Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
RACHEL
Paris didn’t wait for me to feel settled.
By Monday morning, the city had decided I existed and expected me to keep up.
I spent my first week walking. Not the romantic strolling people talk about, but the kind where your feet hurt and your brain won’t shut up and you keep checking your phone even though there’s no one left to text.
I walked to learn the shape of my neighborhood.
To memorize corners. To pretend I wasn’t counting the hours since Frankie left.
I took my camera everywhere.
It felt safer that way. Like if I had it around my neck, I wasn’t just a girl alone in a foreign city—I was working. Observing. Collecting evidence.
Paris had faces for days. Old men with eyebrows like punctuation marks. Women with mouths that looked like they’d said no their entire lives and meant it. Kids who stared right back at you without blinking, like they already knew something you didn’t.
I loved them all.
I started most mornings at the market two blocks from my apartment. It wasn’t fancy. No Instagram-perfect flower stalls or cinematic baguette displays. Just crates of produce, stacks of cheese sweating in the heat, fish laid out like they were daring you to flinch.
The vendors learned my face before they learned my name.
“Bonjour,” I’d say, confident. Clear. American vowels tucked neatly behind Parisian consonants. I definitely wasn’t channeling any songs from Beauty and the Beast. Well, mostly not.
Sometimes they’d respond fast. Too fast.
And then I’d smile, nod, and say, “Pardon—plus lentement, s’il vous pla?t,” which immediately gave me away by asking them to repeat it more slowly.
My French was good. Technically. Grammatically. Years of classes and pronunciation drills and teachers who spoke in neat, neutral accents. But Parisian French had swagger. Shortcuts. Attitude. Regional slant. It moved like it didn’t care if you followed.
Sometimes they’d switch to English out of mercy. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Both options were humbling.
There was one woman—late fifties, maybe—who sold herbs and looked like she’d never trusted anyone a day in her life. She corrected my pronunciation of thym three times before finally nodding like I’d passed a test I didn’t know I was taking.
“Vous apprenez vite,” she said.
I preened. Internally. Always internally. Because yes, there was no better way to make you learn fast than to throw you in the deep end. I was definitely swimming to keep from drowning.
Furniture shopping was its own emotional rollercoaster.
I learned quickly that “vintage” in Paris could mean either charmingly distressed or structurally offensive.
I walked into at least five shops that smelled like dust and regret.
I sat on chairs that wobbled under my weight and pretended not to imagine Frankie’s voice in my head pointing it out even as she laughed.
I bought a small kitchen table from a man who called me ma photographe before I told him what I did. He said my hands gave me away. Something about how I kept framing things in the air when I talked.
Did I do that? Really?
Yes, it made me really self-conscious the rest of the day because yes, I did do that.
That night, I ate takeout on my “new” table like it was a victory.
Every afternoon, I wandered.
I crossed bridges for no reason. I sat on benches and watched couples fight quietly. I photographed reflections in windows and the backs of people’s heads and the exact moment someone realized they were being watched.
Faces told stories even when mouths stayed shut. Especially then.
There was a woman on the métro who kept checking her lipstick like it might betray her. A man with a scar across his cheek who smiled at nothing and no one. A boy who couldn’t have been older than six, gripping his mother’s coat like the world was a slippery place.
I took pictures when I could. When it felt right. When it felt honest.
Sometimes, I didn’t. Sometimes, I just looked.
Being alone sharpened everything. Sounds. Smells. My own thoughts. There was no one to buffer them. No one to hand things off to.
At night, I came home to my apartment and let the quiet hit me like a second wave. I unpacked slowly. Hung clothes. Reorganized drawers even though Frankie wasn’t there to comment on my knife placement.
I missed her in weird flashes. The kind that didn’t make sense. When I saw a dumb sign. When I needed a second opinion. When I realized no one was going to steal my socks anymore.
But missing her didn’t mean I wanted to go back.
That part surprised me.
By the end of the week, my legs ached, my memory cards were full, and my brain felt louder—but clearer. Like something had been stripped down to its bones.
Paris wasn’t asking me who I was.
It was watching to see what I’d do. For the first time in a long while, I didn’t feel like I had to answer to anyone but myself.
I lifted my camera, focused, and clicked.
The first text came while I was sitting on the edge of a fountain, camera resting against my thigh, watching a couple argue in whispers like it was foreplay.
Dominic:
So. Paris.
I stared at my phone like it had personally offended me.
Of course, he knew. Dominic always knew things before I was ready for him to. He had a talent for timing that felt less like coincidence and more like a threat.
I didn’t answer.
I tucked the phone back into my bag and lifted my camera, refocused. The woman’s jaw was tight now. The man’s smile had gone brittle. I snapped the shutter and felt that small, familiar thrill—the one that came from catching something honest.
My phone buzzed again.
I sighed. Loudly. Like that might scare him off.
Dominic:
How’s the light? Still making everyone look like they’re starring in a movie?
I smiled despite myself. Traitor.
Still, I didn’t reply.
I stood, slung my bag over my shoulder, and started walking. The city folded around me easily, like it was used to people changing their minds mid-thought.
The third buzz came as I crossed the street.
Dominic:
You look beautiful.
I stopped.
Actually stopped. Like an idiot.
I glanced around, instinctive and ridiculous, scanning faces, reflections, windows. Men on bikes. A woman smoking. A kid licking ice cream. No one looking at me. No one paying attention at all.
My phone chimed again.
This time with a laughing face.
Dominic:
I made you look, didn’t I?
I huffed a laugh and shook my head, heat crawling up my neck. I typed before I could talk myself out of it.
Me:
You’re such a dick.
The response came immediately.
Of course it did.
Dominic:
Only for you.
I stared at the screen longer than I meant to.
That was the thing with Dominic. He never demanded anything outright. He just… lingered. Like a familiar song you didn’t remember putting on but somehow knew all the words to anyway.
I locked my phone and slid it back into my bag, heart doing something inconvenient and loud.
Paris kept moving. Faces kept passing. The light shifted.
And somewhere between the click of my camera and the echo of his words, I knew this week—this city—wasn’t going to let me pretend the past stayed neatly behind me.
Not when it knew exactly how to find me.
Two weeks slipped by without asking my permission.
Paris stopped feeling like a dare and started feeling like a rhythm.
I learned which bakeries were worth the line and which weren’t.
I stopped getting lost on purpose. I figured out the métro well enough to only end up going the wrong direction once a day, which felt like progress.
I started recognizing faces—baristas, vendors, the woman who walked her dog like it was an Olympic sport.
I was still carrying my camera everywhere. That part wasn’t changing.
What did change was the quiet certainty that this wasn’t a vacation anymore.
This was work.
Paris Daily occupied a narrow building wedged between a bookstore and a café that smelled aggressively like burnt espresso.
The lobby was unimpressive in the way serious places often are—no glossy displays, no dramatic lighting, just a name on the wall and a buzz that suggested people here were too busy to care if you were impressed.
I gave my name at the desk. The woman barely looked up before pointing me down the hall.
“Deuxième porte à gauche.”
I thanked her and walked on, bottling everything—nerves, awe, the sudden urge to turn around and flee the country.
Imposter syndrome was a hell of a drug.
The shouting hit before I reached the door.
Not raised voices. Not tension.
Full-on, unrestrained fury.
“—do you have any idea how lazy this is?” a man bellowed in French, his accent sharp and precise, like every syllable had been honed into a weapon. “This is not vision, this is fear. You hide behind technique because you have nothing to say!”
No one looked up.
That was the part that unsettled me most.
People typed. Phones rang. Someone laughed softly at a desk nearby. The office absorbed the rage like it was background noise. Like this was Tuesday. Like this was weather.
I stopped just outside the door marked “René Dubois – Directeur de la Photographie” and waited, spine straight, face neutral, heartbeat absolutely refusing to cooperate.
“Non. Non, do not send me revisions,” René snapped. “Go back and learn how to see. Then we talk.”
Then he slammed his phone so hard against his desk, I half-expected it to shatter.
The door flew open.
René Dubois was… not what I expected.
He was short. Shorter than me. Shorter than Frankie—which my brain didn’t fully register until a beat too late because there was so much personality packed into that frame it threw off the math.
He had a compact, slightly stocky build that gave him a grounded, almost cherubic presence, like someone had taken a Renaissance angel and dropped him into modern Paris with a deadline.
His face was round and soft, dominated by a high, broad forehead and large, expressive dark brown eyes that missed nothing.
They were the kind of eyes that had seen talent bloom and die in the same afternoon.
His hair was thinning and receding, light brown threaded with gray, more volume at the sides than on top.
He wore wire-rimmed glasses that sat low on his nose, adding to the distracted professor vibe, and when the light hit him just right I could see the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw—clean-shaven in theory, human in practice.
He was in his early fifties, maybe, dressed like he’d forgotten his clothes were supposed to make an impression. Rumpled jacket. Soft sweater. Button-down that had seen better irons. His posture was slightly stooped, as if his thoughts were heavier than his body.
He didn’t look powerful.
He radiated it.
His gaze snapped to me, sharp and immediate, as he finished glaring at the phone like it might argue back. His head canted slightly to the side—not curious, exactly. Assessing.
We locked eyes.
“Well?” he said, switching to accented English without missing a beat. “Are you coming in or not?”