Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
One month passes . Then two more.
I go from crushed to furious to something more like banked coals waiting for reason to blaze. It feels as carbonated as that champagne, but painfully so. It’s wedged under my ribs in that misshapen place that isn’t mine anymore.
A heart that only beats for a man who was never here, not really.
It hurts.
That’s the long and the short of it. It hurts.
I never wanted to hurt you, he said.
On that night I was mad enough to think nothing ever could if only he touched me.
Sometimes I think it would be easier if he’d left me to perform a bedraggled walk of shame all the way across the South of France—diamond-studded mask still welded to my face to make it that much more embarrassing—but he thought about that. He planned for that.
And I can’t decide if he did it because he’s simply that conscientious, or because he didn’t want me tracking down that villa and pounding on the door.
Sometimes I just get caught up in the fact that he thought it through, and I can’t decide if that means I imagined the whole part where we found each other in that cottage… or if he was playing me all along.
I’ll never know, because when I finally emerged from the bedroom of the cottage, the woman who dressed me the night before was there in the living room with that same iron smile welded to her face.
I don’t mean to rush you, madam, she said in that soothing voice of hers that talked me into dressing up in the first place. But we will need to get you to the plane sooner rather than later.
And then, as I stood there, dumbfounded while wearing last night’s dress haphazardly, she’d taken charge.
She turned on the water in the bath, all but herding me in to take a shower.
When I came out, squeaky clean in a body that didn’t feel at all like mine, every remnant of the night before was gone.
When I looked in the mirror there were no goddesses looking back, it was only me.
The me without him, and that felt like grief.
When I wrapped a towel around me and walked out into the bedroom, the bed was made and looked as if it had never been touched. The dress and shoes and mask were gone. She had even laid out clothes for me on the bed.
My clothes that I’d last seen in a dressing room in a different villa.
Is this a cottage of requirement? I asked her dryly when I dressed and tried to make myself feel anything but the pain in my chest and the absence of a man who’d never existed.
This is not a place that anyone can access without an invitation, she replied, with that cool gaze of hers.
But it’s part of the villa where the party was last night.
I watched her face, but it was smooth and gave away nothing. It is considered a part of the estate but I believe that technically, it belongs to a previous owner of the property and can only be used with that owner’s permission.
But— I began.
Madam. Her voice was as impenetrable as her expression. The plane.
And it was my intention to stay awake the whole flight home and pepper the crew with incisive questions before conducting an in-depth investigation of all the parts of the plane I didn’t see before, but the events of the night before caught up with me, and I slept.
Deeply.
Then, like a terrible magic, I was back in New York as if nothing had happened.
Back in my life, where I realized after only a few days, that he was not going to appear again. He was well and truly gone.
He had done exactly what he’d told me he would. He’d assumed the Luc Garnier persona, held it for a short while, and then disappeared.
I wonder if he found that woman. I wonder who she is to him. I wonder if she was worth all of this. If finding her was worth burning so bright and then leaving all that flame to sputter out and die.
I wonder how I let this all happen in the first place.
How I let him hurt me when no one ever has, not since I left my childhood home behind.
I should have leaped into action immediately, the moment I got back to New York, but I didn’t.
It was almost like I wanted to sit with that night. Hold on to it for a while before I forced myself into unraveling the mystery.
Because part of the mystery was why I’d fallen so hard for him when I knew he was nothing but a lie.
Tomorrow, I kept telling myself.
I would start tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.
In the meantime, I took myself to the office each day. I performed for Tess and all of my existing clients. Hints of Luc Garnier were sprinkled all over the papers, tales of sightings and rumors of his many glorious deeds, fueling a surge of new clients.
I didn’t have anything to do with it, which meant he had. He must have.
I had to sit with that.
I didn’t only sit with it. I felt it. And I didn’t like feelings, so I decided the best thing to do was to eat mine.
I dedicated myself to finding the perfect treats. But what I thought about was him.
The calls kept coming as time went on. Tess and I talked very seriously about hiring another investigator, and began taking interviews to find someone who fit. I should have been jubilant that this dream of mine was going so well that it was hitting new milestones… But I wasn’t.
It was like I couldn’t feel anything unless it was a sugar rush.
I became fixated on toast. I had my job to perform and this lovely little life that I built, and sugar and toast could not keep things running the way they should.
I had to throw myself into my role the way I’d always done, and I did, but that meant that it was only at home that I could face the things that were really bothering me.
Like, say, the fact that I had sex for the first time in my life with a man who didn’t exist.
And who had abandoned me without a backward look the morning after anyway.
More time passes than I like to admit to myself before I shake that off.
Well. I don’t shake it off, exactly. But I stop spending my time aimlessly doomscrolling on social media.
I stop staring at the ceiling in my apartment when I should be sleeping.
I become deeply revolted with toast and crave burritos from a particular restaurant across the city from my apartment, and make sure I get at least one a day. Usually more.
Plus there’s a chocolate peanut butter truffle situation. Don’t ask. They taste like love should feel.
It’s going on four months by the time I stop moping and do the only thing I know how to do.
Solve the damn mystery. Or try.
I have the name he left behind, and part of it is the name he gave me. This makes me think that it might actually be a real lead so I throw everything I have into figuring out who this woman is. Or was.
In between my other jobs, I dig. Late at night in my apartment, I hunt through records and trace faint hints.
I build a picture—well, not a picture. A sketch at best.
Amara Mariana Vizcaya existed. She was real.
It’s amazing how relieved I am when I discover that.
Like it makes up for the whole man I slept with who…
maybe isn’t real at all no matter what he calls herself.
She was a servant, originally from Basque Country, who left a great house in Spain some three decades ago.
She entered the United States on a tourist visa in New York City, and like many, promptly disappeared.
I can find nothing in any US papers to tell me why she should be of interest to anyone. Much less of such interest that a man like him had gone to the trouble of assuming a fictional identity just to find her.
Assuming that’s what he was doing.
I’m thinking about this one morning while sitting in my little cave of an office, wishing I hadn’t let Tess talk me into breakfast sandwiches—that beloved New Jersey staple, a Taylor ham, egg, and cheese on a Kaiser roll—shortly after we arrived at work.
It isn’t sitting well with me, but then, I’m convinced that might simply be more of the same temper that’s been gripping me since I flew back from France, because I’m fairly certain I’ve had indigestion ever since.
Four and a half months and counting.
I rub my belly—which, I can admit, is a lot thicker after months of eating my feelings around the clock—and glare at the screen in front of me.
The truth is, I don’t actually know what he was doing here.
He told me he was looking for this woman, and something in me really wants to believe that’s true, but I don’t know that it is.
Or even if that was what he was doing. Or what reasons he had for doing anything.
Including all the things he did that night—
“You really have to stop thinking about that,” I mutter to myself.
I never wanted to hurt you, I hear him say again and again in my head.
I researched that law firm in Nice and identified the people who worked there months back. Several attorneys and a fair number of support staff, I believe. I remember that now and check the clock, pleased to see it’s only four o’clock in the afternoon over in France.
I look at the remains of my breakfast and feel gross. I feel thick and strange, the way I have for months now. I decide only answers will save me, so I call one of the lower-level assistants and lay a breathless sob story all over her. Complete with vocal fry.
“I know this is outrageous,” I say in the kind of broad American accent that makes every French person I have ever met roll their eyes, especially after no attempt at all at French, “but my boss gave me a list of tasks and I thought I wrote them down exactly as they needed to be done. Except there’s this one name on the list and I don’t know why. ”
The woman on the other end of the phone laughs. “We have all had these days,” she says, in perfect English. The rebuke is implied, but also feels automatic, not personal. This is what I was hoping might happen. “What was the name? Perhaps I can help.”
I try to sound like I’m reading it out to her. As if I don’t have it memorized. “Amara Mariana Vizcaya. That’s all I have.”