Chapter 3
3
Present Day
Nora
W ith my very last euros I bought a croissant at the Charles De Gaulle airport. It was better than it needed to be and I felt my fingers twitch with muscle memory.
Grab my phone. Take a video. Say Au Revoir, France and merci. Except for the last three months, you’ve been so good to me.
Only I wasn’t doing that anymore. I no longer went by the handle @AnAmericanInParis. I was no longer making videos of my life for my millions of social media followers. I was no longer…I didn’t even know. Me?
Someone bumped me from behind. A fellow traveler with a giant backpack.
I apologized. He bumped me and I apologized. I couldn’t stop myself.
“Pardon,” I said. He didn’t even notice. I took my better than it needed to be croissant and my tea and found an empty seat at my gate. The day was gray and rain pattered listlessly against the giant windows. I wished for sun so I could hide behind my sunglasses. No such luck today. No luck, really. Not for me. Not for months.
You know what happens to an accidental influencer with millions of followers when she goes down in a blaze of world-wide public humiliation?
Middle seat in coach.
Across the aisle a group of teenagers were looking at me and then down at their phones and then back at me. I still had a half hour before my flight boarded. It was only a matter of time before they started filming me. Or worse. Talking to me.
I opened my phone, as if I could delay the inevitable, and read the various texts.
Mom: I can’t wait to see you, honey. Dad will pick you up at the airport. I’ve told him to be calm.
Charlie: You really sold all your shoes? Even the Chanels? Seriously?
Interpol Agent Claudia Dufrais: I will be talking to my counterparts in the FBI. You can expect to hear from them in the next week.
My breath caught and I found myself saying, out loud, to no one in particular.
“I’m sorry.”
Beneath Claudia’s text was the text thread I’d thought a million times about deleting. From a number I’d planned on blocking but never did. My personal revenge was keeping his number under the nickname I knew he hated.
Nicky: Talk. To. Me.
Nicky: Just let me know you’re okay.
Nicky: Freezing me out is bullshit and immature. And you know it. Just tell me you’re okay.
Maybe it was, but it had become a habit I couldn’t break. It had been six years of uncomfortable reunions. Thanksgivings. Roy’s gall bladder surgery when we sat in the waiting room together not saying a word.
That Christmas party three years ago.
So awkward.
Yes, part of me knew it was immature, but the truth was, I couldn’t look at him anymore without remembering the night of my eighteenth birthday.
Without remembering how wrong I’d been about his feelings. My feelings. All of it.
After all this recent humiliation, it reminded me of my old humiliation. I had to wonder if I had some kind of a kink for it. A humiliation kink.
But it’s why I’d been purposefully…how did he say it? Freezing him out.
“Excuse me.” Awesome. One of the teenagers worked up the courage to talk to me.
I blinked at her.
“You’re…her? Right? An American in Paris?” She was American, from someplace in the south. One of her friends wore a University of Texas sweatshirt.
“Nope,” I said. Because the account had been deleted. No one was her anymore.
The girl looked back at her friends, but suddenly they were all looking at their phones like they didn’t know her.
Bitches. Get new friends, I wanted to tell her.
“I just…I wanted to say I loved your account. It’s why we came to Paris.”
“You came all the way to Paris because of a social media account?” I asked and the girl shrugged. That was the power of millions of followers, I could never get used to it.
“You made it look so easy,” she said and I could have cried. Because it had been really really hard.
Only I’d done enough crying over the past month, and frankly, it got me nothing but a swollen face and puffy eyes.
My days of being a social influencer were over. Now that I had some time to reflect on it, really what a ridiculous and capricious thing it had all been.
An American in Paris. Making fun of how I stood out while I adjusted to French culture. Trying new food. Shopping in vintage stores. What had started as a daily journal to chronicle my life in France, turned into viral video after viral video.
Suddenly, I had enough followers to qualify as a legitimate content creator.
Then came the stuff.
Loads and loads of stuff. Makeup, hair products, prepared meals, clothes, lingerie, shoes, handbags, jewelry. It didn’t end. I found myself reaching out to other content creators in Paris to learn how to manage it all. Eventually, I had to hire an agent to book actual paying advertisers.
Checks rolled in with more zeros then I’d ever felt possible.
So much, that I rented an apartment with original Herringbone wood floors, crown molding and a view of the Eiffel Tower (if one leaned way out over the balcony and craned one’s neck to the left.)
It all looked magical on social media.
There had only been one problem.
I’d been lonely as fuck.
Maybe that’s why I’d been such a sucker for Rene’s bullshit.
Hard stop!
“So the guy? Rene?” she said.
“Listen, if you’re going to tell me I’m an idiot for getting conned by him, I’ve already heard it. Like a million times. So…maybe, don’t?”
“He wasn’t even that hot.” One of the other girls from the pack chimed in. “I didn’t think.”
Yeah. He was. But it was nice for her to say that.
At first, my female and some of my male followers were obsessed with how hot Rene had been. Like that was the only thing that could be attractive about a man. They didn’t understand he’d been so fucking charming, and – on the surface – so fucking worldly. It had been like a fairy tale until it turned into a nightmare.
“You had to see him in person,” I said with a shrug.
“You really gave him, like, thousands of dollars?” Another girl asked.
“I really did.” I said. He maxed out my credit cards and left me in crippling debt. Me and ten other women around my age in Europe. All of us, just a bunch of dopes.
“I’m sorry,” the girl standing in front of me said. “That sucks.”
I laughed humorously.
These girls weren’t any different from me when I moved to Paris for my final semester of school. I thought I knew everything. And when my TikTok account went viral, I thought I was unstoppable. I was the girl from Calico Cove who’d had her heart broken and had recreated herself in college only to explode onto the world stage.
Except I was just me.
And now, I was going home with nothing.
Calico Cove
Nick
She was back.
Nora was back. She was fifty feet away and she might as well have been on the moon. The garage doors were open and my shop faced the town square where the Fall Festival was in full swing. Tents were up, food trucks abounded. Games were being played by the young and old of Calico Cove.
But I wasn’t seeing any of that.
My eyes were on a bench where someone I used to know was sitting alone eating a cupcake.
“You just going to stare at her, or are you going to say something?” Roy asked, hovering behind me.
“You need a new belt,” I said and grabbed a cloth on a nearby work bench to wipe my hands.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Fine. You need a new truck.” I turned away from Nora and the square because I couldn’t stand it anymore.
He grunted. “One more year.”
“You’ve been saying that for the last six years,” I pointed out. “Seriously, I don’t know how much longer I can hold this truck together.”
“One more year.”
There was no point in arguing with Roy once he made up his mind. If he thought there were two more miles left in the old lady he would make sure to drive those two miles. The guy had more silver in his hair than black, but he was still rawhide tough and as strong as two men.
“So?”
“So what?” I asked. “I’ll work up what you owe and send it to you. For now, you should be able to drive it out of here.”
“Not what I meant,” he jerked his head towards the open bay doors. The Fall Festival. And Nora all alone on that park bench. “She could use a friend right now. You used to be one.”
Used to.
Not anymore. Nora and I were strangers. We never made it back from that night.
These past few weeks, when everything was coming undone for her, it didn’t matter how many texts I sent. How many emails. How often I called. It was radio silence from her end.
“She made it very clear she does not want to talk to me.”
Every time I’d seen her, I’d tried to look into her eyes, see into her head. To know what she was thinking, feeling. But every time she froze me out. I used to be able to know what she was thinking by the way she held her shoulders. Or how she’d tuck her hair behind her ear.
These past six years, it’s like she’d been a locked box. There, in front of me, but never open.
But now, looking at her from fifty feet away – I could see everything. All the pain she tried to hide. The humiliation and the embarrassment.
“She’s been shaken,” Roy said, arms crossed over his chest as he stared out over the park. “Badly. I knew that TikTok thing would end badly.”
“My guess is, you still don’t even know what TikTok is.”
“I know it gave her a lot, but it took away even more.”
That was the truth.
It all happened by accident. She’d started an account – innocently enough. An American in Paris. It was her walking around Paris, studying abroad, trying new food, figuring out the Metro, being Nora. Which meant being irresistible and funny and charismatic. The world took notice.
Rene Tartempion took notice.
“Have they found him?” The last update from Roy was that both Interpol and the FBI were after him.
“No,” Roy said. “She’s so embarrassed she won’t even let us say his name in the house.”
That sounded like Nora.
“We should have gone over there and picked her up the second she realized what was happening,” Roy said and I nodded. I knew we shared the same dream. Getting our hands on that asshole.
“Do you think she…” I stopped myself, because it didn’t matter. Honest to God, it didn’t.
“What?”
“Do you think she loved him? Like for real?” I’d looked at pictures of that asshole and couldn’t even imagine her falling for someone so slick. So loud and flashy. The opposite of everything I was. Not that she ever seriously loved me. I’d been nothing more than an out of control crush.
“No,” Roy said. “I never heard it in her voice. Never when she talked about him. I think she got swept up by it all and paid for it.”
I didn’t know the number on how much Rene took her for, but I knew she had to sell basically anything of value she had to pay off her credit cards.
No doubt Roy’s reluctance to move on from his ancient truck had to do with bailing Nora out of trouble. He’d told me that Vanessa, who had access to her family inheritance, could have wiped out the debt completely, but Nora was adamant about fixing it on her own.
Which was why she was back in Calico Cove, living in her parents’ house, in the same bedroom where’d she grown up as a child.
Which was also why she was sitting alone on the bench, watching the festivities play out in front of her, when she’d always been the person to be right in the center of all the action.
She looked totally defeated.
I’d never seen her like this. Ever. Nora’s super strength was self-confidence. She had always known who she was. She’d known she was loved by her family. Adored by the town. There was nothing she couldn’t do, including picking up and moving to Paris, learning to speak the language fluently, going to school and then setting the world on fire.
Now her social media account was deleted, her followers gone. She’d sold off everything to pay off the debt that asshole got her into.
She was no longer on the world stage.
Just a resident of Calico Cove.
Maybe it was wrong or selfish, but I still thought this was the right place for her to be.
Paris be damned.
“She’s going to work on the boat with me,” Roy said.
I shook my head. “You know she can’t do that. She gets seasick.”
“She’ll never admit it.”
“Doesn’t make it not true.”
Roy grunted. “You should go talk to her. It’s the Fall Festival. Buy her a hot dog. Shake her out of her mood.”
“I think it goes a little deeper than that,” I told him.
“How would you know? You haven’t talked to her.”
It was meant to be a criticism. Roy knew his daughter was suffering and he wanted to circle the wagons around her. And he still considered me one of those wagons.
“I’ll talk to her,” I said. I didn’t know what good it would do. Not with how we were with one another now. But Roy was right. I had to try.
I could call her out for the bullshit of not answering a single text I’d sent. Ghosting me wasn’t going to make the shit happening in her life any less real. Besides, I could help her. I didn’t know exactly how, but if she’d just talk to me, I’d figure it out.
“You got your keys?” I asked Roy.
He grunted and showed me he had them in his hand. “Also, don’t forget about tomorrow.”
Right. He wanted me to look at the boat’s engine. “You know I’m better with cars than boats.”
“Engine’s an engine,” he said.
“Fine, but I make no promises,” I told him.
“First thing. I don’t dawdle in the morning.”
Inwardly, I groaned. First thing meant before sunrise. “I’ll be there.”
I wiped my hands as best I could before I tossed the grease rag aside and jogged across the street to Nora Barnes, the center of everything.
“Hey, squirt,” I said, just to see her wince.
“Nick,” she said, around a mouthful of chocolate cupcake.
“You okay?” I sat next to her on the bench. And even though there were inches between us, she still shifted away. We were magnets now flipped the wrong way – all I did was repel her.
“Yep.”
“I saw…” I started and stopped.
I saw you got hurt. I saw you fall for the wrong guy. I saw everyone on the planet calling you an idiot and I wanted to tell them all how un-fucking true it was.
“Nick. Let’s not recap.”
I nodded and folded my hands between my knees.
“I called,” I said. I’d been calling for years. Sometimes I’d get a thumb emoji back. Her only acknowledgement that I’d reached out.
For her birthday. My birthday. Last 4 th of July I sent her videos of the Calico Cove fireworks. I called her whenever I caught the dinner party episode of The Office, because once when we’d watched it together, she’d laughed so hard she’d farted and nearly lost her shit she was so embarrassed.
I’d called her right after that video she posted. The one that brought her whole world crashing down around her.
All alone in her bedroom, wild-eyed and scared. She’d looked like a disaster survivor.
Hey, everyone. I think…I think Rene is a thief. A con man. I think I’ve let a con man steal all my money. I don’t know what to do.
The plan had been for me and Roy to fly over to Paris and get her, but Nora called Roy off. She was adamant about settling what she could on her own before getting a flight home.
“I know,” she said.
“Texted a few hundred times too.” I didn’t have to say it. She had the texts in her phone. Most of them some variation of TALK. TO. ME.
“I know.”
This wasn’t working. She clearly didn’t want to talk to anyone, least of all me.
Maybe a little nostalgia might shake her out of it.
“You want to enter the three-legged race?” I pointed at the square where couples were pairing up to have their legs tied. “Show those rookies how it’s done?”
“Uh, hard pass,” she said disdainfully. I wasn’t sure if that attitude was for the race or for me. Probably me.
“We could-”
“Nick. Stop. Just…stop.”
I knew this wasn’t about me. Her life had fallen apart. But it had been six years, six years of being kept out of her life and she needed me. Her friend. Her best fucking friend. I knew it, Roy knew it. She had to know it.
“ Me ? Me stop? How about you stop!”
Her eyes got huge. “Me! What am I doing?”
I rubbed my hands through my hair, over my face. I wanted to strangle her. I wanted to pull her into my arms and tell her everything was going to be okay. But I could do none of that because of that stupid night. Because she’d crossed a line and I’d messed it up and she couldn’t even fucking look at me.
“Ignoring me! It’s been years, Nora. Years. Are we ever just going to get over it?”
“There’s nothing for you to get over.”
I couldn’t control my gasp of outrage. I sounded like Madame Za when she flipped over a good card for someone. Nothing for me to get over? She’d basically ignored me for six years.
“Fine, then you get over it,” I said sharply.
“Why do you even care?”
Didn’t she know I would always care?
“Because I fucking miss you, okay?” I stood, too agitated to sit. “We were friends. We were a part of each other’s lives, then you just cut me out-”
There was a ruckus over by the apple cider donuts stand. A crowd was forming. Phones were being lifted overhead so they could video whatever was happening.
Nora got to her feet like she might bolt and I put my hand on her elbow. Through her sweatshirt I could feel the tension in her body.
“Is it…” she stopped herself from saying his name but it was in the air between us. I knew for a long time she’d be looking over her shoulder for that guy. Just like it took me years to stop looking over my shoulder for my father.
“No,” I said.
“Can you see?” she asked, craning her neck. “Do you know?”
The crowd split and two men – two giant men – one wearing a plain black sweatshirt and Timberlands. The other one wearing a leather coat and a diamond fucking necklace walked right through the three-legged race course towards us.
People were staring, pointing. You would think everyone in town would have gotten used to them by now. They practically lived here.
“Is that the…the Locke brothers? What are the Locke brothers doing in Calico Cove?”
“How do you know The Locke Brothers?”
“Roy. And Will.”
Right. Hockey fans.
“Nick?” she said, tugging on the sleeve of my shirt. “Why are they walking towards us?”
“These guys do not give up,” I muttered.
“Do you know them?”
“If you weren’t ignoring my calls and texts I would have told you.”
“Told me what?”
I sighed. “I have brothers.”