“Oh, you would not believe how very calm and controlled I am, even when I am about to lose my mind,” she said, keeping her voice light.
He looked sharply down at her as they threaded through the crowd toward the upstairs area with the gates.
At the gate area, the whole pitched ceiling was made out of glass. Planes circled and clouds scudded in the azure, Parisian sky.
Flicka had always loved the sky in Paris. Even when it was raining, the clouds roiled over the gorgeous architecture and hills. When the sky was as blue as now, her whole world lifted.
They found seats near their gate.
The enormous plane waited outside the glass walls, and a long tunnel snaked out to it. The gate agent, a tiny woman wearing a dark blue hijab scarf to match her British Airways uniform, was typing on her terminal as the time to board the flight neared.
Dieter asked, “Is there a problem?”
Flicka paused because once she broached this subject, there was no going back. She swallowed hard and said, “That’s a real passport, isn’t it?”
“I told you it was,” he said.
“You said that it was someone you knew through Rogue Security.”
Dieter looked down between his knees, bracing his forearms on his thighs. He had the grace to not answer with another lie.
“Dieter, whose passport is it?”
He looked around at the crowd around them. “Gretchen, my ex-wife. Alina’s mother.”
“You married a woman who looks almostexactlylike me?” She flipped the passport open to the front page, showing him the other woman’s birthdate because Flicka didn’t need to damn well look at it. “And she is six monthsyoungerthan I am when my stupid age upset you so much,andyou married her within a few months of leaving me?” The thin passport shook in her hand. “What the hell is going on?”
“It’s not like that.”
“I never understood why you dropped me like a damn rock and married someone else right away.”
He reached over and tried to take her fingers in his.
She snatched her hand back. “Don’t touch me.”
He nodded and folded his hands together around the other passport. “I left London because I thought it was the right thing to do, but leaving you nearly destroyed me. I couldn’t even drink it out with Wulfram, because what could I say? That I had been sleeping with his younger sister, betraying his trust when I was supposed to keep her safe from men exactly like me? That I was out of my mind because I’d left you when I shouldn’t have?”
Flicka heard thathe shouldn’t have left herand held tight to it, even though the rest of his speech made her want to shove his ex-wife’s passport right down his lying throat.
He said, “I was drunk in a bar one night. I saw a woman. I knew she wasn’t you. If you’d been there, I would have been on my knees in front of everyone begging your forgiveness, but I knew she was just some woman who looked uncannily like you.”
“Yeah.” Flicka stared at the picture of the woman’s face that so freakishly closely resembled her own. “No wonder Alina called me ‘Mama.’”
“I almost walked out the door when she did that.” Dieter’s head drooped so that he wasn’t looking at her, and he stared at the other Swiss passport still in his hands. “I picked Gretchen up and took her to a hotel, and the condom broke, or else I was so drunk that I didn’t put it on right. I don’t know. We were both drunk as shit. But it broke. We both knew it the next day. I offered to get her a morning-after pill, but she said no, she was on birth control pills anyway. She called me a couple of weeks later, saying that the pregnancy test was positive.” He sucked in a deep breath. “I took responsibility. We met a few times after that, and I offered to marry her and try to do the right thing for the baby.”
Flicka stared at the birthdate on that damn passport. “What would you have done if I had gotten pregnant?”
“Married you, right away.”
Flicka sat back in her seat. “You couldn’t have. There’s a month-long waiting period in all of the UK.”
“Not in Gibraltar,” he said. “You register and get a license, and it’s valid right away. You just have to stay the night before or after in a hotel.”
“You found that out because of Gretchen,” she said.
“I met Gretchen in Chicago. We eloped to Las Vegas. I researched wedding laws in the UK after we forgot the condom that one time.”
“You wouldn’t have married me,” she said, shaking her head. “You couldn’t wait to leave London. You didn’t even take any of your clothes from our flat. You walked away with nothing and boarded a flight to Chicago at Heathrow.”
