Chapter Two
There were times when Juliette’s life seemed like a dream from which she might awaken at any moment, with her husband Kevin – ex-husband now – sleeping beside her in their spacious house on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
Yet here she was, leading a totally different existence in a one-bedroom apartment above a bookstore in Paris.
She and Kevin had come to the city three years before on a bucket-list trip to find her roots and honour the memory of her French grandmother.
The day before they were due to go home, she’d answered the phone to his mistress and her world had fallen apart.
She’d sent him back to Philadelphia alone while she decided what to do and one thing had led to another, until eventually she’d chosen to stay on in the city and ended up taking over the lease of a dusty, forgotten bookshop in a square where old men played boules and drank pastis in a café with a striped awning: the square she’d recognised from a painting that had hung on her grandmother’s bedroom wall.
It was as though fate had brought her to the Place Dorée.
While the challenges she faced sometimes threatened to overwhelm her, she had to pinch herself when she thought how far she’d come.
The bookshop she was running, La Page Cachée, made just enough money to keep her afloat; she’d survived the end of her twenty-five-year marriage and now she was navigating a new relationship with a man she loved so much that it frightened her.
No wonder she sometimes felt as though she were drowning.
Not that she wasn’t homesick occasionally.
She missed so many things she’d taken for granted over the years: for a start, the ease with which wheels turned in the States, compared to the lumbering bureaucracy of French governmental departments, and customer service that sometimes felt more like a fight to the death.
In summer, she missed air conditioning, decent-sized refrigerators and buckets of ice; all year round, she missed power showers, modern plumbing and electrical circuits that didn’t fuse if you plugged in more than two appliances at the same time.
She missed American humour, too, because it was hard to be funny in French and their jokes had to be explained to her, and she missed wise-cracking comedians and the husky voice of Dick Vitale calling a basketball game: the soundtrack of her childhood.
And of course, above all she missed her family and friends – even though her daughter Emily worked as a marine biologist at a scientific research centre in Colorado, her son Ben, Emily’s twin, was training as an architect in New York and her brother lived in San Francisco.
Her friends had always been scattered all over the country, needless to say.
Yet now Ben was about to visit. Juliette had been counting the days until he arrived, her stomach flipping with excitement and her mind busy with plans.
She would have to share Ben because he’d primarily flown over to see Sophie, his Parisian girlfriend – which was fine, because Juliette loved Sophie almost as much as he did.
Sophie had worked as an assistant in La Page Cachée in the early days so it was Juliette who’d brought her and Ben together, which gave her a sense of quiet satisfaction whenever she thought about it.
For the past eighteen months the two of them had been conducting a long-distance relationship, which Sophie at least was finding difficult; she and Juliette would have dinner together and talk about Ben, wondering whether there was any chance he might one day move to France.
Juliette couldn’t imagine that happening and she was afraid both kids would end up broken-hearted.
‘Maybe some things just aren’t meant to be,’ she wanted to tell Sophie. ‘You’re young – there’s plenty of time to find someone else, someone you don’t have to travel thousands of miles to be with.’
She could imagine how that would go down, though, so she held her tongue.
Juliette’s own mother had tried to persuade her not to marry Kevin and the advice had only made her more determined to go through with it.
Recently it had occurred to her that Ben might be flying over to break up with Sophie in person; he was far too decent to dump her by phone or email.
Well, they would just have to sort things out between themselves and she’d do what she could to be supportive.
She’d hate to lose Sophie as a friend, though: despite the age difference, they’d become close over the past three years.
Sophie had helped Juliette find her way around the French banking system and her local tax office, though the ways of the Paris Chamber of Commerce had defeated them both, had helped translate her business plan into decent French and, more importantly, had encouraged and reassured Juliette when she was feeling lonely and her problems seemed overwhelming.
‘Mom?’ Her son’s voice over the intercom made her heart leap. Rather than buzzing him into the flat, she ran down the stairs to meet him; it was a year since they’d last seen each other and she couldn’t wait another second.
‘Hey, steady on!’ he said, disentangling her arms from his neck. ‘You’re actually strangling me.’
He looked just the same: his dark hair a mess, an absent-minded expression in his lovely hazel eyes, and a smile that lit up his face and made you feel everything was right with the world.
‘I’ve missed you so much. Now come upstairs and tell me everything.’ She looked past him into the street, suddenly anxious. ‘Sophie’s not with you?’
He shook his head. ‘No, she’s giving us some quality mother and son time.’
They sat drinking coffee in the living room while Ben filled Juliette in on his news.
Work was going well: he’d moved to a practice that was smaller but gave him more opportunity and responsibility, and his co-workers were great.
He’d found a better apartment, too, which had a second bedroom he could use as a studio.
‘And you’re still here.’ He gazed round the cosy room with its wide oak floorboards, tall wooden shutters and pot-bellied stove. ‘I thought you might have moved in with Nico by now.’
‘I like my independence,’ she replied. ‘Living above the bookstore is perfect, and this way I feel closer to Mémé and Jacques. You know they lived in this very apartment, right?’
She’d discovered an extraordinary family connection to this small square in Paris.
Her grandmother had been married to Jacques Duval, who had run La Page Cachée during the Nazi occupation of the city in the Second World War.
Juliette and Nico had found a secret storeroom while they were renovating the bookstore, where it turned out Jacques had hidden refugees fleeing from the Nazis.
He was alone by then, because Mémé had left Paris to live in the south.
He’d been arrested and deported, and died in Dachau concentration camp just as the war was ending.
Mémé had met an American soldier when Paris was liberated after the war, and started a new life across the Atlantic as a GI bride.
‘I still can’t believe it.’ Ben yawned, stretching his arms above his head. ‘Your grandmother had this whole other life before she married again, and she never breathed a word to anyone about it?’
‘Not so far as I know,’ Juliette said. ‘I guess it was just too painful. Wish I could talk to her now.’
The more time Juliette spent in France, the more Frenchified she became, the more she kept thinking about the grandmother she could barely remember: a white-haired old lady dressed in black who still spoke with a strong accent and was punctilious about table manners.
What sights she must have seen, what secrets she must have been hiding!
Did she feel guilty, having abandoned her husband to his fate?
She had died when Juliette was young, and Juliette’s own mother had passed away a few years ago, so now there was no one left in the family to talk about Marie Garnier.
Only one link remained: Nico’s ninety-nine-year-old grandmother, Zizi, who had known both Jacques and Marie.
In fact, Jacques had been the love of Zizi’s life.
She would have married him in a heartbeat if he’d been free, so instead she married his best friend, Henri, who became Nico’s grandfather.
Ben wasn’t listening. ‘Mom, there’s something I want to tell you,’ he said, his face serious.
Juliette’s heart sank. Uh-oh, she thought, assuming a neutral expression, here it comes.
‘So, I’ve been finding this past year really tough,’ he went on, ‘and I know Sophie has also. It’s just too hard, only seeing each other every couple of months and trying to cram our whole relationship into a week or so.’
‘I can imagine,’ Juliette told him. ‘I’ve been thinking you couldn’t carry on like this. Sophie’s a lovely girl but you’re both so young.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Breaking up is painful but at least you’ll know where you stand.’
He snatched his hand away, frowning. ‘That’s not what I meant at all. Jeez, Mom! I’m going to ask her to marry me. This evening, over dinner, if the time feels right.’
Juliette gasped, her cheeks growing hot. ‘Oh, Ben! I’m so sorry. How stupid of me! Well, that’s wonderful news – I couldn’t be happier.’
‘Are you sure?’ He was still glowering. ‘Sounds like you were hoping we’d break up.’
‘Of course not. I adore Sophie – you know I do.’ She chose her words carefully. ‘I just didn’t think you were ready to make that kind of commitment. I mean, you’re only twenty-six and Sophie’s even younger.’
‘She’s older than you were when you married Dad.’
‘Yes, and look how that turned out,’ Juliette said without thinking.
Ben’s frown deepened. ‘Are you saying your marriage was a mistake?’