If they’d headed for different places, they were after different things. Alls would start over, finally. Better to be a nobody headed nowhere than to be a convict in Garland, surrounded by Kimbroughs and people like them.
But Grace was not going to sit and wait for Riley to find her. Whatever he wanted from her, he would have to find somewhere else. She trudged up the stairs and set her sweating glass down on her nightstand. She fumbled in her bag for the brown paper envelope and unwrapped the trillions, adding them to the scattering of diamonds that was already sparkling there on the desk. God, how they gleamed, even in the dark. She turned on her bedside lamp and sat there on the edge of her single mattress, staring at the big stones, like two bright eyes, looking at her and everything else.
“Your problem,” Riley had shouted during one of their fights, “is that you want everyone to think you’re so goddamn special, but you don’t even think you’re that special. No one is!”
“I’m not special,” she’d protested. “Please, I don’t think that at all.”
“EXACTLY!” he’d roared.
Grace sipped her drink.
She had just been looking for the most love, that was all. Like anything you believed to be scarce, you had to take it for yourself wherever you found it.
Lachaille would buy the trillions. Maxine Lachaille knew her well enough now; she might even take them for cash, though not for nearly as much as if Grace had had enough time to set them in something. Selling a naked diamond was nearly impossible, but Grace would have to try tomorrow and leave Paris straight after. It didn’t matter that Jacqueline knew Mme Lachaille, as long as Grace left right away. That was a guarantee, Grace decided, that she would really go.
She pulled down her suitcase and began to fill it. Her books would have to stay. Just clothes. She pulled her skirts and dresses off their hangers and dropped them in. She’d buy a train pass and start moving; that was the main thing. She listened to a woman outside chattering at her baby as she pushed a stroller along the bumpy sidewalk. It was dark. In the apartment across the street, the teenage boys were smoking pot and listening to drum solos.
Because of the drumming, she didn’t hear the knocking right away. But when the drums quieted, the knocking kept on.
Someone was knocking at the front door.
She looked out the window to the street below but saw no car. She tried to see around the awning over the front door, but she could see nothing.
No one ever knocked on the door. Freindametz’s daughter just barged in.
Riley. She had known it would happen just this way.
Grace sat on her bed and waited—for what, she didn’t know. If she went downstairs and opened the door, there he would be, her cheated husband who never broke a promise.
The knocking stopped.
Grace stood next to the window, looking out from where she couldn’t be seen. No one.
Then she heard the door open. The hinge squeaked and the sound hung there. Shoes. Slow, pausing, stopping, looking around.
On the stairs now.
It could be Hanna, or some disgruntled boyfriend of Freindametz’s daughter, looking for her. Was she sure Freindametz didn’t have a son? A husband. A handyman. Any man she did not know. The footsteps, though soft, were a man’s.
On her little writing desk was a cup of pens, some scissors, a sterling letter opener. She reached for the letter opener and shut it in her fist. She should have turned around but she was scared to.
In the hall.
He cleared his throat behind her and she knew, she knew, she knew.
“Grace,” he said. “Long time no see.”
27
Alls was taller than Grace remembered, and broader. His chest was deep and upright, not crouched and hollow like it used to be. She couldn’t yet stand to look at his face.
“It’s you,” he said. “I knew I would find you, but I still can’t believe I did.”
Grace stepped backward, but there was only wall behind her. Alls shut the door.
He took her hand in his and looked over her nails, her hot palms. She stared at his fingers, his knuckles, his wrist, the cuff of his sleeve. She couldn’t stand him touching her. She held tight to the letter opener in her other hand. She knew he’d seen it.
He dropped her hand and sat down on her bed. “You look exactly the same,” he said.
He flicked his eyes up at her impatiently. She sat down next to him, nearer her pillow, enough space for another person between them.
He took out a cigarette and offered it to her first. Grace shook her head and smoothed her skirt over her thighs. His were already splayed out carelessly. He rooted for a lighter in his jacket pocket. The weight on her narrow, lumpy mattress shifted and her body pitched toward him. She reached out to steady herself, trying not to touch him. She crossed her legs and pulled at the hem of her dress, like some schoolgirl at a babysitting interview, and he laughed, though exactly how he was laughing she couldn’t tell. He was a stranger.
“You didn’t think I would come,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Or, not alone.”
She saw the twitch of surprise in his neck.
“This isn’t what I thought Paris would look like,” he said.
“It’s only Paris in the municipal sense.”
“This room is very similar to the last bedroom we sat in together.” He patted the blanket on either side of him. “Little bed against the wall. One window to the street. Little desk, little chair.”
Grace felt like Alice, already little herself and shrinking to a crumb.
“A dorm room,” he said. “You came all the way over here to live in the same goddamn dorm room?” He nodded toward the window. “Cobblestones, I guess.”
He had lines around his eyes already, as if he had been squinting into the sun for years. But the sadness she used to see there was gone. She didn’t know what she saw instead. She had imagined this moment, a hundred variations on the wrong theme, for years, and now Alls had broken into her house and she didn’t think it was her place to ask why.
“How did you find me?” she asked him.
“It’s always how with you. Never why.”
“I can’t ask you that,” she said. “I don’t think I want to know.”
He stood up and went to her bookshelf, stooping to look over the titles. He went to her desk and picked up one of the trillions, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. “Still a magpie,” he said quietly. He turned toward her and she flinched.
“You think I came all this way to hurt you?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“You don’t know me anymore. I get that.” He shrugged and nodded toward her desk, toward the loose diamonds and piles of books under the poster of Petit Trianon that hung over her desk. “Is it possible you haven’t changed? That as different as I am, you’ve just been sitting up here in your little room, changing your hair but staying the same?”
She shook her head. “I’m not the same.”
“What,” he said, looking toward the diamonds again. “You steal those yourself?”
But stealing alone was a real difference, wasn’t it? She had grown up, if sideways. She raised her eyes to meet his. “I did.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I know what you must think of me,” she started.
“You can’t imagine,” he said.
“Where’s Riley?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not taking questions just yet.”
“Please tell me,” she begged him. “You don’t know what I—”
“I don’t?” he shook his head. He reached for her drink and when he saw that it was empty, he asked for his own. “Scotch?” he said in disbelief. “Benedict Arnold.”
“When in Rome, you’ll take any whiskey,” she said evenly. “Did you want a cup of tea?”
She needed him out of her room. He followed her downstairs to the kitchen table, where she poured them both a finger of Scotch.
“How was your day?” he said, as though they sat there often.
“Not my best,” she said.
“Why, what happened? Get caught with your hand in the till?”