To keep myself sane, I revisited the landmarks from that first trip. The Eiffel Tower, standing like a rusted monument to ambition. Notre-Dame, scaffolding still clinging to its bones. The Louvre, all glass and grandeur and tourists taking selfies in front of art they'd never actually look at.
I tried to recapture that feeling from when I was fourteen. That sense of possibility. That belief that the world was big enough to hold whatever version of yourself you decided to be.
But it was impossible.
The world wasn't that big. And the version of myself I'd tried to become? It was cracking at the seams.
Still, I kept moving. Kept painting.
Yeah. Painting.
I'd picked it up years ago, on a deployment that stretched too long, in a country I couldn't name. One of the local contractors had been an artist—watercolors, mostly. He'd shown me the basics, and something about it had stuck. The focus. The control. The way you could take chaos and turn it into something deliberate.
I painted in private. No one knew. Not my teammates. Not the Agency guys. It was mine, and I wanted to keep it that way.
In Paris, I'd found a little shop in the Marais that sold supplies. The owner was an older man, soft-spoken, with paint-stained hands and a habit of recommending colors I'd never have picked on my own.
I went there twice a week. Bought canvases, brushes, oils in shades that reminded me of the city—burnt umber, Prussian blue, cadmium yellow.
The routine helped. Gave me something to anchor to.
And then there was the woman.
I noticed her the first time at the café near the river.
She'd walked in like she belonged there, all long lines and quiet confidence. Dark hair, unstyled, falling over her shoulders. A camera slung across her body like an extension of her arm. She ordered something in French that sounded easy, natural, like she'd been doing it her whole life.
She wasn't trying to be noticed. That's what caught my attention.
Most people, they broadcast themselves. They want you to look. But she moved through the world like she was cataloging it, not performing in it.
I watched her sit by the window, notebook open, pen moving slowly across the page. She didn't take pictures. Didn't check her phone. Just sat there, present in a way most people had forgotten how to be.
I told myself it was nothing. A coincidence. Paris was full of beautiful women who knew how to exist without apology.
But then I saw her again.
And again.
At first, I chalked it up to patterns. Same neighborhood, same routines. But the third time—standing across the street from the paint shop, camera raised, shooting the façade—my instincts kicked in.
The people I was running from weren't above sending a beautiful woman after me. They'd done worse.
So, I did what I always did at work.
I looked her up.
It wasn't hard. A photographer in Paris, young, American, probably here on some kind of program. I pulled what I could from open sources, cross-referenced faces, ran her through databases I technically wasn't supposed to have access to anymore.
She was clean.
No red flags. No connections. Just a woman with a camera, trying to make something of herself in a city that didn't care.
I should have stopped there.
But I didn't.
Because once I knew she wasn't a threat, something shifted. I started hoping to see her. Started adjusting my route just slightly, telling myself it was coincidence when our paths crossed.
