Rose and I had listened.
Until Rose hadn’t.
“We’ll talk later,” I said gently. “I’m going to head out soon. Start … looking around.”
“Call us again soon,” my mother said quickly.
“I will.”
We exchanged goodbyes, and the line went dead.
I stared at my phone for a long moment before setting it down.
Good parents. Slightly odd. Deeply loving. And maybe a little afraid of the parts of life you couldn’t control.
Maybe Rose and I had inherited that fear—and learned too late how suffocating it could become.
I wondered what might have happened if she’d been braver in the ways that mattered. If she’d sat across from Randy at their kitchen table and told him the truth instead of protecting him from it. Told him she wasn’t unhappy exactly—but she wasn’t fulfilled either. That safety had begun to feel like a cage. That something in her had woken up and refused to go back to sleep.
If that was, in fact, what had happened.
Randy would have been devastated. I knew that. He would have tried to fix it, to adjust, to become whatever he thought she needed. He would have asked for time, for patience, for another chance to make the life they’d built feel right again.
And maybe that would have been kinder than disappearing into a second life across an ocean.
Or maybe it would have been unbearable.
Some truths didn’t survive daylight. Some desires shriveled when forced to justify themselves. I could imagine Rose knowing that—knowing that whatever had found her here in Paris only worked in secrecy, only stayed alive because it wasn’t asked to explain itself.
I hated that she’d felt trapped between hurting Randy and denying herself something that made her feel whole. Hated that she’d chosen silence instead of honesty. But standing there now,I couldn’t pretend I didn’t understand the impulse. Courage wasn’t just about telling the truth. Sometimes it was about admitting you wanted something you couldn’t make sense of yet.
I finished my coffee, showered quickly, and dressed with more intention than necessary: dark jeans, boots, a soft sweater, coat thrown over the top. Armor disguised as normalcy.
On Rose’s dresser, the small pile of things I’d noticed the night before waited. Receipts. A metro ticket. And two ticket stubs to a theater across town.
I picked them up again.
Why had she kept them?
On impulse, I slipped them into my pocket.
An hour later, I stepped back onto the street. Morning sunlight painted the buildings gold, the air crisp enough to sting my lungs. People moved with purpose—commuters, delivery drivers, couples arguing softly over directions.
Paris felt … promising.
Which felt almost obscene, given why I was here.
The theater turned out to be tucked along a quieter street, its facade elegant but understated. Posters advertised upcoming productions I couldn’t read quickly enough to understand. The doors were locked, the lobby dark.
Of course. Too early.
Still, curiosity pulled me closer. I peered through the glass, catching glimpses of velvet seats and gilded trim. Something intimate about the space tugged at me.
A side door creaked open behind me.
I jumped, spinning.
A woman in her fifties stepped out, broom in hand, eyeing me curiously. She said something in rapid French.
