“Good. You’ll need it. We’re about to start our descent.”
He offers a smile, but it’s forced, uncomfortable. I realize he feels like we can’t discuss any of this. Even with Sally in the restroom. Even with Ryan in the cockpit. He wants to deliver us to Paris in one piece, and he wants to be done with his part of this.
Except for this. The one thing that he has to convey to me. The message he was instructed to deliver.
“So… will this be your first time at La Réserve?”
I look up at him. That’s where we stayed during our honeymoon—Owen and I. That’s where we stayed during those magical six nights.
It’s a hotel in the 8th arrondissement. Small and intimate. So smallthat you could miss the hotel entirely, if you didn’t know where you were going to look for it. Our last night in Paris, Owen said that we should make it a tradition—our tradition—to spend our anniversaries there.We’ll come back, he said.I promise you.
Then again, he promised me a lot of things.
“No,” I tell Daniel. “Not the first.”
Before I can ask for any other details, Sally steps out of the bathroom and Daniel nods in her direction.
“You may want to wake your daughter,” he says to me. He holds his gaze on Sally. “We’ll be on the ground soon enough.”
“Thank you,” I say. “For everything.”
“Pleasure,” he says.
Then, as though we are strangers—which, in a way, we are—he walks away.
Forty Keys
“Not the way I thought I’d see the Eiffel Tower for the first time,” Bailey says. “But okay…”
“Pretty spectacular, no?”
She nods. “Not bad.”
We are in the back of a taxi, on the way to the hotel, Paris laid out before us, its beauty like a magic trick: the Eiffel Tower, and the bridges glistening in the midday sun, the museums along the river.
The taxi turns down Avenue Matignon and drops us in front of Hôtel Le Bristol—a historic hotel not far from the Champs-Élysées. From the Arc de Triomphe. It’s a larger hotel than La Réserve—more well known—and feels like a safe place to be dropped. If someone is monitoring where we went from the airport—if someone manages to figure out we are people that should be monitored.
I pay the driver and we walk through Le Bristol’s revolving doors, past the six doormen and into the magnificent lobby. Antique chandeliers and lavish white tile floors—classically French architecture in every direction.
We head through the lobby, and past the parlor for breakfast and high tea—before circling back around, slipping out one of the lobby’s side doors.
I start walking quicker, weaving us through the crowds, in and out of traffic, toward where we are going—a half a mile down the street to Avenue Gabriel, and the small entrance that will lead us into La Réserve.
“Hey, don’t turn around now, but…” Bailey says as we move at a brisk clip down the street. “There’s a guy behind us, with a beard… black hat, green army jacket… I think he is following us.”
I feel my heart pick up a beat, turn back to take a peek in his direction. I pretend like I’m looking at a store across the street, but watch him out of my peripheral view.
He is too far behind us for me to make out his face, but I see his thick beard. I see his jacket. He does seem to be moving at a steady clip, weaving in and out of people as quickly as we are.
“When did you first see him?”
“He walked out of the hotel the same time we did,” she says. “Or… right after we did. I’m sure.”
I nod, not doubting Bailey on that. She has become schooled in sensing when something feels off—when someone does. I have done my best to help school her. But, even if she is correct, there could still be a million reasons why this man is rushing down the Paris streets in the same direction we are. A million reasons that have nothing to do with us.
Still, when a door to a boutique opens, I push past the woman walking out—Bailey and I moving inside quickly, ducking behind a clothes rack. It’s a children’s boutique—pink and yellow tutus standing between us and the street.
We stay out of sight. And wait for him to pass. I want to see what he does, while we are no longer in view. Is he trying to find us? Or is he moving as quickly as he can in whatever direction he is going?
