Chapter Ten
Serena
The next morning, I donotgo to Marché d’Aligre. That’s discipline.
I go to a bakery near the Canal Saint-Martin, eat a chausson aux pommes still warm enough to soften the paper bag, and spend the late morning walking through Belleville because I need a neighborhood that does not know I am waiting for anything. I take notes on a tiny place with excellent coffee, a storefront selling spices in open sacks, and a Vietnamese lunch spot where the broth is clearer than most people’s intentions. I write for three hours in the afternoon, answer Diana’s comments on Lyon, and pretend the tarragon on the desk has not become a small green reminder of a moment I try to diminish.
My resolve crumbles however, because by the following morning, I am back at Marché d’Aligre—not accidentally—I’m not insulting either of us by pretending otherwise. The sky is clearer than it was two days ago, with a pale blue openness that promises heat later and gives the market a brief, merciful softness before the day hardens. The vendors are already louder, already deeper into their work. Crates stack higher. Apricots glow like small suns. A fishmonger lays crushed ice over his display with a flat metal scoop, his movements rhythmic andsharp. The coffee stall is crowded, and the woman in the red scarf gives me one look before pouring my coffee without asking.
“You came back,” she says.
“I did,” I say.
“For the market or the trouble?” she asks.
I pause with the cup halfway to my mouth.
Her expression does not change.
“The market,” I say.
She hums as if she accepts lies only when they are well dressed.
“Of course.”
I drink the coffee. It burns my tongue again. I move through the stalls slower than I did the first morning, not because I need less, but because I am listening to the market differently. The first visit to a market is about orientation. The second is about trust. You learn which vendor remembers faces, which stall changes the front layer of fruit before the old stock beneath it, which people are kinder before seven and which ones become kinder only after they have sold enough to feel generous.
I buy figs because they are ripe enough to demand it. I buy a little round of goat cheese from the same woman who corrected me last time and now corrects me with slightly less devastation. I buy cherries I do not need. I do not go to the herb stall immediately.
That would be obvious.
I make it fifteen minutes.
Then I go.
He is not there.
The disappointment is small and sharp enough to embarrass me.
I tell myself that is useful information, then immediately decide I do not want the information and reach for basil with more focus than basil requires.
“You are going to punish the leaves,” a voice says behind me.
My hand stills. I close my fingers lightly around the basil stem, then let it go before I bruise it and prove him right.
When I turn, Damien is standing at the edge of the stall with a canvas bag over his forearm, no coat, no pretense of having arrived by accident. The morning light catches the silver at his temples. He is wearing a pale blue linen shirt today, sleeves rolled, collar open, the fabric soft from heat and movement. His dark trousers are simple, his shoes practical, his posture infuriatingly at ease.
He looks like a man who has slept. I find that irritating because I have not done so with any particular success.
“You’re late,” I say.
His brows lift. “Was there an appointment?”
“No.”
“Then I am exactly on time,” he says.
“That is a very convenient philosophy.”
