love superseded m
orality. Because I wanted to live in a world where love wasn’t mere acceptance of the things you couldn’t change or limited by what you didn’t know, but where love could be a source of aspiration.
“Marie,” he said, inhaling deeply, reaching for her hand. “What have you done?”
The tone in his voice was stern but gentle, and full of love.
I rested my forehead on my mother’s knee. Maybe, maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe . . . maybe they could save each other.
Chapter 26
Need to ship home clothes, I sighed, sitting on my suitcase after failing to zip it up. Sylvie had offloaded a bunch of her unsold spring wear on me when I resigned yesterday, and I wanted to give some of it to the girls.
The decision to go home, which I’d brooded over for three weeks, arrived as an epiphany the night before. I was listening to music and writing a blog about infinite variations in recipes and bam. Wow, I thought. How lucky was I to have two lives, and two families, two countries to call home.
And I knew then that going home wasn’t an ending. I was simply putting the path that lay ahead for me in Toulon on pause. And when I returned? I would be a different person. Events and the grace of time would make sure of that. Just as my mom and the girls in Austin would find me changed from my time here.
I found a last-minute seat on a flight and booked it.
I stared at the made bed, and my phone, anxiety surging in me. Still, I would miss the here and now. The pace of life in France was undeniably better than in America. Being surrounded by the architectural beauty of the past slowed down the urgent sense of future I had always felt in America. Shopping in street markets under the watchful eyes of gargoyles perched high, you live your life surrounded by centuries-old monumental greatness—why rush to chase your own? I’d even come to appreciate the way French culture had disciplined my generosity of heart. I didn’t need to be a revolving door when it came to assuming the best in others. Kindness wasn’t anointment.
I sighed. My cab would be here soon. I should stuff some more clothes in the box I had dug up. Marie could ship them after I left (and maybe sneak in some croissants).
I still couldn’t quite believe how events had unfolded.
Whatever happened after I left my father’s restaurant, whatever Laurent had said, Marie had had the charges dropped against Georges Messette one hour before his arraignment.
Three weeks ago.
The two must have come up with some plan, some way to destroy the evidence that Marie had so carefully crafted without implicating her, because she was never charged with anything. As for Bastien, Marie had had a conversation with him after I told her about his involvement with getting the evidence room recordings. I am sure they reached an agreement that stipulated neither would tell on the other. (I did not tell her that Louis had no doubt already guaranteed Bastien’s silence.) I wouldn’t have believed Marie would let a dirty cop off, but she announced the day after Georges was released that she was taking a leave of absence from the police force. She told me this after arriving back at the apartment that morning in the same clothes she’d wore the day before, with joy on her face, the likes of which I had never seen. I was shocked by her announcement, momentarily.
After years of living a mistaken life, she knew perfectly well what she really wanted—my father. A family.
She pulled me to her, and didn’t let me go for a long time.
“Do you think you will ever forgive me?” she asked, tears in her eyes.
“Do you think you will ever realize there is nothing to forgive?” I asked, cheekily. I meant that.
I knew what it felt like to think you had no control over your own destiny. To have it rest in the hands of someone else.
That I could walk away free was a lie. But I was walking away with who I was still intact; and maybe even a better me.
Louis had stuck to our deal. He let me go in exchange for Georges’s freedom. In a few bitter moments, I told myself his heart was too small. But I knew better—I felt his expansive, loving realm in moments when we’d made love, when he held my heart in his hands and cherished it. He was capable of so much more. He just didn’t have the courage to give it, or he didn’t want to.
Marie and I had one conversation about Louis after she’d left the force. It was short and sweet. She’d said, “If you love your Messette, you should fight to be with him.”
I looked her square in the eye and said, “I am.”
The best part of the past few weeks was spending time together with a mother and a father. It was strange and awkward, witnessing the budding love of two people who gave birth to you, both of whom love you wholly and completely without really knowing you, both of whom have no idea how to trust.
Laurent showed me around his restaurant, and admitted, yes, he had been behind my tutor switch-up, which first led me to Little Clam—I didn’t ask how he knew so much about me (unable to process the fact that I’d been watched by more than one powerful man). He said he canceled as soon as he realized one of Louis’s men was tailing me, as he was not yet ready, then, to lose his retirement cover. Of course a father keeps tabs on his daughter, he added, with passion, mentioning that he admired Louis, and hoped things worked out for us. I let that go, too, suspecting Marie had probably filled him on what had happened between us. Instead, I focused on how I was grounded hard and fast by the fact that we shared a similar love of food. It was something we could build on. Something I looked forward to building on. Slowly.
But now, I thought, glancing around Marie’s apartment, it was time to visit my other family. How loved I was—how blessed.
I gathered my things quickly, and locked the door behind me. Marie and Laurent had left for a weekend trip to wine country, not having a clue about my last-minute plans. I sent an email to them less than an hour ago explaining that I missed my mom and friends, and that I would be back when the time felt right.
The cab was waiting for me, and I took a deep breath, not looking at the building, or at the bistro across the street, as I got in. What was the point of looking back at the tunnel of my heart? I knew it would stretch across the ocean, vacant—the tollbooth manned forever, waiting for one man to come pay the fee.
I admired the port one last time as we sped past on our way to the airport highway. Flashes of the dance district, business buildings, sailboats, and the Messette compound. The sea sparkled blue, and seagulls flew up in a crowded rush. Cars sped past.
The closer we drew to the airport, the better I felt.
Standing in line, I knew once and for all that I’d done the right thing. The booking agent examined my passport photo and me. I doubt she could see the difference, though I knew I was no longer that girl.
Louis had accused me of lying to myself throughout our love affair. And I had beaten myself up for wanting to lose myself in him. For wanting to hide in him.
But we’d both been wrong.
Love is blindness.
I wanted him no matter who he was, or where he came from, or the danger he posed. And I’d wanted him even when he held back from me—hoping, believing we were in love.
As I passed through security I felt a moment of panic, held on to it, and then let it go.
The loss wasn’t real. I’d never really had anything to lose.
I took my time in the snack shop. Coming here, I ended up with too many magazines crammed in the pocket in front of me, which stole legroom. But I was overwhelmed with a sudden appetite for them. I bought five of my favorites and loaded down, found a seat near the gate, as I’ve always had an irrational fear of missing a flight.
I removed my long cardigan and adjusted my snug scoop neck shirt. I glanced at the woman across from me, a middle-aged lady watching me settle in. We shared a smile.
“Where are you headed?”
“Austin. How about you?”
“Atlanta.”
It was nice to speak smooth English. We swapped stories about places we’d seen in France before we slid into a comfortable sil
ence.
I had to flip through at least two of the magazines, tearing out keeper recipes so I could recycle the rest before boarding. I got to work.
Reading, salivating, tearing. Reading, tearing. I was into the third magazine when I came across a recipe for a cheesecake that gave me pause. The woman across from me said, “You keeping all those? Wow you’ve got some appetite.”
I looked up at her.
“Oui, she is very greedy,” thrummed a deep voice in my ear.
My eyes popped wide open, my heart stopped. The lady across from me wore a similar expression.
I peered over my shoulder into the seat behind me.
Louis.
I turned forward, frozen, staring at my fellow passenger without seeing her.
Impossible.
He shifted, and yes, oh my God, he stepped around the row of seats and slid in next to me.
His scent. It was him. I peered down at his large thigh, just a millimeter from mine. His shoulder touched mine and I clutched my neck.
“You must be very, very hungry, non?” he asked quietly.
Slowly, very slowly, I lifted my face up and over, and met his eyes. I didn’t know what I would see there, or what I wanted to see there.
He was still so confident from within, but . . . wait, there was something very different. He was confident in himself, not in us. He was nervous.
“Bonjour,” he said, quietly, sticking his hand out. Pink flushing on his cheeks. “My name is Louis Messette.”
I didn’t move.
I looked down at his hand, and peered back into his eyes.
What are you doing here?! I pleaded.
You heart is safe with me, he pleaded in return.
I wasn’t imagining it.
We floated there, suspended on the promise of unspoken words.
In one powerful breath of life I felt all the love I had for him. It sent goosebumps down my arms. Hope spread with a fury of determination. He had much to prove. So did I.
The Frenchman (Crime Royalty Romance Book 1) Page 26
