Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
T hanks to Emi’s text explaining the full origin and meaning of the expression, as it turns out, “ne peigne pas la girafe” is slang for “don’t do something unnecessary.”
What the hell does Estelle mean by that? For a culture that has no problem being blunt, her selective indirectness comes at the worst times. She obviously knows how much I’ve enjoyed writing Conseils . It’s part of what’s given me the glow she talked about. She lauded it herself.
And if she’s referencing Young Soarers, well... well, how dare she. A decade’s worth of meticulously written A-plus papers, dream boards plastered with the Continental Air logo, and a killer interview record would have another thing to say.
Fortunately, I have all day to ruminate on it, given that I’m dropping the kids off with Angela at Le Negresco, Nice’s finest waterfront hotel. Considering its castle-like exterior waving French flags from the green tin rooftops, I’d expect nothing less from a place on Angela’s go-to brunch list.
Angela sees us before we see her. We share a quick, cordial greeting and goodbye. The briskness of our exchange amuses me. I’m rather proud that I’ve come this far, not going to jelly-legs in her presence, especially after our little confrontation the other morning.
As I turn to go, Angela calls my name. “Enjoy some alone time, hmm?”
Can’t imagine what she’s insinuating. I suppress an eye roll. Now with the rest of the day wide open, Emi and I agree to rendezvous downtown. The sunshine coats my neck as I navigate through Nice, around sunscreen-covered tourists making beelines for the salt water and the leisurely-walking locals on their way to pick up loaves of bread or wedges of cheese at the Cours Saleya market.
My unencumbered strides are only temporary. Satiated café-goers swing open a bistro’s door, and an herbal aroma occupies my entire sense of smell and stops me in my tracks. Almost instinctively, some commotion simmers through my body, making me feel ravenous. And it isn’t just hunger for food. The calendar taunts me. Aunt Flo’s monthly visit is coming up. It explains the dream from the other night and why my hormones are blitzed up to eleven.
Seriously, imagine that. I’ve never kissed a guy beyond a few pecks, but I can fantasize like I know exactly what I’m doing.
I cast off the persistent feelings ensuing down there .
But doing my best to force those feelings away has minimal power against the romanticism baked into these French streets. On my way to meet Emi at the bistro with the best café au laits in town, an adjacent window display debuting a new lingerie line seizes my attention.
The mannequins, of various heights and sizes, boast lacy bra and underwear sets. The cherry blossom pink and jet-black colors are enticing, but my eyes settle on the scarlet red. I inhale deeply, realizing I haven’t taken a full breath in a minute. I bite my lower lip, pulling my shades down my face.
“Looking for something in particular?”
I want to run, but not a muscle moves as panic glues every cell in my body together.
It’s Emi. She examines the display with me. My shoulders at my ears, I shake my head.
“Pretty,” she says. “Wanna go in?”
“Oh, n-n-no. I was just looking. Come on, let’s get some coffee.” I take a few steps down the sidewalk before checking over my shoulder. Emi doesn’t try to hide her smirk.
“So,” she says. “You guys making plans?” She wiggles her brows lewdly.
“What. No. What do you mean? No.”
“Okay,” Emi says, lifting her palms. “Just asking.”
“Why would we, why would you think we would?—”
“Kat, you’ve spent weeks writing this guy letters. I just figured you were gearing up for a bit of physical touch.”
An internal sigh cascades through me. Damien. She’s talking about Damien. My pent-up nerves manifest in a relieving chuckle. “No, no. Not yet anyway.”
“Oh?” Emi’s grin returns.
As much as I want to share, I don’t think it’d be right for me to air what Jamie had told me in confidence—how Damien was looking to poach all the shops in èze for commercial investment properties. But it happens to be the reason that’s detained me from responding to his latest letter. I want there to be another side that I’m missing that’d remedy his character. It’s gut-wrenching to question whether he’s the guy I thought he was. Especially now that I’ve already pictured what names we’d pick for our imaginary kids. I have a knee-jerk habit of doing that with every guy that tosses me a pickup line.
I crack a sheepish smile. “He’s coming back from the last leg of the cruise in a few weeks. We’ll see then.”
“Didn’t he ask you out?”
I shrug. “I haven’t responded.”
Emi does a poor job at hiding her confusion. It doesn’t help the thoughts pouring through my mind either. The spark I get in those letters, it’s indescribable. I can tell he’s really reading my words. He’s listening to me, assuaging my initial doubts about Conseils , championing me in every pursuit. But the picture Jamie illustrates of Damien, in the business and personal arenas, leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Jamie said it himself. That I’m not the first girl to fall under Damien’s spell. A pang in my stomach forms as I consider that there may be someone else in the picture.
Ugh, but what does Jamie know, really? Sure, maybe Damien has had flings in the past. I mean who could resist that Mediterranean masterpiece of a man? Besides, all Jamie can assess is the exterior Damien presents to the world. But through our letters, I know his inner world. Jamie’s judgments can bite me.
The business-poaching, however, is a point I’ll have to investigate. There’s got to be another angle to that story.
Emi and I take our seats at an outdoor table under the shade of an umbrella and order our coffees.
I tilt my head, sipping the foam off my drink. From the impromptu Chessley outing to the Michelin inspector fiasco, I’ve been a bit delayed in penning Damien. If Emi hadn’t mentioned the letters, I probably would have pushed it off further, but that wouldn’t be fair to him. I make a mental note to write it tonight.
The waiter brings a few napoleons to the table. They’re almost too pretty to eat, with sandwiched layers of pastry and cream and immaculate feathering of pink and white chocolate icing on top. Emi leans forward and whispers.
“These are Jamie’s. The Vigne is selling his stuff all over town. The cafés and restaurants. They can’t get enough. Must be that write-up you put in the last Conseils publication.”
My mind flashes to the past few weeks. His hand on my lower back, the meal we enjoyed on the terrace, his help with the magazine. Combined with the hormonal symphony taking place in my body, the memories are aphrodisiacs.
Emi’s fork crunches through the flaky, buttery pastry, sending the layers of cream oozing to the sides. A warmth below my waist amplifies. To keep myself from sighing, I grab the water glass coated in condensation and guzzle down the cool drink.
I am not throwing away what I have with Damien because I’m starting to get the hots for someone else. And I am not throwing away my au pair job or my chance at becoming a Young Soarer because I couldn’t keep my hands off the family’s oldest.
When we finish our coffees, Emi tosses down a few euros and stands proudly.
“Kat, allons-y,” she announces.
“Where are we going?”
Emi tosses both palms up toward her shoulders. “It’s journée des filles !”
Girls’ day.
“Come on.” Emi waves her arm. “When’s the last time we’ve had a full day where neither of us needs to work? Do you have any writing left for this week’s Conseils ?”
I shake my head.
“And you are off duty with the kids for the rest of the day, so...”
“Girls’ day it is,” I say with a smile. Emi claps and bounces down the sidewalk, tossing ideas around. Spa? Kayaking? Horseback riding tour in the lush mountain trails?
“Ah, I’ve got it,” Emi says, halting on the sidewalk. A group of passersby nearly stumble right into Emi in her enlightened moment. She doesn’t seem to mind, though, taking me by the elbow and exclaiming “Saint-Tropez!”
A smile spreads across my face, and a sense of urgency jolts through my voice. Maybe it’s the caffeine. It’s one of those places I’ve had in mind ever since I heard it in that Taylor Swift song. “How do we get there? Train? Ferry?”
Emi winks and pulls out a set of keys from her purse, dangling them in front of my face. Then I remember, it’s Monday, also known as Antoine’s day off from Ubering, which means Emi has free rein of the family’s Porsche. I couldn’t think of a better way to navigate our girls’ day in style.
Emi clicks the key fob, directing my attention twenty feet down the street. The soft beep-beep of the unlocking car and a flash of its headlights bring me back to the moment I stepped out of the Nice airport that early June day. While the car is pretty much the same, I feel completely different. Think of all the emotions, embarrassments, and wins I’ve endured in eight weeks. At first glance, someone might say Europe was changing me, that France was changing me, but I say France is finding me. It’s putting opportunity on a silver platter and saying do what you will.
And I’ve seized every opportunity flung my way in order to be a better Young Soarers applicant. Now I feel like my dream is finally within reach, a reality not too far off. And it’ll be out of my hands once I send in the application next week.
The doors thump shut, and Emi scrolls through her playlist on the dashboard screen.
“Harry Styles?”
“Of course,” I say.
We roll the windows down and fall into our own real-life music video, floating our palms in the breezy sea air, our hair flying in all directions as we laugh.
And an entire album of songs later with a pit stop at a fancy gas station for some quick-fix bathing suits and towels, we round a mountainside road. Ahead sits Saint-Tropez at the end of a small peninsula jutting into the coast.
This part of the Riviera boasts a softer pastel color palette than the vibrancy of its neighboring towns. Striped awnings outstretched over cafés and pop-up markets characterize the historic heart of Saint-Tropez. Its coral and dandelion plaster exteriors exude the same toned-down brightness found in Nice. These buildings have braced oceanside conditions for decades, yet share a modernized charm, evolving with the times. The streets are abuzz with locals selling fresh produce and with tourists flocking to the harbor dotted with sleek sailboats and yachts carrying rowdy partiers. A number of people stroll through soap shops or savor a treat at crêperies. In the distance, I can just make out the towering villas on the outskirts of town, where the infamous glitzy and glamorous residents live.
We take a detour through the peninsula, ascending rolling green hills that give way to verdant fields peppered with lush vegetation and tall, fluffy trees two shades darker than the grass beneath them. At times, there’s only a two-foot-tall brown stone wall separating our car from the steep descents on the left. Feeling slightly squeamish about the drop beyond the wall, I glance in the wing mirror, taking notice of an obsidian-black car with shaded windows. I keep my eyes on it as our car continues to follow the curves of the road. Emi glances in the rearview mirror every so often, but only to check that her mascara hasn’t smeared over her eyelid.
“What beach are we going to exactly?” I ask Emi, wondering if she maybe got lost with her directions from memory.
Emi snickers through her nose. “So impatient, Minou. Sometimes I forget you’re Américaine.”
I retort with a smirk, and she points to a stack of signs standing in the shade of full oak trees. Four white rectangles, short and wide and outlined in blue, point in different directions. Emi reads the top one. “Pampelonne.”
The car trailing ours turns down a side road, releasing the tension knotting through my upper back. But after my last conversation with Angela, I wouldn’t put it past her to send a tracker two hours down the coast to make sure I’m not secretly meeting up with Jamie. She must really think I could do some damage to that family dynamic. More than that, she must really miss her son.
Within ten minutes, Emi parks the car, and we find ourselves sitting oceanside at one of the most precious open-air cafés I’ve ever been in. On the nearly white sand beach, some guests drape themselves over cushioned lounge chairs. Others, like Emi and me, take a rest by the bar, where neatly set tables with pin-striped padded wicker chairs host hungry beachgoers. Wooden columns support a rustic pallet ceiling that still allows a few sunrays to peek through the slits.
The hypnotic turquoise waters beckon our attention. The sea on this side of the peninsula looks like a blue topaz crystal.
When a waiter approaches our table, Emi surveys the wine list.
“Une bouteille de Champagne Rosé,” she says to him.
“Mo?t et Chandon?” he asks to confirm. With Emi’s nod of approval, he smiles generously, fills our glasses with sparkling water, and trots back to the bar.
I lean forward. “A bottle?”
Emi sips her water and swats a hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll order another.”
Something between a laugh and a scoff forms in my throat. “It’s not even noon, Em.”
“It’s girls’ day!” Emi reminds me.
As we gorge on truffle fries, burrata with fresh tomatoes, tuna tartare, and dressed salad greens, Emi eyes me curiously.
“So, Minou,” she says. “You will be coming back next summer, yes?”
I swirl the rosé and trace the glass’s condensation with my finger. “I, um, I don’t know. I’ll have to see what my schedule looks like.”
“Do you not get to travel as a Young Soarer? That seems contre-intuitif.”
I don’t answer and pile in another mouthful of peppery arugula.
“Minou, what will you do when the program is over?”
“That’s if I get in, Em.”
“Okay, if you get in. What do you do when it ends?”
My lacy sun cover-up starts to itch my shoulders. A bit more at ease to answer with the bubbly flowing in my bloodstream, I reveal my plans to level up to travel writer for Continental before experimenting in bringing my own creative projects to life. Like that study abroad memoir. Or a documentary on the Riviera.
“Why wait?” she says, twirling her fishtail braid.
I pause my chewing. A few breathy sighs come out before any meaningful words form on my tongue. “Why does everyone think it’s so simple?”
“Isn’t it?”
“How so?” I press. “I can’t just walk into Continental and say here I am, pay me millions to traipse around the world.”
“I mean,” she starts, watching me take a long sip of wine. “What’s stopping you from your own projects?”
I cast my gaze to the sea. “Because it’s not as black and white as you think. I don’t know the how part yet, so that’s what I’m using the next few years to figure out.”
“Isn’t that part of the fun though? Trying?”
“Fun isn’t always stable.”
Emi pushes back, leaning her forearms on the tablecloth. “Life isn’t meant to be stable, Minou. It’s an evolution.”
“Since you’re so passionate about my career, I have to ask, have you told your mom about teaching in Paris?”
Emi swats her hand. “C’est sans importance. I’m working on it.”
I breathe out, not realizing I’d been holding the air in my lungs. I meet Emi’s eyes. They’re gentle, reassuring me of her kind intentions and her instinctive ability to read me with ease despite our rather young friendship. I take another breath and smile weakly at her, though tingles still rush from my fingertips to my toes.
Then, I see him . Or at least, I think it’s him.
I sit forward abruptly, nearly spilling my glass of rosé on to my plate of fish and fries.
Damien. What the hell is he doing here?
Walking down the wooden boardwalk connecting a strip of beach bars to each other, a group of twenty-somethings mosey from one joint to another. In the middle of the pack, I could’ve sworn I saw Damien’s clean-cut dark hair and deep olive skin. But the group moved so quickly down the path that they were out of sight as soon as they came into view.
Emi couldn’t make him out either.
“Probably some Italian,” she says to assure me, but it’s too late. The arches of my feet have already soaked my flip-flops in sweat.
This is silly. Damien’s sailing around the Amalfi Coast, not meandering about the French Riviera. Come on, Kat. Get it together.
Emi begs to hit the shops in the beachy village and to grab something sweet. The rosé’s buzz makes me compliant. We intertwine our elbows as we head into the town of Ramatuelle. There’s something about the salty air kissing my bare neck, the simplicity of the pale stone buildings drenched in sunlight and vines, and the increasing silence as we head deeper into the winding streets, that eases my thoughts. Or maybe it’s the three glasses of rosé champagne.
I don’t have the patience to filter myself, and I wouldn’t have it any other way right now.
Emi pokes at me about my increasing flirtation with my beau. I wave her off saying it’s nothing and insist that we grab whatever the heck smells so good out of the bakery up ahead. Through the glass, I spot shelves well stocked with baguettes, a rainbow of macarons, lemon tarts, layered rectangular cakes, and delicate palmiers.
“Deux feuilletés à la pomme,” I say, pointing out two circles of flaky pastries topped with caramelized apples.
The baker, with his paper bag at the ready, asks if we want anything else. He even suggests trying it with a café au lait.
I respond enthusiastically with, “Eh bien, si vous le recommandez, bien s?r!”
Emi raises her brow at me and gives me a little clap. Normally, if I completely botch my French and the person knows English, they’ll switch without asking—to practice themselves. But this boulanger nods and pours two coffees followed by hefty splashes of fresh dairy milk.
Part of me wishes I had my camera with me to capture these precious moments, but I resolve to blink hard and make a mental note to remember all the sensations going through me this afternoon. We take our culinary treasures down the streets, and Emi compliments me on my linguistic progress.
“I’ve never seen you so sur de soi,” Emi says, taking a bite of apple tart. “C’est très sexy.”
I shrug and toss in a chuckle. “I don’t know. There’s something about France that makes me feel so much more like a woman.”
“Minou, you’re almost twenty-three. I think you’ve been a woman for a few years now,” Emi says, nudging my elbow.
“Yet somehow, I still haven’t slept with anyone.” I know she wasn’t even going there, but I couldn’t help myself. Drunk words, sober thoughts.
“And what does that have to do with anything, hmm?” she asks. Emi tosses her paper wrapper and empty cup into a trash bin. “à mon avis, having sex doesn’t make you a woman. What makes you a woman is your confidence, your spirit, and your compassion.” She offers me a comforting smile. “Besides, sleeping with someone doesn’t give you sexual prowess. You already have it. Just rock it.”
Emi casts me a gentle smile, and an internal heat churns through almost every cell in my body, like something’s awakening.
We continue our stroll through town, and a storefront’s plum-purple window frames catch both our eyes. Emi’s drawn immediately to the outdoor display of children’s books neatly arranged on a table. Some stories I recognize like Ferdinand and Madeline .
“Don’t you love this smell?” she says, lifting one binding below her nose. Her eyelids press together, and I can imagine what she’s picturing. A bookshelf full of stories like these nestled around desks and tiny chairs and a humongous rug where she can read to all the students.
My gaze wanders to the next table over. The stacks of books on sale are categorized by topic. Jardinage. Cuisine. La navigation à voile. Gardening. Cooking. Sailing.
I brush over to the index card labeled Philosophy, and that’s when I see it. Tucked beneath a stack of Greek volumes, a hardbound leather book with gilded engravings sits unassumingly. I tilt my head, reading the title from the philosopher Epictetus. Also known as Jamie’s free-thinking ancient hero. He couldn’t stop gushing about him after we visited an ancient ruins site a few towns away from èze, close to the Italian border.
And now The Art of Living sits before me in a rare trilingual edition. I grab it as if it were the last discounted television at a Black Friday sale and pull it close to my chest. I’m glad I did, because now that it’s past the afternoon snooze session, the streets have become a bit more populated.
Examining the copy, a few inches of its binding are scraggly looking, but the rest is in good shape. I flick through the pages, scanning the tightly printed font and whiffing the tobacco baked into the pages after years of sitting on the shelves of a pipe smoker. The bookshop owner sits inside, dutifully reorganizing haphazard piles of old newspapers, maps, and vintage magazines. Given his hunched back and thin frame, my guess is that he’s been doing it for years.
Emi points at the Epictetus book snug in my elbow’s grasp. “Light reading?”
“It’s not for me.”
“Ah, for your beau then,” Emi says, resuming her perusing.
I roll my eyes playfully. “Jamie is not my beau.”
Emi’s dropped jaw swaps places with her grin. “Jamie?”
Oh God. I feel the color drain from my face. Damn rosé!
Emi steps closer. “You and Jamie?” She raises her brow.
I shake my head and wave my hands out aggressively. “No, no, nothing’s happened. Nothing will happen. I just saw this and thought he’d like it.” I drop the Epictetus copy on the table.
Emi’s playful grin returns as she pulls her sunglasses down. “Okay, if you say so.”
“There’s no way he likes me,” I resolve, poking at a few gardening pamphlets.
“Uh-huh. Oui,” Emi says unconvincingly. My cheeks are beet red I’m sure.
“Who doesn’t like who?” a voice behind us rings out. I turn and see the uber-fashionable Vivian nearing us in the street. The sun dances over her silky black braids as she struts across the bricks in a sunshine-yellow bikini peeking out from her lacy cover-up.
She points our way. “Kat. Emi. Bonjour! ?a va?”
My body casually leans in for the obligatory hug and cheek kisses, but my mind is in full-on panic mode, deliberating how much she might have overheard.
“Kat,” she says, clasping my elbow.
Oh God, she’s probably going to yank my arm out of my socket.
“Un petit amour d’été?” she presses with a grin.
Summer romance. Yeah, something like that. While a love as passionate as Danny and Sandy’s has been on my bucket list since I first watched Grease in seventh grade, I didn’t exactly plan for Jamie and my stop-and-go relationship this summer. It sort of just happened. And I most certainly can’t let Vivian know that there’s any relationship at all. In fact, there isn’t. Feelings, emotions, impulses. That’s not a relationship. Still, she doesn’t need to know any of it. So I shake my head bashfully until Emi pipes in.
“What do you mean, Minou?” she says, tilting her head at me.
I try to use my eyes to beg her not to spill what little she’s heard me talk about it. But she doesn’t even bring him up.
“Damien,” she says as if I lost my brain.
“Oh, right, yes. Oui.” I hope the breathiness in my voice doesn’t give the impression that I forgot.
Vivian turns away from us and focuses on the spread of magazines. “Ah, Damien. Right. And, um, how is he?”
“Still drop-dead gorgeous,” Emi adds in, alleviating my silence.
Vivian quickly exhales through her nose and offers me a tight, closed-mouth grin. “I bet... Well, I’m glad at least someone’s got a bit of romance going on.” She sighs, leaning into her right hip and flipping through an issue of Vogue from the ’70s.
“Guy troubles?” Emi asks Vivian. I gulp, awaiting her response.
“And girls,” Vivian says. “Maybe it’s the universe telling me to take a break.” Vivian slaps the cover on her magazine shut. “There was this one guy from last summer. I was head over heels for him. We had an amazing night together by the beach where he said he loved me.” She briefly shuts her eyes and bites her lower lip, soaking in the memory. “But the connard ghosted me two days later, and I haven’t heard a word from him since. Guess he moved on.”
Surely she would’ve name-dropped Jamie if it was him. Right?
“Ugh, men,” Emi says, shaking her head.
“Not all of them are like that,” Vivian says. “I know a few good ones.”
My voice cracks as I mutter, “Like Jamie.”
“Exactement,” Vivian agrees, therefore verifying the mystery man who dumped her isn’t my British-French side crush.
Emi bites her tongue from saying something.
“He’s the best brother I’ve never had,” Vivian says, sighing and slumping her hip.
Brother! She thinks of him as a brother.
Emi catches my bugged eyes and prods Vivian for me. “Oh, so you and Jamie never...”
“Jamie et moi?” Vivian nearly tears up chuckling. “No. Never. Jamais.”
It’s moments like these that I realize the stories in my mind, when unchecked, can run wild and rampant. And thankfully, Vivian corrects my extrapolation that just because she and Jamie are undeniably attractive people, they’re not exactly into each other as I had assumed.
I watch her check her phone. She answers with impressive speed, not needing to reread her message or manicure her words.
“Désolée,” she says, putting her phone away.
“Work?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I never answer when I’m off the clock. Unless it’s an emergency.”
“Wow. That takes discipline.” I think of my own lack of boundaries when it comes to work and play, a.k.a. the Young Soarers application that’s been by my side all summer.
“Don’t get me wrong, though, it’s tempting to answer after hours, but why waste your twenties burning yourself out for a title that you might not even want in five years. I learned that from experience.”
I examine Vivian’s sweat-glistened forehead. There are the faintest of crease-lines decorating her temples. I’d painted her as this untouchable idol, and now the veneer is wearing off.
“I need a speed course in work-life balance, the French way,” I confess with a grin.
“Happy to grab some café with you anytime if you want some tips,” Vivian offers.
A smile burgeons across my lips, and a warmth burrows in my stomach. “I’d love that.”
A car beeps behind us. Four people squashed into a compact shout for Vivian to join them. She gives them a wave and yells back, “J’arrive!”
Emi and I salute her with la bise, and in thirty seconds, she’s packed into the little car and speeding off down the bumpy road with her friends.
My shoulders loosen, and I heave out a deep sigh, but the relief only lasts a few seconds. When the group’s car is about to turn the corner, the taxi behind them snatches my attention. Someone props a camera lens in the taxi’s rear windshield and aims it straight at me.
Oh no. No, no, no!
I knew it. I knew Angela sent one of her spies to tail me even on my day off! And I’m so flippin’ sick of it! What makes her think this is at all okay? It’s an invasion of privacy. And I’m over it!
My jaw and fists clench simultaneously as I fume with ire. Snatching our paper bag from the bakery, I bolt down the uneven cobblestones toward the taxi slowing at a stop sign.
I dig my hands in the crumpled bag and scoop up a handful of sandwiched macarons, chucking them right at the car. Emi’s shouts echo behind me as I get closer to the vehicle. I can’t make out the photographer. They’ve snugged a baseball cap over their head and hidden their face behind the camera.
“Take all the damn pictures you want!”
Angela will love these shots. A sweat-drenched, lobster-red American with too much vino in her system to have any aim.
“Enjoy!”
I pitch a chocolate macaron right at the taxi’s side view mirror, the ganache staining the glass. A plummeting feeling makes my stomach feel about twenty pounds heavier. The car slows down for a moment, and I hope to goodness I didn’t just piss off the driver. Then again, I’d like to confront the photographer and give them a piece of my mind.
The taxi with the spy speeds off down a side street. Emi runs up to me. Catching my breath, I sheepishly hold up the empty paper bag sticking to my wet palm before divulging my suspicions about being watched all summer.
“It’s just driving me nuts! Why does she care so much?” I vent.
“You’ve run wild with the idea. Literally! My aunt wouldn’t do something like that,” Emi insists.
As the wine wears off and the sun wanes across the sky, Emi and I pack the Porsche with our bookstore goodies and the second bag of macarons from the boulangerie before taking the sober drive back to èze. Word of advice: chasing a detective while slightly buzzed and on the verge of dehydration, not a good look.
We pass through highway tunnels carved through the mountain arches. Eventually, the terra-cotta tops of Nice peek out from the rugged terrain to the right of the road. The speed limit ticks down as we approach town. Blue road signs for èze pop up on our route, but I make a special request to take the exit ramp down toward the Matisse museum.
Emi complies but kindly asks for a reason.
“I want to show you something,” I say.
A few miles down from the neatly trimmed hedges and topiaries surrounding the stately reddish-orange museum, a sparsely populated street looks almost abandoned. Not one car is parked alongside the stretch of stone buildings, despite the small but vibrant green field at the top of the street. It’s perfect for a picnic or an outdoor reading session.
I point out a building toward the end of the lane and request Emi to park in front. She eyes me curiously as she follows me out of the car toward the window plastered with renovation papers. The flier taped to the front door catches Emi’s attention, as I had hoped.
“Estelle told me that one of the gallery docents is starting a primary school. And she’ll be needing teachers. Like you.” I nudge Emi, whose face is awash in surprise, angst, and fear.
She examines the flier intently, crossing her arms and biting the inside of her cheek. But her eyes turn cold and any flutter of excitement dissolves from her body as her nostrils flare and her lips purse.
“Ce n’est pas ton problème. Occupe-toi de tes oignons.”
“But Emi...”
Emi storms back to the car and shuts the door. Fortunately, yet unfortunately, I know the expression take care of your onions. It’s the nice way of saying, “Kat, keep your nose out of my damn business.”
“I have to get back to the Cave,” she says out the window, pulling her sunglasses over her eyes. I scurry toward the car, but she puts it in drive and tosses my bag at me. “Angela’s probably waiting for you in town. And Kat. Don’t try to fix my life when you have plenty of work to do on your own.”
In an instant, our day of intoxicated bliss morphs to shaky, crumbling ground. Emi revs the engine and flies down the street, the wind sweeping up my hair in all directions. No one is around for blocks, but I keep the tangled curls in front of my face, masking the tears threatening my dry eyes.