“The work is better here,” I say.
“Yes,” Diana says. “It is.”
“I would need a structure.”
“Six months,” she says without hesitation.
“Paris-based. European dining coverage. Same editorial oversight. Same aliases. Same fact-checking. Same brutal honesty. We frame it as an expansion of the column, not a relocation announcement. You keep your independence. You keep your standards. You donotbecome the chef’s girlfriend who writes pretty things about Paris.”
The directness almost makes me laugh.
“Thank you for that terrifying phrasing.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I have not decided anything,” I reassure her, but also myself.
“I know,” Diana says.
“You’re proposing the door before admitting you want to walk through it.”
“That sounds like something I would do,” I say.
“It is exactly something you would do,” she replies.
I sit there with the phone to my ear and the Seine below the windows and the quiet knowledge that she is right. I have made the professional argument. I have given it structure, ethics, method, and editorial value. Every piece of it is real. So is Damien. That’s the part I have not known how to hold without feeling as if one truth weakens the other.
“I’ll think about it,” Diana says.
“Ok,” I say.
“And Serena?”
“Yes?”
“If you do this, do it because the work is better and because you want the life. Not because a man has gorgeous blue eyes and a beautiful kitchen.”
Despite everything, I smile. “It’s a very beautiful kitchen.”
“I am sure it is. You’re still not moving continents for appliances.”
“No,” I say.
“Good,” she says.
“Then call me when you stop pretending this is hypothetical. Otherwise, I’ll see you back in New York.”
The call ends, and I sit with the phone in my hand for a long time. I won’t mention this idea to Damien—not yet. Not until I’ve thought about what the implications of such an endeavor would represent.
***
The following evening, Damien makes dinner on the terrace. Nothing elaborate, he says, which means he has still thought about it for three hours. Grilled fish, warm beans, tomatoes that taste like they have been waiting all summer for this exact purpose, bread, butter, wine cold enough to make the glass sweat in the late light. The Seine runs gold below us, and the city shifts around the edges of evening with that careless Parisian confidence that makes beauty feel like a civic habit.
We eat without talking much at first. That has become one of the things I trust about him. Damien doesn’t fear silence. He lets it sit as if it belongs there. He only interrupts when there is something worth putting into it. I’m halfway through a second piece of bread when he says,
“What do you want to happen?”
My hand stills. Of course he asks it directly. Damien is many difficult things, but he does not beat around the bushes. I look at him across the terrace table. His sleeves are rolled. His hair is silvered by the last light. He watches me with the kind of focus that has always made evasion feel embarrassing.
