Chapter Forty-Two
LUCY
The thing they don’t tell you about making a grand gesture is that it is fucking excruciating . In the movies there’s a decision, and a plane ride that takes approximately three seconds, and boom – happily ever after. Easy.
In real life, apparently, it’s seven full days of agony.
Case in point: Lucy stood at the door of her neighbor, Oumarou, beside her other neighbor Carl, a slender man in a Bengals sweatshirt and flip-flops, whom she’d dragged from an apparently riveting documentary on Tudor England.
‘So, then ,’ Carl said, jabbering away as he had for five minutes, ‘the last one, Catherine Parr, enters the picture—’
‘Hello, neighbors!’ said Oumarou, opening the door on his tidy Midwestern bungalow.
His wife, Pauline, shuffled in behind him carrying their baby daughter.
Lucy resisted the urge to reach out and grab little Marthe for the baby-cuddle time she usually enjoyed when hanging out next door.
Unfortunately, Lucy didn’t have the time to indulge.
‘Are you two still interested in getting a car?’ Lucy asked.
‘We are,’ Pauline replied. ‘But the prices are still too high.’
Lucy beamed. ‘Well, do I have a deal for you! I will sell you my Subaru for one dollar.’
‘What?’ asked Oumarou, shocked. ‘No, that is too generous.’
‘Well, look,’ Lucy said, ‘it has seventy-eight thousand miles on it and there’s something squidgy going on with the emergency brake. However, it also has a new set of tires and a full tank of gas.’
‘We’ll take it!’ chirped Pauline.
‘Pauline!’ Oumarou protested.
A spate of rapid-fire French ensued. While Lucy was extremely bad at French, she could tell by the hand motions and general air of exasperation that Pauline was winning and Oumarou was deeply in love with his wife.
‘Are you escaping from the law?’ Oumarou asked Lucy.
‘No, I am running away to be with the man I love.’
‘Carl?’ Pauline gasped.
‘ Not Carl,’ Lucy said, absolutely not laughing. ‘Carl is here because he’s a notary. For the car title. To make it official.’
Carl held his hand up showing the couple his very official notary stamp thingy that looked like it could have been purchased at Staples.
‘We will take it,’ Oumarou said finally.
Five minutes and four-quarters later, Oumarou and Pauline were the proud owners of an eight-year-old Subaru hatchback and Lucy was one step closer to the future.
Lucy was clearly too practical for her own good.
She couldn’t just hop on a plane, damn the consequences.
She had to carefully dismantle her life first. She had to be sure her students would be in good hands for the fall semester.
She had to write a letter of resignation and formally withdraw from the tenure review process.
Then, when that was done, she had to spend an enormous chunk of her life savings on a last-minute, one-way ticket to Monaco. As one does.
The internal struggle was a whole other animal.
She could have texted or called Nicky at any point.
Typed something like, ‘Hey, remember that invitation? Uh, quitting my whole fucking life over here. Still into that?’ But she didn’t.
She couldn’t. She wanted to show Nicky that she was in it , that she was leaping.
She needed to feel it. For her own sanity.
Lucy had to experience every brave step, if giving up on everything she’d ever worked for could be considered brave and not colossally stupid.
What’s more, Lucy wanted to be there to witness Nicky’s reaction, to see with her own eyes that she hadn’t irreparably and terminally screwed up what they had because of her lifelong reliance on the safety of inertia.
It couldn’t be easy. She wouldn’t let it be easy.
For all those years Nicky had needed her to want to be found.
It was beyond time for Lucy to prove exactly how much she wanted it – by leaping headfirst into the unknown and hoping that she wouldn’t fall flat on her face.
Lucy made one last tour of her home. The dusty corners she hadn’t had time to clean, the bathroom faucet that dripped and needed mending.
She passed Chloe’s childhood bedroom and couldn’t resist peeking in.
Chloe wasn’t there, of course, she was in Boston.
All she’d left behind were dog-eared Taylor Swift posters and a bunch of boxes that probably wouldn’t get opened again for a decade.
There were memories, too. Sweet ones. Maybe bittersweet since the place they all happened would very likely live only in Lucy’s memory from then on.
Still, Lucy trudged forward. Past the sofa she’d spent hours on, past the front door she’d painted blue after her last divorce. She locked the house up tight and rolled her suitcase down the driveway that Chloe had turned into a gruesome chalk-art masterpiece every Halloween.
Lucy knew that the little tug she felt in her chest when she got in the Uber wasn’t fatal. It was only the evidence of an ending. That her choice meant something dear and true.
In further proof that life is not like the movies, Lucy’s seven days of craziness were followed by two hours of drinking terrible coffee and being fondled by the TSA, ninety minutes of layover in New York, another ninety minutes in Paris, and thirteen total hours in the air.
This was followed by a car ride from Nice with a driver who really, really loved French rap.
Every single moment was spent oozing excitement, doubt, and fear in equal measures.
By the time Lucy’s taxi pulled up to the exquisite H?tel de Paris Monte-Carlo at 5 p.m. the day after she’d walked out of her living room in Ohio, she was shaking with the nerves she’d been desperately trying to hold up over her head like a boom box blaring Peter Gabriel.
The surroundings didn’t help. The hotel was intimidating.
Grand on a scale that made Lucy’s palms sweat.
Luxurious as a fairy tale. Or an Audrey Hepburn movie.
Maybe a fairy-tale Audrey Hepburn movie.
Golden, Cote d’Azur twilight streamed in from an extravagant domed skylight.
A bronze statue of Louis the XIV on horseback stood sentry at one end of the marbled hall.
Its bent knee was rubbed shiny and bright by gamblers hoping for a mystical edge on the casino.
She knew this because, ever the researcher, Lucy had downloaded a traveler’s guide on her Kindle with the hope that it would make her feel more prepared for what lay ahead. (Spoiler, it did not.)
Lucy wheeled her bag to the sculpture of Louis and ran her clammy fingers along the smooth bronze of the horse’s knee.
Superstitions weren’t usually part of Lucy’s repertoire, but at this point she’d try anything that might put luck on her side.
She was all-in on the biggest gamble of her life; she’d take any edge she could get.
Lucy checked her phone. There was a text from Kim.
KimmyR: I think you’re there by now. Don’t text me. Just go get him. You’re doing great. It will all be GREAT. I miss you! I love you!
Lucy tried to smile, then dug through her old messages for Chloe’s text.
Chloe had reached out to Nicky with some excuse about post-wedding thank-you notes to get his location.
He’d been forthcoming and asked about her honeymoon.
Chloe had pasted their whole conversation into their long mother-daughter thread, and his interest and sweetness had felt like nails being driven into Lucy’s heart.
God, she hoped he would forgive her. If he didn’t …
well, if he didn’t, she would deal with it.
Probably. She might deal with it by curling up in the fetal position under the ginormous floral arrangement in the lobby of the H?tel de Paris Monte-Carlo, but she would deal with it. So, that was something. A backup plan.
She approached the reception attendant.
‘How may I be of service to you, madame ?’ the silver-haired man said in a thick French accent.
‘I am joining a friend,’ she said, uttering the lines she had rehearsed in her head somewhere over the Atlantic. Lucy did her best to project confidence as she pressed on, ‘He’s staying in the Garnier Suite.’
The man was silent, but perused her in a way that made it perfectly clear that he knew exactly who was staying in the Garnier Suite. The man scrutinized her as though strange women trying to get into the Garnier Suite was a regular occurrence. Lucy’s heart vanished into a black hole.
‘Your name, madame ?’
‘Rollins,’ Lucy offered.
The man picked up the house phone, dialing a string of numbers. She caught a heavily accented ‘Rollins’ and a couple of ‘ouis.’
‘One moment, please,’ the attendant said before disappearing through a door behind the desk.
Lucy was half convinced they thought she was a stalker and she was about to be escorted off to some Monte-Carlo jail cell when the older man arrived with a young woman in tow.
‘Please, follow me,’ he said to Lucy.
Here it comes. If the jails in Monte-Carlo are even a tenth as nice as the hotels I’ll be fine. I’ll call Kim and try again tomorrow.
But the hotel employee didn’t veer off for the exit, instead he moved further into the hotel to a discreetly placed elevator. He pulled out a keycard, attached to his sport coat by a lanyard, and waved it in front of a keypad.
‘Bonsoir, Madame Rollins,’ he said with a bow as the elevator doors opened.
He pressed the button for the second floor and waited for the doors to close between them.
When the doors opened again, Lucy was greeted by a smiling semi-familiar face. ‘Hello, Lucy,’ he said in a distinctly American accent. ‘I’m Jacob, we met in Las Vegas?’
Lucy’s jet-lagged brain clicked slowly, but finally placed the man. From the Scala Theater, in another hotel some five thousand miles away. On a different continent. A lifetime ago.
Behind Jacob was a very large black man with muscles stacked on top of his muscles, all of them squeezed into a smart black suit and thin black tie. Lucy noticed an earpiece curled around his ear.