“I didn’t think she did it because the photo had you in it,” I say honestly. It’s the only reason I ever dismissed Simone.
Aubert’s lips twitch. “She wants you that badly.”
I want to smash something. I want to call in every favor, reach into the old boys’ club, and have Simone quietly erased from polite society. I want to find Tara and beg until she forgives me.
But I don’t even know where she is. Philadelphia? Los Angeles? Somewhere else entirely?
Aubert watches me, his expression softening. “Papa, the way Tara is with you—it’s real. Don’t lose her to pride.”
“It’s not pride, Aubert. It’s….” I gesture around the office, to the polished wood, the inherited portraits, the suffocating weight of lineage. “This world crushes people.”
“Not Tara.”
“No.” The truth lands heavy in my chest. “Icrushed her.”
I close my eyes, and the weight of what I did—and everything I failed to do—presses down on me.
“Papa,” Aubert says quietly, “bring her back.”
“I don’t even know where she is.”
He hesitates, licking his lips. “She’s in Los Angeles.”
My head snaps up. “How do you know that?”
He swallows, a little sheepish. “Ah…her sister is on Instagram. I follow her.”
I narrow my eyes.
Aubert grins. “What? Marisol posts everything. Tara’s working at her father’s restaurant. It’s called Mi Tierra. It’s in Boyle Heights.”
He unlocks his phone and hands it to me. I hungrily go through the photos.
Tara. Laughing behind a counter, sunlight in her hair, wearing an apron.
A painful knot tightens beneath my ribs. I haven’t seen her in forever, and now, even through a screen, my heart remembers what it means to live.
“Ah… I’d like to come along,” Aubert says, a little self-conscious but bright-eyed with hope. “You know, to check out UCLA and USC. Application deadlines are coming up soon.”
I don’t have to think about it, not anymore. I’ve always known what I have to do. Until now, I just didn’t know how to go about it.
I pick up my phone and call my secretary. When she answers, I say, “Two tickets, Juliette, to Los Angeles, as soon as possible. One for Aubert and one for me.” When she asks about when we’ll return to Paris, I look at my son and reply, “Open-ended, please.”
She asks a few more questions about hotel accommodations. I advise her to consider the proximity of our lodgings to a restaurant called Mi Tierra in Boyle Heights.
I ask to meet Simone at her house, the one where I lived only two years ago, the house that still feels like a prison.
She played me like a fool. She destroyed Tara. I let her.
Shame scalds me, thick and choking. The memory of Tara’s tear-streaked face, her desperate insistence that she hadn’t betrayed me, it brings me to my knees.
I didn’t believe her.
I didn’t trust her.
I cast her out.
“Gustave.” Simone gives me air kisses when her butler leads me into the living room.
