Chapter 5
CHELSEA
Dr. Devereaux let the silence sit for a moment after that is not nothing, the way she always let things sit—not uncomfortably, but with the deliberate patience of someone who understood that the space after a sentence was where the real answer usually lived.
I looked at the plant.
"You said last week," she began, "that you came to Paris because you needed somewhere that didn't know what you were." She paused. "What are you?"
I smiled, the way I smiled when something caught me off guard and I needed a second. "That's rather the question, isn't it?"
"Humor is not an answer."
"No," I agreed. "It's a reflex."
She wrote something. I'd stopped trying to imagine what. Whatever she was transcribing bore no obvious relationship to what had just been said, or perhaps it bore every relationship and I simply couldn't see it.
"What did you want to be," she said, "when you were young?"
The question landed differently than I expected.
Not what do you want to do or what are your plans—the forward-facing version that Robert's circle asked at dinners, their eyes already moving to the next person before you'd finished answering.
This was backward. Smaller. A child in Kensington with a question nobody had thought to keep asking.
"I wanted to be a barrister," I said. "Until I was about twelve. I liked the wigs."
"And after twelve?"
"I stopped wanting things in that declarative way. You learn to—" I stopped.
"To what?"
"To want things that are available. Things that make sense given what your life looks like.
" I said it without self-pity, which was the only way I could stand to say it.
"Robert's world was very legible. There were things women like me did and things we didn't. Not enforced—nothing so crude as that. Just modelled. Everywhere. Constantly."
"Women like you," she repeated.
"Well-presented. Well-connected."
She let that one breathe.
"Tell me about your parents," she said.
I'd known it was coming. It came eventually, with everyone—the pivot toward the thing that happened when I was nine as though it were the key that unlocked all subsequent rooms. Maybe it was. I'd never found a clean way to discuss it.
"They died when I was nine," I said. "Car accident. M40. My mother was in the passenger seat. She was wearing a yellow scarf—I remember that specifically because I'd given it to her for her birthday and I felt, afterwards, some irrational—" I stopped again. "I felt responsible. Which is absurd."
"Is it?"
"I was nine. I didn't cause the accident."
"No," she said. "But nine-year-olds don't process causality the way adults do. They process proximity. They process I gave her the thing she was wearing and they feel implicated. That's not absurd. That's a child's mind doing the only thing it knows how to do with something too large for it."
The room was very quiet. Outside on the street, a car passed and then silence resettled.
"I didn't know I still thought about the scarf," I said, which was not quite true. I'd known. I simply hadn't said it to anyone.
"What was she like?"
"Warm," I said immediately. Then, because that was too simple and Dr. Devereaux's face invited more: "She laughed at things that weren't funny and somehow made them funny by laughing.
She read to me every night until the night before she died, which should have been too old for that, but neither of us wanted to stop.
" I paused. "She would have told me I was being an idiot.
About all of this. Gently but clearly. She had the gift of telling you difficult things without making you feel diminished by them. "
"Do you have anyone in your life now who does that?"
I thought about Thomas at the airport, pressing the car keys into my hand. Some days you'll want to go somewhere without explaining yourself. The implication underneath it—that he'd seen what I couldn't yet say and had quietly arranged for it.
"Obliquely," I said. "Not directly."
"Why not directly?"
"Because I'm better at—" I stopped.
She waited.
"Because I'm better at being the person who reads the room than being the person in it.
" The words came out more plainly than I'd meant them to, without the usual handling.
"I'm good at seeing what other people need.
I'm good at providing it. I've spent my entire adult life being the most comfortable person in a room and I've confused that with being known.
" I looked at my hands. "I'm not known by anyone. Not really."
Dr. Devereaux was very still.
"That's quite an admission," she said.
"Yes."
"How does it feel, saying it?"
"Dreadful," I said, and to my absolute horror my voice cracked on the word—just fractionally, just enough. I pressed my lips together and looked back at the plant and concentrated on its leaves, which were regular and unconcerned and asked nothing of anyone.
"Chelsea," she said, gently.
"I'm fine."
"You're allowed not to be."
"I'm aware of that," I said, and the sharpness in it was genuine. Real irritation, at myself, at the room, at being seen when you'd spent so long being invisible by design.
She gave me a moment. When she spoke again her voice was measured.
"I want to ask you something you may find uncomfortable."
"Most things in this room qualify."
"Are you in a relationship?"
"No."
"When were you last?"
I thought about Arthur, which I rarely allowed myself to do, not because it had ended badly but because it had ended so quietly—a long diminishment rather than a rupture.Two people who'd been pleasant to each other for two years and then been pleasant about stopping. "A while ago."
"What was it missing?"
I looked at her. "That's quite a question."
"You came here to find yourself. I'm trying to understand what version of yourself you've had access to, and what's been withheld." She held my gaze evenly. "Intimacy is not a peripheral topic."
I was quiet for a moment. The word intimacy sat in the room and did what it always did in rooms I was in—reminded me of the gap between my facility with closeness as a social register and my relationship with it as an actual lived thing.
"It was missing—" I started. Stopped. Started again.
"I've never been with someone who made me feel like I could be difficult.
Who wanted the version of me that wasn't managing everything.
I'm very good at being—" I caught the banned word before it arrived.
"—very good at being what a situation needs.
I'm good at that in bed as I am everywhere else.
I know how to be responsive. I know how to be present in a way that reads as genuine and is genuine in its way, but it's not—" I paused.
"It's not want. Not really. It's competence.
I'm competent at intimacy the way I'm competent at social events.
I've never quite lost my head over anyone. "
I hadn't said that before. Not aloud. Not even, really, to myself—not in those words, not that plainly.
"Does that frighten you?" she asked.
"It would be convenient if it didn't."
"Does it?"
"Yes," I said. "Quite a lot, actually." My voice was steady but only just. "I'm not sure I've ever wanted something badly enough to be frightened of not having it.
And I can't tell whether that's damage or just—me.
" I looked away. "I can't tell if I'm someone who doesn't feel things deeply or someone who's never let themselves find out. "
The room was very quiet.
"I think," Dr. Devereaux said, slowly, "that you already know the answer to that question."
Something moved in my chest. Not a pleasant sensation—more like pressure, the feeling of a room with too many people in it and not enough air.
"What makes you say that?”
"Because the women who don't feel things deeply," she said, "don't cry in my office about a yellow scarf."
I hadn't realised I was crying until she said it. Not weeping—nothing so dramatic. Just tears arriving without permission, quiet and uninvited, the way they sometimes did when something true got said too clearly for the usual defences to intercept it.
I pressed the back of my hand to my cheekbone. Looked at the ceiling. Breathed.
"I'm sorry," I said, which was absurd—apologising for crying in a therapist's office—and I knew it was absurd and said it, anyway.
"You don't need to—"
"I know I don't need to." I stood. The movement surprised me as much as it probably surprised her—my body making the decision before I'd processed it, the way bodies did when the mind was handling too many things at once and something had to give. "I'm sorry. I need—"
I picked up my bag. My coat from the chair.
"Chelsea, it's all right to—"
"I know it is," I said, and my voice was completely level, which cost me something. "I just need some air. I'm sorry—I'll—I'll rebook."
I left before she could respond, which was rude and I knew it was rude and I did it, anyway, because the alternative was sitting back down in that chair and I couldn't do it.
Not today. Not with the yellow scarf and the competent at intimacy and four months of runway and a blister on my heel and all of it sitting in the room together under Dr. Devereaux's patient, unflinching gaze.
Outside, the air was cool, and I was grateful for it.
I walked fast without direction, which was becoming a habit.
After three streets I pulled out my phone and called the first person I could think of who would answer and not ask me any questions that mattered.
A girl I'd met at one of the obligatory social events Robert's contacts had arranged—Séverine, French, effortlessly beautiful in the way of women who had stopped thinking about it, who moved through Paris like a native and found my Britishness amusing rather than alienating.
We'd had drinks twice. She was the closest thing I had to a friend in this city, which said something about the last few weeks that I was choosing not to examine.
She answered on the third ring. Oui, chérie. I said I needed a drink. She said she knew a bar in the Marais, come now, and I said yes, immediately, which made her laugh.
The bar was small and loud in the way of places that had been discovered and didn't especially enjoy it. Séverine was already there when I arrived, dark-haired, impeccably unbothered, a glass of something amber in her hand. She looked at my face and didn't comment, which was why I'd called her.
We drank. Two glasses, then a third. She talked about a man she was seeing—complicated, naturally, everything in Paris was complicated—and I listened and laughed in the right places and felt the session with Dr. Devereaux retreating to a manageable distance, which was the point.
Then a man appeared at the bar beside me.
Not Séverine's complication—someone new.
Tall, French, the kind of easy attractiveness that came from growing up somewhere that considered it a baseline expectation.
He looked at me in the direct way Parisian men looked at women they found interesting, without the English apologetic hedge around it.
Séverine caught my eye across the table and raised her glass a precise centimetre. A toast. A permission. A suggestion.
He bought the next round. We talked—his English was good, my French was less good but wine had improved my confidence if not my accuracy.
He was funny. Attentive. The conversation had a shape to it, the familiar architecture of something going somewhere, and I recognised it and followed it because it was easy and I was tired and I wanted, for an hour, to be someone for whom nothing was complicated.
We kissed outside the bar at some point. He was a good kisser. Séverine had disappeared with the tact of someone who understood exits.
He suggested we go somewhere.
I stood on the pavement in the cold and looked at him—his easy smile, his complete unconcernedness, the total absence of anything that frightened me—and felt something I hadn't anticipated.
Nothing.
Not virtue. Not caution. Just the flat nothingness of someone who has run toward a distraction and arrived to find it isn't one.
The chemistry was pleasant enough. He was pleasant enough.
And pleasant enough was exactly what Dr. Devereaux had been talking about, and I was standing outside a bar in the Marais enacting it in real time, which was almost funny except that it wasn't.
I've never quite lost my head over anyone.
I heard myself say it, in that office, in that chair. I heard what it had sounded like. What it had cost to say it.
"I'm sorry," I said, which was the second time I'd apologised unnecessarily to someone that day. "I don't think—I'm going to go home."
He took it well, because he didn't care enough not to. We said the gracious things and I walked to the end of the street and got into a taxi and gave the address of the apartment in the eighth.
The taxi smelled of someone else's evening—perfume, faintly, and the residual warmth of a city that had been running all day and was nowhere near stopping.
I sat in the back and looked out at Paris going past, and I thought about my mother's yellow scarf and the empty vase on the windowsill and the four months and the woman in the Tuileries photograph with her back to the camera.
Not weeping. Past that. Just tired, the way you got tired when you'd spent a whole day running from something that had simply waited for you to stop.
The driver asked me something in French.
"Pardon?" I said.
He gestured at the window—the city. Something about the evening. Something that might have been beautiful or might have been a question about the route.
I looked where he was pointing. The Seine, catching the light the way it always did—like it hadn't noticed the century, like it intended to be here long after the rest of us had sorted ourselves out.
"Oui," I said. Because it was. Whatever he'd meant, it was.
The taxi moved on. I settled back against the seat and let the city go past.
The apartment was dark and quiet when I let myself in. I didn't turn on the lamps. I sat in my corner of the sofa in my coat, which I hadn't taken off, and looked at the courtyard where the old wisteria grew up the wall and the occasional light moved.
I was going to be all right.
I didn't know that, exactly. But I thought it. And thinking it—quietly, without evidence, in the dark—felt like something. Small and stubborn, the way things were when they were real.
The vase on the windowsill was still empty.
Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow, I'd replace the flowers.