Chapter Three
Well, it wasn’t his private jet, exactly. It belonged to the concert promoter who’d booked the show Jackson would be playing in Paris in just four days, the first of six stadium shows across Europe. Jackson was secretly worried that they’d all be massive flops.
It had been a decade since his last tour, and the experience was already much different from how it used to be, which startled him.
Take today’s hired driver, for instance.
She was a young French woman who introduced herself as Manon and who barely gave him a second glance after he’d slid into the back seat of her sleek Audi.
Thirty years ago, a young woman like that would have been going gaga over him.
But Manon hadn’t even been born when Jackson was at the height of his fame, and if she had any clue who her passenger was, she wasn’t letting on.
Or maybe she just didn’t care.
By that point, he’d had too many experiences with women who wanted him for the wrong reasons, and it had made him wary, not just of the women who approached him, but also of his own poor judgment.
He had a long history of making bad choices when it came to dating—so much so that he had begun to wonder if he had ever had any ability to see people for who they were.
But now he was lonely sometimes, which was a strange thing to admit to himself. Loneliness wasn’t very rock ’n’ roll, was it?
“Excuse me,” Jackson said a few minutes after Manon had pulled out of the airport, headed for Paris. “Would you mind taking a bit of a detour on the way to the hotel?”
“A detour?” she asked, glancing at him in the rearview mirror. “You want to see some of the tourist sites, monsieur? The Eiffel Tower, maybe? Or the Champs-élysées?”
Jackson smiled. “Not exactly.” He gave her an address in the fifth arrondissement, and she scrunched up her nose.
“The Quartier Latin? Is it Notre Dame you want to see, then, sir? Many of the tourists want to go there, especially after the fire.”
“No,” Jackson said. “I mean, yes, I would love to see Notre Dame. But it’s my old street I’d like to visit. We don’t need to stop. I just want to remind myself what it felt like to be here.”
“Monsieur?” Manon’s eyes met his in the rearview again. “Your old street?”
“I lived here for a summer when I was twenty-five. Feels like a different lifetime now.” It had been just before he’d been discovered, just before he’d signed his first record contract, just before he’d stepped aboard a bullet train that went only one way.
He’d spent three sunshine-soaked months here, busking on street corners, and when people stopped to watch him sing, or tossed a few coins in his upturned baseball cap, it had been because of his words, his songs.
And then he’d gone home to the States and been plucked from obscurity by a record executive, who’d heard him singing in New York and had suggested he record a love song called “City of Light,” written by a Grammy-winning songwriter named Henry McGee, and it had felt like fate, since Jackson had just come back from Paris.
“This one is special, man,” the exec had said.
“The story goes that McGee wrote it for a girl he loved in the Second World War, and that every decade, he updates it to make it sound more modern. He’s finally ready to let the world hear it, and, well, I can’t think of a voice more well-suited to the song than yours.
” As Jackson had listened to the backing track and read over the lyrics, he had agreed.
The song felt like opening a vein and bleeding one’s heart onto the stage.
Jackson had considered himself a decent songwriter, but he wasn’t capable of anything remotely like this.
The next summer, the single rocketed to number one and introduced the world to Jackson Quick’s rich baritone, which critics had immediately likened to that of a modern-day Elvis with a little Eddie Vedder thrown in for good measure.
“My mother said you were famous,” Manon admitted, her eyes meeting his again. “She said she liked you when you were young.”
He smiled slightly. “When I was young, huh? Feels like a long time ago, now.”
They lapsed into silence after that; Manon didn’t say another word until after she’d driven him past his old apartment on the rue Xavier Privas. “Would you like to see Notre Dame now, sir?” she asked, breaking the silence between them. “It’s quite close.”
Jackson knew that it was; he had walked there from his apartment nearly every day with his guitar to play for tourists. “No, thanks,” he said. “Actually, would you mind dropping me off here and bringing my bags to my hotel? I’d like to walk around for a little while.”
Manon glanced at him. “Won’t you be recognized?” she asked.
Jackson chuckled. “You’d be surprised.” Middle age—okay, let’s be honest, late middle age—was like a disguise. People didn’t look twice at a fiftysomething man. And even if he did look familiar, they couldn’t quite place him.
It would be different when he took the stage four days from now at Paris’s La Défense Arena. The fans there would know him the moment he stepped into the spotlight.
But until then, maybe he could just be a guy strolling through the familiar streets of the most beautiful city in the world.
Twenty minutes after checking into their hotel, Julia and Piper walked several blocks to the Café Le Petit Pont.
Julia was exhausted; she knew she would need a nap after this, but she was determined not to miss Piper’s first interaction with the city that had so captured Julia’s heart.
She had slept fitfully on the plane, but it was enough to keep her going for another hour or so.
The café was just across a sliver of the Seine River from Notre Dame, and the view of the soaring cathedral was spectacular from outside the restaurant, the front of which was shaded by broad, rose-colored awnings, the name of the café in luminous script overhead.
Inside, the place was exuberantly French, with maroon-backed woven café chairs and vintage alcohol advertisements.
A hostess showed them to a table on the front patio, which had a view of Notre Dame’s towers over the trees, and handed them menus in English.
“Want a glass of white, Mom?” Piper asked as she scanned the wine list.
“You know what? Sure. Why not?” Julia had abstained from alcohol entirely during her two years of chemotherapy, but now there was no longer a reason to swear off a glass of wine here or there; an occasional drink would not change the outcome, and she might as well enjoy it while she could, in the brief window of time where she felt almost like herself.
A waiter a few years older than Piper appeared at their table a moment later. “Bonjour. My name is Nicolas, and I will be your waiter today.” His English, flecked with a French accent, was surprisingly perfect. “May I interest you in a drink to begin? An aperitif, perhaps, or a glass of wine?”
Julia waited for Piper to order since she was still clutching the wine list, but instead of her daughter’s self-assured voice, she heard only silence. She looked up to see Piper staring at the waiter—and the waiter staring back at her, both of them oddly frozen. “Honey?” Julia prompted.
Piper seemed to snap out of it, coughing and awkwardly shuffling the wine list and the menu until she dropped them both. She and the waiter bent to pick them up at the same time and nearly knocked heads. “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!” Piper yelped.
“Ah, excusez-moi, mademoiselle!” The waiter sounded equally mortified as he handed the wine list and the menu back. “The fault is mine. Now, ah, may I bring you something to drink?”
But instead of ordering, Piper just continued to stare. “Uhhhh,” she said, as if she’d forgotten how to speak.
“We’ll have two glasses of Sancerre, please,” Julia interjected helpfully.
The waiter tore his eyes away from her daughter long enough to ask, “The smaller size, or the large, madame?”
“How about the large,” Julia said, and the waiter stood there for another second before blinking a few times.
“Yes, of course, right away.” He finally turned and hurried away.
When Julia looked back at Piper, she was unsurprised to see her daughter staring after him.
In fact, the three thirtysomething women at the next table over all seemed to be gawking at him, too.
Julia stifled a smile. “Well, he seems nice,” she said in the most benign tone she could manage. “I think he thought you were cute.”
“What?” Piper’s cheeks were pink as she avoided Julia’s gaze. “No way. Anyways, he’s probably like that with all the girls he waits on.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” Julia nodded at the waiter, who had stopped at the table of thirtysomethings. One of the women, a redhead, was unabashedly batting her eyelashes at him, but he seemed not to even notice.
As he walked away from the women, he glanced over, smiling at Piper, who looked quickly away. “Anyways, it doesn’t matter,” Piper said. “This is our trip. I’m not here to meet some guy.”
Julia felt a surge of guilt. Over the past two years, even as she’d finished her senior year of college, Piper hadn’t dated at all—and Julia knew it was her own fault. Piper had come home almost every weekend to be with her, which hadn’t left time for much of a social life.
“Honey.” Julia reached across the table for her daughter’s hands. “You’ve been there for me in every way I could have imagined, and I hope you know how much I appreciate that. I know it’s been hard. But I never intended for you to put your own life on hold so that you could deal with mine.”
Piper’s eyes widened. “Mom, I—”
“You and I are going to have plenty of time together on this trip. But I worry about what will happen to you after I’m not here anymore.”
“Mom,” Piper began, but whatever she was about to say was erased by the reappearance of their cute waiter, who had two large glasses of white wine balanced on a tray. He didn’t take his eyes off Piper as he set them down on the table.