I instinctively turned us back toward the Seine and our pace slowed to a stroll down a typical Parisian street, flanked by a series of beautiful six-story limestone buildings. Each, connected to its neighbor, featured long windows with wrought iron detailing and a tall, sloping slate roof. The mansard roofs had always reminded me of hats—and in this neighborhood, expensive hats. I said as much.
“Hats?” Mat studied them. “I like that.” He dropped his wandering gaze from the rooftops back to the trees dotting the sidewalk. I savored the interest and delight in his eyes. Mat was seeing what I felt—the beauty of a completely and utterly French moment with a broad cobblestone sidewalk, tony shops, and expensive cafés. No one had their cell phone out. It felt almost outside time as everyone appeared present, savoring the city and the simple joy of ending a workday.
As we strolled, I shared with Mat how much I had loved Paris, and how I had forgotten that. New York crowded me, hemmed me, and kept me walking faster than I liked. Boston, while feeling like home, never let me feel settled. I was always striving. London, in the short time I’d been there, intimidated me with its history and secrets. But Paris? Despite the fast pace of traffic, Paris felt like a dance with all the pieces moving in a complex choreography. Paris felt like warm butter spreading in the sun. Smoother, silkier. I breathed slower and, tonight, I felt comfortable in my own skin.
He laughed at my descriptions, but as the evening light hit the buildings on the other side of the river, warming the cream stone to a rose pink, I sensed he felt it along with me. He grew quiet. His smile softened.
No longer chasing answers at the Police Prefecture, I let Mat’s train admission wash over me. It filled me with a sense of effervescent wonder. It wasn’t so much that he’d once loved me; it was that he once saw me, knew me—not some “pretend version” I’d tried to create—and had loved me still. In many ways, I figured it was best I hadn’t known back then, as I might have ruined it. For I never could have believed back then that I was enough. As he said, I could not have accepted that another “may simply believe we are.” But now I knew with a deep conviction, I wanted to try. I wanted to try to break that generational resistance to trusting, feeling, relaxing, being . . . loving.
I wanted to reach out and somehow share all this, but his confession had wrought an equally powerful yet opposite reaction in him. He kept his eyes averted, his head turned away. It felt as if he now chased the wonder of Paris and the evening to avoid the more complicated reality of me.
Mat pointed beyond the bridge to the Place du Carrousel and the Louvre. “Do we have time for a detour?”
“This is all a detour. The restaurant’s behind us.” I laughed and continued walking. “Yes, we have time.”
We crossed the bridge and found ourselves at the edge of the famous Tuileries Gardens at the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, across the street from the Louvre’s pyramid.
Mat gestured to the Arc. “Did you know this one was built before the one on the Champs-élysées?”
I kept my face blank. Even if I’d known, I wouldn’t have said. The gleam in his eye told me this was important to him.
He continued, “The Champs-élysées Arc honors those who fought and died in the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and was completed in 1836. This one is about half its size and was finished earlier, in 1808. It celebrates Napoleon’s victories from his 1807 campaigns.”
“You’re well informed.”
“I’ve been writing about memorials for years. How we view them. What they mean across time. I’m still trying to break into that public forum.” He looked down at me. “We need to talk about the article.”
“Now?” I asked.
Mat opened his mouth. I could tell from his expression that work was his next safe landing spot. Mid-exhale, he changed his mind. “Later is fine. Let’s enjoy Paris.”
I led him around the Louvre to the right, following the Seine, and soon reached the Pont Neuf bridge. Paris’s oldest bridge surprises people. It surprised Mat. It was simpler than he expected, and more beautiful. That made me smile.
He pulled at my hand to stop midway across the bridge. “I forget how north we are, even here. It’s after eight and the sun has a long way to go before it’s gone.”
“I’m glad.” I rested my hands on the stone wall. “If we’d come out of that building in the dark, it would have felt even more depressing.”
I needed the sun. I needed a gentle ending to our journey to find Caro. Darkness would have been abrupt, and mirrored how I felt about our search. Because I couldn’t help it—I was sad. My expectations had grown far beyond our abilities. It was too far to leap—and I’d missed the landing.
“It’s not your job,” my mom had said when I outlined my plan to find answers last Sunday. “It was never your fault,” she had assured me this morning.
She was right on both counts, but when are emotions rational? If what had started a domino chain of pain, retreat, and dysfunction could somehow be reversed or reimagined, then couldn’t a domino chain of hope replace and even heal it? That’s how high I had aimed—because the corollary to Mat’s statement that history is subjective meant that we could change it, by shifting our perspective.
It meant my dream wasn’t impossible. If our perceptions changed our reality, our minds could also adapt to something new. As Mom had more than implied—I could stop being a prisoner of a past I hadn’t understood, because I no longer imagined myself to be one.
Standing on the Pont Neuf, I began to wonder if it was possible. Not to change my father, but to fundamentally change me. Could I reach for something new, like I had here all those years ago? This time, could I hang on to it? Not play a role, but grow into something new. I glanced to Mat, wondering if it had already begun.
“You aren’t the woman I fell in love with.” Caden had been right. I shed the courage, the optimism, the joie de vivre, I found in Paris like a borrowed coat and shrugged on the familiar, the heavy, and the ponderous, simply because I didn’t understand I had a choice.
Now this new lightness teased me. I could almost feel it covering me like Schiaparelli’s soft—and as Caro called them, “free and comfortable”—knits all those years ago.
“You’re awfully quiet.” Mat leaned against the wall next to me, but not with me. At the Archives in Kew and the Police Prefecture, our shoulders had touched. With our focus no longer outside us, I missed the closeness. Mat maintained distance now.
“I am, but I’m okay.”
“What’s that?”
I looked down. I’d been unaware I was playing with the gold heart around my neck. I held it out to him. “Do you remember the necklaces mentioned when they turned sixteen? This was Margaret’s. Caro’s actually. They traded.”
“No way.” He placed his fingers beneath it. “It’s so delicate. Where’d you find it?”
“Mom gave it to me this morning. She said my grandmother would have wanted me to have it.”
“I agree.” Mat smiled and released the heart. It dropped back into place, warm against my skin. “You probably know her better than anyone now. Except me, of course.” He winked.