A hospital.
The thought arrived quietly but refused to leave.
I’d seen the paperwork already. The small clinic where she’d been taken after the accident. The sterile words describing efforts made, injuries sustained.
Final times recorded in neat, unforgiving handwriting.
My stomach tightened.
I wasn’t ready.
But maybe readiness didn’t matter.
I picked up the bouquet, standing slowly, the paper crinkling softly in my hands.
Hopeful things had shown me a little about who Rose was here. The places she’d returned to. The beauty she’d chosen to surround herself with. The life she’d built quietly, deliberately, without asking permission from anyone who might have told her not to.
And for the first time since I’d arrived, I let myself consider something else.
I didn’t have to leave right away.
My editor back home had already offered flexibility—an open-ended freelance contract, stories I could file on my own schedule as long as they were good. She’d joked, half-serious, that writing from Paris would probably improve my copy. I’d laughed at the time, brushing it off as impossible.
Now, standing here with Rose’s bouquet in my hands, it didn’t feel impossible at all.
I could stay. For weeks, maybe longer. Learn the rhythms of the city the way Rose had. Walk the streets she’d walked, sit in the quiet places she’d chosen, write in the margins of a life that suddenly felt less distant than I’d imagined.
Time. Real time. Not a rushed visit measured in return flights and obligations waiting impatiently across an ocean.
The thought loosened something in my chest.
I could get to know who my sister had been here without tearing through her life like an intruder. Without forcing answers before I was ready to face them. I could let Paris reveal her slowly, the way it seemed to do everything else.
Still, some things couldn’t be postponed.
Hope had carried me this far. It had softened the city, made grief bearable, reminded me that Rose had lived fully here.
But it wouldn’t explain the end.
The paperwork. The officials. The unanswered questions. The accident that had stolen her away without warning or goodbye.
Those waited.
I took a steadying breath, clutching the bouquet a little tighter.
I’d given myself permission to linger. To breathe. To imagine a life here that didn’t end the moment I finished my sister’s affairs.
But before I let myself settle into that possibility, I needed to face the truth.
The hopeful parts had come first.
Now, it was time to learn how she’d died.
I checked the address again on my phone.
The clinic wasn’t far.
Tomorrow, I told myself.
