Meet Me in Paris

Chapter One

The top of the Eiffel Tower came into view, glittering in the morning sunshine over a row of zinc-roofed Haussmann buildings, and Julia Glover’s breath caught in her throat. She was here. She was really here, and Paris was just as magical as she remembered.

So much life had happened since she’d spent an idyllic summer in an apartment in the Latin Quarter twenty-seven years earlier.

As she closed her eyes now and breathed in the familiar yeasty, grassy scent of Paris through the open window of her taxi’s back seat, she pictured herself at the age of twenty-two, stretched out on a blanket in the Champ de Mars, the park beneath the Eiffel Tower, scribbling furiously in a notebook.

She had dreamed then of being a newspaper columnist, or maybe a magazine writer, the whole world stretching out in front of her in a series of seemingly infinite possibilities.

What had happened to those dreams, to all those open doors she was so sure she would walk through?

She bit her lip, wishing she could go back and tell that na?ve, hopeful version of herself to take more chances, to not be so afraid to spread her wings, to never take no for an answer. But it was too late now, wasn’t it?

“Mom?” Piper said, interrupting Julia’s spiral of self-pity. “You okay? You look upset.”

Julia turned to her twenty-three-year-old daughter, her only child, who was sitting beside her in the cab. Piper was the only thing she was certain she’d done right in life, the thing she was proudest of. “I’m fine,” she said, smiling. “Just wishing that I’d come back sooner.”

Piper reached for her hand and squeezed. “But we’re here now, Mom.”

“We’re here now,” Julia echoed as the taxi turned a corner and the Eiffel Tower disappeared behind a building. Piper sighed contentedly and turned back to look out the window at the city rolling by.

Julia had always meant to bring Piper to the place that had captured her heart all those years before. That summer had been everything to her, and somehow, Julia had forgotten.

She snuck another glance at her daughter.

Piper’s wavy dark hair hung to the middle of her back, and her coffee-brown eyes sparkled with excitement.

A few freckles danced across the bridge of her nose, and she had two deep dimples that matched those of her father, Julia’s ex-husband, Ryan.

They’d split up when Piper was just ten, and though Ryan hadn’t been a bad father, he had drifted away as Piper had gotten older.

“Mom?” Piper said, turning back to her. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Staring at me like a weirdo.”

Julia laughed. “But I am a weirdo.”

“Yeah, you are.” Piper gave her a small smile, but Julia could see the sadness in her eyes. “But you’re my favorite weirdo.”

“You’re my favorite weirdo, too, kid,” Julia said as the Seine finally came into view and they could see the Eiffel Tower again in all its glory, glimmering in the late morning sunshine across the water on the Left Bank.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” Piper said, and Julia could hear the awe in her voice.

“It’s going to be an amazing week,” Julia said with a confidence she didn’t feel, and when Piper turned to glance at her, Julia could see tears in her daughter’s eyes. Her aching stomach twisted with guilt.

“You sure you’re okay, Mom?” Piper asked, giving her a wobbly smile. Piper asked that question a lot these days, and it broke Julia’s heart every time.

“Just fine, honey.” Julia knew, though, that Piper could see right through her. How could she not?

The truth was, Julia was dying. She had just turned forty-nine, and she wouldn’t live to see her fiftieth birthday.

For Henry McGee, it all began with a letter.

No, that wasn’t quite right. In fact, the story of Henry and Celeste Didier had begun some eighty years earlier in a run-down, top-floor apartment on the rue Dante.

But Henry had always believed that the story had ended in Paris, too, in 1943, when Celeste had been arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately executed for her involvement with the French Resistance.

But impossibly, Celeste had lived after all—or so said the message he’d received last week from her grandson, Jean-Luc, who’d been cleaning out his grandmother’s belongings in Paris when he’d come across her diary from the fall of 1945, which she’d written after she’d returned to France from the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Your name was repeated often in those pages, Jean-Luc had explained, adding that he’d tracked Henry down with the help of a private investigator.

My grandmother believed you had perished.

It is clear she loved you deeply, and as I work to put her affairs in order, it felt right that you should know.

Jean-Luc hadn’t explicitly invited Henry to fly across the ocean for a reunion with Celeste, but how could he do anything but? The lost love of his life—the woman he’d spent an entire career writing songs about—was alive.

I am coming to see her. Henry had replied to Jean-Luc immediately, using the email address the younger man had included at the end of his note. I will arrive on Monday.

Jean-Luc’s response had been swift. Sir, I regret to inform you that my grandmother is in a care home, without any memory of the past. I’m afraid a visit to Paris would be a waste of your time.

But Celeste would know him. Henry believed that with every fiber in his being.

She had to, didn’t she? Henry knew in the depths of his soul that a love like the one they’d once shared never disappeared, even if it became buried in the shadows of the years.

As long as Celeste was still alive, Henry would go to her.

Music will bring her back, he had replied to Jean-Luc.

Long ago, I used to sing to her, and I know that if she can hear the music, she’ll remember.

“Sir?”

Henry’s eyes flew open, his thoughts interrupted by the arrival of a thin, dark-haired Air France flight attendant, with eyes the color of twilight and lips painted scarlet.

She reminded him a bit of the Celeste he’d known eighty years ago, an eighteen-year-old spitfire whose fierce passion for the French Resistance had nearly ended her life.

Henry blinked up at her from his seat in first class. “Yes?”

She looked relieved. “I was just checking… well, to see if you were all right.”

Her accent even sounded like Celeste’s. He gave her a half smile. “I suspect you were checking to make sure I hadn’t kicked the bucket mid-flight.”

A flush crept up her neck, and her eyes widened. “No, sir! Of course not, sir. I was just making sure… you didn’t need anything.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I appreciate your concern. I’m just fine, ma’am, but while you’re here, might I trouble you for a cup of coffee? I’ll need my wits about me as soon as we arrive.”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.” She looked relieved to be hurrying off, and Henry chuckled to himself.

He had been told he looked good for his age—barely a day over eighty, his granddaughter, Melanie, had assured him when she’d last visited at Christmastime.

But the fact was, he’d been born nearly a century ago, and his doctor would have sternly warned against a transatlantic journey like this one.

Henry wouldn’t have listened, though. He would have traveled to the ends of the earth to see Celeste again.

“Sir?” The flight attendant was back, holding a steaming cup. “Cream and sugar?”

“No, thank you,” he said with a smile, taking the drink from her. As she moved away, his heart thudded. Ninety minutes until he was back in Paris. Ninety minutes until the past caught up with the present.

Ninety minutes until his future began.

As worried as Melanie Chaulet was about her grandfather traveling by himself from New York to Paris at his age, she was also secretly glad that he was coming.

Grandpa Henry was the only family she had left—and right now, she needed to be around someone who loved her unconditionally.

She was, however, completely confused about his reason for this trip.

She’d known, of course, that Grandpa Henry had served in France during the Second World War, but most of her questions over the years about that period of his life had gone unanswered, even when she herself had moved to France two decades before to marry Gilles.

“It’s remarkable to think that your life will unfold in the city where I once thought I’d spend mine,” he’d said then, tears in his eyes, but he hadn’t elaborated, and Melanie had been too caught up in her own love story to give her grandfather’s past more than a second thought.

He’d never mentioned Paris again, and even though she’d visited him twice a year at his home in New York, he’d never come to visit her, which she had always assumed was because of a reluctance to travel at his age.

But then he’d called yesterday and told her he was arriving the next morning on a flight from JFK that landed at 8:05 a.m. “I have just learned that the woman I loved in Paris is still alive,” he’d said, the emotional tremor in his voice unmistakable.

“The woman you loved?” Melanie had repeated in confusion.

Grandpa Henry—a humble songwriter who had penned some of the most popular hits of the past five decades—had been married to Melanie’s grandmother from the time he was twenty-six right up to her death thirty-five years ago.

“Before you married Grandma Betsy, you mean?”

Grandpa Henry had hesitated. “Yes, before I married your grandmother,” he acknowledged, a note of apology in his voice. “I thought—I thought my Celeste had died, you see. And now, there’s not a moment to waste.”

“I see. Well, of course you’ll stay with us,” Melanie said quickly, though her blood pressure was already rising at the complication of an unexpected houseguest when her life was in the midst of falling apart. Not that Grandpa Henry knew that. No one knew. “I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

And now, she was on her way to Charles de Gaulle, a thousand questions running through her head. She’d always thought that her grandparents had been each other’s first loves.

My Celeste, he’d called her. Who was this woman? How had her grandfather met her? Had he managed to erase her from his heart before marrying Grandma Betsy, or had she always been there, a silent third party to their decades-long marriage?

As Melanie crept along in her Peugeot 208 through near-standstill traffic on the Boulevard Périphérique, her thoughts turned to the not-so-silent third party in her own marriage.

Amandine. A woman named after a nut, who had apparently seduced Melanie’s husband. Or was it Gilles who had seduced her? Either way, it was clear there was an affair in progress.

The text had pinged through a few evenings ago when Gilles was in the shower, his phone sitting on the bathroom counter, just beside the sink. She had glanced down while brushing her teeth, not meaning to read it, and her throat had tightened when she’d realized what she was seeing.

I can still smell you on my skin, the text said in French. Until we meet again, Kisses from your Amandine.

In case there was any confusion as to Amandine’s meaning, the woman had also helpfully added a multitude of heart and kiss emojis.

Melanie had stared at the text in disbelief, then she had swallowed down the bile rising in her throat, snapped a quick picture in case she needed it, and hastily walked away before she had to acknowledge what she’d seen.

She had just turned fifty, and she and Gilles were set to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary this summer.

She knew, of course, that she wasn’t as shiny and new as she had been two decades earlier, when Gilles, ten years her senior, had swept her off her feet.

There was more weight around her middle than there had been then, and the pieces of her that had once been pert had begun to sag, a cruel trick of gravity and time.

But she had a reliable coiffeur, who kept Melanie’s thick hair a youthful chestnut brown, and an esthéticienne, whose monthly facials allowed her to maintain skin that was mostly wrinkle-free.

More importantly, though, she was a woman who read widely and was interested in politics and art and could hold a conversation with anyone, anywhere—qualities she’d thought Gilles valued.

Beyond that, she was a woman who had sacrificed her own desire to have children, because Gilles hadn’t wanted them.

She was a woman who had uprooted her life and moved across an ocean because she loved her husband.

But now, it seemed, she was merely a woman who was a fool.

She was also a woman who couldn’t decide how to proceed.

Should she confront Gilles? Then again, what if his explanation was that she was past her expiration date?

That he’d decided to move on to perkier pastures and wanted a divorce?

That an affair wasn’t such a big deal and she should live with it or leave?

She wasn’t ready yet to tell Grandpa Henry about Gilles, because that would mean she’d have to face the situation—and she had no idea what came next.

Traffic was moving again on the Boulevard Périphérique, and as Melanie accelerated toward the airport, toward her beloved grandfather, she practiced a breezy smile in the mirror.

If Gilles hadn’t noticed in the past few days that Melanie wasn’t acting like herself, maybe Grandpa Henry wouldn’t, either.