The server smiles. “That’s a Lyon problem.”
“It seems to be one of the better ones.”
“Yes,” the server says.
“We have worse, but we do not serve them with bread.”
I laugh softly, and the sound feels easy.
The server pours the coffee, then gestures toward the window with her hand.
“The rain has stopped. You should walk before it starts again.”
“That sounds like advice.”
“It is,” the server says. “Good advice.”
“I’ll take it.”
After I pay, I step outside into the damp evening. The street shines beneath the lamps. The air smells like wet stone, river water, coffee, and butter escaping from kitchens still in service. I walk back toward the hotel without opening my umbrella because the rain has become mist, and mist feels less like weather than a city breathing against your skin.
My phone stays in my bag. It doesn’t buzz again. For the first time, I’m not waiting for it to. The quiet follows me back to the hotel, into the elevator, through the narrow hallway, and into my room, where my suitcase lies open at the foot of the bed with the practical impatience of a thing that knows I will be leaving again in the morning.
Lyon has been good to me. Not gentle. I don’t think cities like Lyon are built for gentleness. It gives in richer ways; butter in a pan. Rain on old stone. A waiter taking the menu away because he has already decided what the room knows better than I do. A bowl of sauce so clear in its purpose that I write the review before the memory has a chance to soften at the edges.
I pack slowly that night, not because there is much to pack, but because I am not in a hurry to step out of this version of myself. Three cities in, I have started to remember the particular relief of motion. A room, a meal, a train, a street, a sentence. Then another. Then another. The body learns again that departure is not always loss. Sometimes it is simply the next door opening.
The next morning, I leave Lyon with my notebook fuller than I expected and my phone quieter than it has been in weeks. I do not mistake that for resolution. Ethan has always understood timing. A man who works in money knows when to enter a market, when to wait, and when to make a move because the silence has begun to do some of the work for him.
He can wait.
So can I.
Chapter Six
Serena
PARIS
The train to Paris is nearly full. A woman across from me reads a paperback with a cracked spine and eats almonds from a paper bag. A man in a navy suit types with the grim concentration of someone either writing an email or ending a life. Outside the window, France moves past in soft greens and pale golds, fields giving way to towns, towns giving way to the first outer edges of the city.
I try to work, but the closer we get to Paris, the less cooperative my mind becomes. That irritates me because I know better than to romanticize arrival.
Paris is not magic. It is expensive, inconvenient, over-photographed, frequently rude, and fully aware of its own face. It has bad coffee in beautiful places and excellent food in rooms that do not care if you find them. It can make a woman feel chosen while charging too much for a hotel breakfast. It is not waiting for anyone.
Yet when the train pulls in, when I step onto the platform with my bag over my shoulder and the warm air of late Junemoving through the station, something in me still lifts. I hate that a little, but not enough to resist it.
The taxi line outside Gare de Lyon is long, sunstruck, and filled with people pretending not to assess one another’s luggage. I stand behind a man arguing softly into his phone in Italian and in front of a couple studying a map with the grim devotion of people determined to suffer together. The air smells like warm concrete, diesel, perfume, coffee, and the faint metallic breath of trains.
When my taxi finally pulls away from the curb, Paris opens in pieces, a café terrace with every chair facing outward because Parisians understand that other people are the view. A woman in a white shirt and red lipstick riding a bicycle with a baguette sticking out of her tote like a cliché that has earned the right to exist. A florist misting peonies beneath a striped awning. A man in sunglasses smoking outside a pharmacy with the exact posture of someone auditioning for his own autobiography.
The Seine flashes between buildings, silver-green and indifferent. I lean back against the seat as the driver glances at me in the rearview mirror. He’s middle-aged, with close-cropped hair, a square jaw, and the weary eyes of a man who has driven too many visitors toward their ideas of Paris.
“First time?” he asks in French.
“No,” I answer in French.
He looks pleased. “Then you know traffic is terrible.”
