1
ELLA
Paris didn’t feel romantic.
Not when I’d come to close out my sister’s life instead of living my own.
It felt alert.
I noticed it the moment I stepped out of the car—how the city seemed awake in a way New York never quite was.
It wasn’t louder or faster. Just sharper, like it was paying attention back.
The air was cool and damp, the kind that settled into your lungs and stayed there, and the street smelled like rain and metal and something faintly sweet I couldn’t place.
Rose, my beloved big sister, had died here.
That fact followed me out of the car and onto the sidewalk, heavy and immediate, like a hand at my back. A car accident, sudden enough to make every conversation we’d ever postponed feel obscene in hindsight. Sudden enough that I still half-expected my phone to buzz with her name lighting up the screen, demanding to know why I hadn’t texted back yet.
The city didn’t care.
Cars slid past without slowing. People moved around me with practiced ease, brushing shoulders, talking over one another, living. Paris hadn’t paused for Rose, and it wasn’t about to pause for me.
I stood there longer than I needed to, my suitcase at my side, coat unbuttoned, blonde hair already frizzing in the damp air. I let myself feel it—the wrongness of standing upright in a place where she had died. The wrongness of being alive at all when she wasn’t.
Then the driver unloaded my bag, muttered something in French I barely registered, and disappeared into traffic without ceremony.
That, somehow, steadied me.
No condolences. No careful looks. No one lowering their voice.
Paris didn’t ask for my grief. It didn’t offer comfort. It simply kept going, daring me to do the same.
Rose would have liked that.
We had always been close—close in the way sisters are when they grow up sharing space and secrets. In New York, we talked constantly. Not the polite check-ins people mistake for intimacy, but real conversations—late-night calls, half-formed thoughts, the unfiltered truth. I knew when something was off with her long before anyone else did.
I was the first to notice when her work trips to France began to stretch. A few extra days at first. Then a week. Then a month. Then explanations that grew vague around the edges. She sounded distracted when we spoke, like part of her attention was always somewhere else—somewhere across an ocean I couldn’t see.
Randy hadn’t seemed to notice.
He was a nice guy. Steady, reliable, proud of his wife in the way that didn’t require too many questions. He trusted Rosecompletely. Trusted the marriage. Trusted the version of her he saw every day.
I loved him for that. And I hated myself a little for knowing better.
Something else had Rose’s attention. I could hear it in the pauses, in the way her voice softened when she talked about Paris, in how quickly she changed the subject when I pressed. I told myself I was imagining it. That it wasn’t my place. That she’d tell me when she was ready.
She never did.
Now, standing here with my suitcase in my hand, I wished I had asked harder. Confronted her. Forced the truth into the open before it could calcify into silence. Whatever Rose had been chasing—or whatever had found her here—I would never hear it from her lips.
Showing up in Paris to find out for myself was the only option left.
I dragged my suitcase inside the building and climbed the stairs, the narrow stairwell echoing faintly with each step. My hand skimmed the banister, my mind cataloging details because that was how I stayed upright when everything else tilted—the chipped paint, the uneven steps, the smell of old stone and cleaning solution.
The apartment key was heavier than it should have been.
I unlocked the door and stepped inside.
