“I’m safe to tell, if you wanted to bounce it off someone. I don’t even know your real name, so it’s not like I could go and narc on you to your friends or parents or something.”
Maxence laughed at that. “My parents are both dead, so I shan’t worry about you telling on me to them.”
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to bring it up. I knew about your dad, but not your mom.”
“I’m not happy that they’re dead, but I’d only met them a few times that I can remember. I remember my mother being around more when I was very young, but they sent me to boarding school when I was five for kindergarten. I came home during the summers, but there were people there to see to my needs, not my parents.”
Dree stopped walking and tugged on his arm to stop him. “Your parents didn’t raise you? Then what’s even the point of having kids?”
Maxence did not feel the need to tell her again because he didn’t want her to know that. “Some people are different that way, I suppose.”
“Are you going to do that to your kids?” she asked him, and he would have described her expression asaghast.
“No, I’m not. The boarding school I attended, Le Rosey, kept me off the streets and provided a world-class education. I met my friends Arthur and Casimir there, who are closer to me than my brother. When there is a problem, I call them. When I dropped out of sight a few days ago, the pal—” He faked a coughing fit.“Police,the Monagasquaypolicecalled Casimir and Arthur rather than my brother. Le Rosey gave them to me, I suppose.”
“Sounds great.”
“I wouldneversend a child there.”
“Oh. It was rough?”
“It was rough,” he agreed. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“You can talk to me. I would never tell anybody about whatever is messing with you. Beyond the fact that I don’t know any of your friends, I don’t tell on people, jerkface ex-boyfriends who turned out to be drug dealers not included.”
Maxence laughed again. She made him laugh. “Our exes seem to be giving us trouble this week.”
“Ah, you have ex trouble, too, huh? It seems to be going around.”
Maxence looked at the sphinxes and the hall. On a school field trip to see this very room at the Louvre when he’d been in the upper school, he, Arthur, and Casimir thought the world would be all right, and Max was already noticing Flicka von Hannover.
He said, “Everything seems to be reminding me of my previous girlfriend, Flicka. She was married in Paris just a few months ago. Her wedding reception for her family and friends was here.”
“Yeah, you said a friend of yours had held her reception here. I’ll bet that cost more than a cake from Smitty’s Grocery Store served in the church basement.”
“The lobby where we came in was set with banquet tables, a dance floor, and musicians. The seating, dining tables, and chairs, took up all the balconies and extended back into the exhibition halls. It was simply splendid. She did an amazing job planning it.”
Dree slipped her fingers down his arm and held his hand. “Regretting that you didn’t stand up and say something when the preacher asked if anybody knew why these two people should not be joined in Holy Matrimony?”
Maxence winced. “Actually, yes, but not for myself. It’s obvious that I was not Flicka’s first choice, and I would wager that I wasn’t her second choice or even her third.”
“It’s kinda weird, the way you talk about it like that. In America, two people date for a while, fall in love, and decide to get married. You’re almost talking about it like she had the church booked, so she lined up the guys in order and took the first guy in line, but there was a whole line of guys who wanted to lock her down. It sounds almost medieval or like Jane Austen.”
Max was shaking his head at her, but she was right. “I hang out with some old-fashioned people.”
“I grew up the old-fashioned way, too. Around the sheep farm, we sewed our own clothes, canned vegetables and berries from the garden for the winter, fed our leftovers to the chickens and gathered the eggs, and sewed our old clothes into quilts.”
That was not the old-fashioned way that Maxence had grown up, but he wasn’t going to tell Dree that.
She said, “I’m good at sewing and quilting. I was working on an appliqué top before Francis stole everything. I wonder what happened to it.” She turned back to him. “Anyway,Flicka.”
Maxence gazed around the room, inspecting the stolen artifacts. “She and I dated for about a year, quite a while ago. It was on and off, but I felt like we’d end up together. There was always an edge to our relationship for me, that the long-term was the point of it.”
“Oh, yeah. I get that. When I was first dating Francis, only the first couple of dates I felt like, hey, this is a date, and now it’s over. After a month or two, it seemed inevitable that I was going to marry him.”
“Yes, that’s it. Our relationship and marriage feltinevitable,but it wasn’t.”
Dree sighed and touched her chest. “Yeah, I get it.”
