Chapter 24 Scarlett
SCARLETT
I have a confession.
“This is my first time in Lyon,” I tell my traveling companion the next day.
Daniel’s eyes grow to the size of beach balls. He blinks, jerking his head back. “Woman, how is that even possible?”
I shrug with a smile. “I don’t know. I guess I should blame it on Paris, right? It was too enticing to leave.”
“Naturally, Paris should always take the blame,” he says as we leave the inn in Lyon and make our way across the cobblestones, heading to the nearby Rh?ne river that cuts through the city. “But still . . . how is it that you never found your way here?”
I glance around, soaking in the architecture, the winding streets, the gorgeous hills.
“Now that I’m here, I’m asking myself that same question, because I already adore Lyon.
I think I’ve fallen in love with this city at first sight,” I say as we walk across one of the smaller bridges, a red iron latticework one curving over the Rh?ne, near a steepled church set into a high hillside.
The inn is perched up on the hillside too, overlooking the river.
This place needs a little work, some sprucing up here and there, a bit of new decor, so my tablet has been kept quite busy with notes here on the fifth day of our trip.
But it’s good to find things to work on.
A plan helps me to focus on the practical—vitally important when the impractical side of me is spinning wildly out of control the more time I spend with this man.
Yet I don’t want to stop spending time with him. Don’t want to stop exploring with him.
We stop in the middle of the bridge, our hands curling over the railing. “I take it you’ve been to Lyon before? Wait, don’t tell me. You performed here,” I say, teasing him.
He laughs, wrapping an arm around my shoulders, and I’m so glad I made him laugh about something that can hurt. He nuzzles my hair. “Look at you, already taking the piss out of me about my once-upon-a-time career.”
I slink closer, looping my arms around his waist. “And you like that I do that,” I say.
He pulls back, tucks his finger under my chin, and raises my face to meet his eyes. “I do. I truly do.”
He sighs a little wistfully, then turns his gaze back to the water, staring out at the curving ribbon as he leaves his arm around me. He doesn’t say anything, and I suspect he’s remembering the last time he was here. Maybe with his family.
“Were you here on vacation when you were younger?” I ask.
“Yes, I was . . . maybe twelve,” he says, seeming a little lost in thought. I say nothing, giving him the space to keep going if he wants. “There’s so much history in this town. I always loved that when I was a kid. I asked them to bring me here.”
A grin spreads across my face as I picture him as a kid, tugging on his parents’ hands, asking for a trip. “Why did you want to explore Lyon when you were a young English boy?”
His blue eyes glint. “Don’t tell anyone, but I had a secret fascination with the French Revolution.
I guess I loved the idea of the revolutionary spirit, so I made them take me to France, to visit Versailles and Paris and Lyon.
I wanted to come here and learn more about this city’s role in the French Revolution, but I think I was most taken by the river. ”
“Ah, that I understand. I’m the same way,” I say.
“Are you a river junkie?”
I gaze out at the water, drawing in a huge inhale. “I have a bit of a thing for them. I feel this primal, almost ancient sort of connection to the Seine. Which is not entirely surprising, because I feel a sort of primal, almost ancient connection to Paris. Is that crazy?”
He shakes his head. “No. Paris has that effect on people. Paris has an effect on you. I told you the other day, you were made for Paris and Paris was made for you.”
“When my parents first took me there, I knew deep in my heart,” I say, tapping my chest fiercely, “that I would live there someday.”
“It spoke to you when you were younger?”
I tell him all about my connection to the city, how I feel at home there, at peace there. “Do you know that’s why I moved away from London? Because my marriage ended?”
His expression goes serious. “I don’t think I entirely knew why you left London, only that you were leaving shortly after I met you. And I enjoyed visiting you in Paris once you were there.”
“I had to get away from London. It contained all the memories of Jonathan and my time with him. There was only one place I wanted to go. I felt like Paris welcomed me with open arms. It helped me to heal.”
He runs a hand along my wrist. “Because it’s your home. It’s where you feel you belong. And you needed that.”
“Perhaps I did. The river was like my shrink.” I dip my head, a little shy, a little embarrassed. But it’s freeing, too, to tell him that.
“Is that so? You and the river talk to each other?” His voice is lighthearted. This is the Daniel who delights in fun and games.
“We have many, many conversations,” I say playfully, no longer embarrassed.
“Does it give good advice?”
“Sometimes it does,” I say with a coy shrug. “Sometimes it gives me stock tips. Sometimes it tells me who to bet on in the World Series.”
“Lucky you. I want to have your river. That’s why you’re such a financial wunderkind.”
I laugh as a breeze kicks up from the water, gusting through my hair, blowing it behind my shoulder. He reaches for the strands, tucking some over my ear. “Tell me more about why you loved Paris when you moved there a few years ago.”
As we both gaze out at the Rh?ne, I picture the Seine—the heart of my answer.
“I loved to walk across the bridges. I came to know all of them. How they made me feel. What they could do for me. As I was trying to make sense of what had happened in my marriage, I’d think and walk.
I’d wander across them, stop in the middle, rest my elbows on the railing,” I say, sliding down onto my elbows here as if to demonstrate.
“And then I would tell the river what made me sad.”
“Did the river say anything back to you?”
His question is wholly serious. So is my answer as I say, “I would pretend it would reply. I’d pretend it was listening.” I take a beat. “Maybe that sounds foolish.”
“It doesn’t sound foolish at all. Sounds like you needed it. Like it helped you get through a difficult time. And I can see that rivers are like that. They’re not as daunting as oceans. They feel like they could talk to us, right?”
He gets it. He gets me. “Like they have something to say. They feel, too, like they’ve seen more interesting things than the ocean, don’t you think?”
He moves his hand in front of him, wiggling it back and forth to imitate the river winding through the city.
“Rivers snake through cities. They spy on us. They know what we’re up to.
Maybe they know our darker secrets,” he says as something black flickers across his eyes.
Almost like he has a deep, dark secret, perhaps one he’s shared with a river.
Then he’s quiet, possibly drifting off to thoughts of those secrets.
I sense he still has them. I can hear their echoes in the words he doesn’t say, the way he sometimes quiets at the end of a sentence or a thought.
Leaving so much unsaid.
I’m not like that though. Now that I’ve opened up to him, I see no need to hold back. “My love of the river came from my parents,” I say with a contented sigh. “My dad was like that. He was the one who loved it and took me to it, and he was the one who said the river would talk to me.”
“You got that from him,” he says, wonder in his voice.
“I did.”
Daniel stares off in the distance across the Rh?ne, his profile inscrutable.
Is he thinking of his own family? I want to know what’s in that faraway gaze of his. I’m tempted to ask, when he turns back to me and says, “Do you ever see yourself living any place besides Paris?”
I shake my head. “It’s my home now. I’ve no reason to leave. What about you? What about London? For all intents and purposes, that’s your home base. Even though you’re really only there half the time.”
“I don’t seem to put down roots, do I? I’m constantly drawn to Paris though,” he says, his eyes going flirty, journeying over my body, letting me know that I’m one of the reasons he’s drawn to that city. My God, I hope I can keep being one of those reasons.
I want to tell him to stay in Paris. Don’t go back to London. Camp out, stay with me. But that’s dangerous. That’s so damn dangerous. We’re ending.
Even though the more we talk, the more it feels like we’re only just beginning.
“I suppose I don’t feel like I’ve had a home in a long time, honestly,” he says, his tone melancholy. “I don’t think I’ve really felt that way since my parents died. I’ve been all over the world since then.”
“College in the US with Cole,” I say, prompting him.
“Yes, then I lived in New York. And I’ve lived in Los Angeles. I’ve spent time in Las Vegas. I have a home in London, but I also like to be in Paris. I suppose I feel like I’m everywhere,” he says, a note of mourning in his voice. “And perhaps nowhere all at once.”
My heart squeezes at that wistful note from him. I brush my hand along his back. “Do you like that though? That nomadic life?”
He heaves a sigh, then shrugs. “Maybe it suits me.” He’s quiet again.
Is he wandering back in time? Is he a nomad because of his family? I’m torn between patience and pushing. He seems to like both. He seems to like when I take my time, but also when I ask him things too. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. “Do you say it suits you because your family is gone?”
His eyes squeeze shut. When he opens them, they’re dark again, those blue irises like hard gems. “Nothing will ever feel like home again,” he says, his tone icy but at the same time full of self-loathing.
The sound chills me and worries me. “You’re close with your parents, aren’t you?
” He shifts the conversation with a question.
I go with the changeup. “My dad sent me a text this morning. It was a picture of his dinner the night before.”
Daniel’s grin is electric, buoyant, and wonderful. Like that’s the best thing I could have ever received. “What did he have?” He sounds deliriously giddy.
“He had a saag paneer. He loves Indian food,” I say.
“I want to see it,” Daniel says, and there’s that desperate tone again.
I take out my phone, click on the screen, then find my messages. I show him the photo of my father’s dinner. “Here you go.”
Staring at the picture, he works his jaw over and over. “It’s so pedestrian. It’s so everyday,” he says, soft and full of wonder. “That’s what I love about it.”
My heart lurches toward him. In his words, I can hear all the unsaid things. All the wishes. He wishes he had a text from his parents about what they had for dinner.
He hands me my phone, and I put it away. I slide a palm along his arm, rubbing it up and down. “You still miss them.”
It’s not a question. It’s a statement of this immutable fact of his existence.
He draws a deep breath, then expels it like he’s letting it go across the river, like maybe the river is inhaling his breath.
“I miss them every day.” He turns to me, looks me square in the eye, and drops a bomb. “When I was seventeen, they were murdered.”