Juliette felt like someone had poured hot water down the back of her robe. “What is that supposed to mean? She’s my daughter. She’s Lucie Foulon!”
He blinked at her as if her words didn’t make sense. “Of course she is. Who else would she be?”
She waved her hands in exasperation. How could he not understand what she was saying? “She’s not old enough to be dating, first of all. And that boy is probably the one encouraging her to paint. You know that, don’t you? How can you condone this when you know it’s not the future I want for her?”
“And what future is that, Juliette? You’d prefer she stay a little girl forever, that she move into the bookstore with you? That she continue living in the past?” Arthur snapped the newspaper back up, indicating that his side of the conversation was over. “It might be the life you’ve chosen for yourself, but it’s no life for your daughter.”
He flipped a page of the newspaper, and it made a sound like something ripping. Juliette thought perhaps it was the last shred of her patience, tearing in two.
“First Elise LeClair comes into the bookstore to tell me she’s concerned about my daughter, and now you’re criticizing my parenting, too?”
He lowered the paper again. “You didn’t tell me that the LeClair woman was in New York. Was it nice for you to see her after all this time?”
“Nice?” Juliette repeated in disbelief. Arthur knew all about the LeClairs, and how Elise had deposited her daughter with the Foulons before running off to the south of France. “It was terrible, Arthur. She has no concept of how irresponsibly she behaved, and when I reminded her, she had the gall to look offended!”
“You told her—after seventeen years—that she was irresponsible? After she lost her daughter?”
“It was her fault,” Juliette muttered.
Now Arthur looked worried. “Is that what you said, Juliette? It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was a terrible thing that happened.” He shook his head. “Is that why Lucie went off in such a huff this morning?”
“A huff?” A cold tingle began at the base of Juliette’s back and began to creep slowly up her spine. “What did she say? Did Elise LeClair get to her?”
The worry line between Arthur’s bushy white eyebrows grew deeper. “I have no idea. But she was upset. Something about art and people telling lies.”
Juliette simply stared at him, her mouth dry. If Lucie was speaking of art and lies… If Elise was trying to find her… Abruptly, she pushed back her chair from the table. “Do you know where the Italian boy lives?”
“Juliette…” Arthur drew her name out like a warning.
She snapped her fingers. “Come on, Arthur. I know you. I know you checked him out.” It was one of the things she both loved and hated about him. He had people, the kind of people who investigated things, who checked people’s backgrounds. She had no doubt that he’d looked into her past before they’d married, and she knew that sometimes, a man dressed all in black with a mustache that looked like peach fuzz followed her to and from work. It would have bothered her more if she had anywhere secretive to go, but her life consisted only of coming and going from the bookstore. Arthur was burning his money having someone tail her, but if he knew where Lucie was now, well, it wasn’t a waste at all.
He narrowed his eyes at her and seemed to think about it for a few seconds. “He lives off Mott Street with his parents. But he’s not there today. There’s a Christmas tree lot in Brooklyn he’s running with a cousin of his.”
“Where in Brooklyn?”
“Juliette…”
“Where in Brooklyn, Arthur? She’s my daughter.”
He sighed. “Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue. Are you happy now?”
“Thank you.” Juliette didn’t wait for him to interrogate her about her intentions. After all, what she had to do was perfectly clear. If Elise LeClair somehow found Lucie before Juliette could get there… Well, Juliette couldn’t think about that right now.
Ten minutes later, wrapped in a long coat to shield her against the cold, she headed out the front door and hailed a taxi. She’d be late to the bookstore today, but Paul would have to understand.
* * *
The rain turned to light snow as the yellow cab hurtled across the Brooklyn Bridge twenty-five minutes later, and the knot in Juliette’s stomach was rapidly becoming something more, the beginning of a terrible ulcer.
“Can’t you go any faster?” she asked from the back seat.
“I’m going as fast as I can, lady.” The balding driver didn’t even glance at her. As he switched lanes, whizzing around a slow-moving pickup truck, Juliette gripped the door handle and closed her eyes.
“Tell her.” Paul’s voice was as clear and loud as if he’d been sitting right beside her.
Juliette’s eyes flew open, and she swiveled her head, half expecting to see him beside her. But the back seat of the cab was empty.
“Paul?” she whispered.
“Tell her,” he said again, but more loudly.
“I can’t, Paul. How can you ask me to do such a thing?”
This time, the driver turned around to look at her. “You talking to me, lady?”
“No.” She forced a polite smile. “Don’t you think you’d better keep your eyes on the road?”
The man grunted and turned back around, but not before muttering something under his breath about always getting the crazy ones.
“Tell her,” Paul repeated, and Juliette squeezed her eyes closed, willing him to be quiet. She needed to think.
Paul couldn’t possibly be suggesting what it sounded like he was suggesting. Tell her. Tell whom? Tell Elise? Or tell Lucie that in the rubble of their bombed-out bookstore seventeen years earlier, with the world swimming around her in shadows and smoke, she’d made a mistake?
But if she hadn’t pulled Lucie from the rubble that day, what reason would she have had to survive? She would have closed her eyes right there on that destroyed floor and walked toward the light with the others. She would have fallen asleep and slept forever; no move across the ocean, no New York, no Arthur.
Tell her.
And now Paul wanted her to rewrite history? How could he believe that it was the right thing when he knew very well that without Lucie, she had no reason to live?
But destiny, it seemed, had a way of righting itself, of throwing the dice again, of rerouting the road. It had begun with Lucie’s willful disobedience as a child, her proclivity for crayons over Bobbsey Twins books, for doodling over reading. While other children ran like hellions through Central Park, hooting and hollering and pretending to be princesses and pirates, Lucie was always stubbornly bent over whatever scraps of paper she could find, trying to capture the shape of a blade of grass or the bulge and shadows of the clouds floating over her head.
Tell her.
It had made Juliette so angry, the girl’s inclination to be someone she wasn’t. She was Lucie Foulon. And yet her daughter remained independent, obstinate, choosing to listen to some drumbeat within her rather than her mother’s loving guidance. This, despite the fact that Juliette had sacrificed so much to make sure her daughter’s life was a good one. It had infuriated Juliette, the anger hardening within her over the years, twisting into a rock of rage that she kept in her stomach.
But the harder Lucie pushed, the more often Paul appeared to comfort Juliette, and Juliette knew, therefore, that she was doing the right thing. Lucie was twenty now, and somehow, it had all worked itself out, and things were fine.
But then Ruth Levy had stepped out of the past, her presence in the bookstore an inexplicable joke from the heavens, and it had been like someone pulling a thread. Round and round and round the unweaving had gone until somehow, one day, Elise LeClair was standing there, too.
How Juliette rued that day in the Bois de Boulogne that she had stopped to help Elise! What she’d set in motion, this friendship that was supposed to transcend time, had ruined everything.
Tell her.
“Tell her what?” Juliette snapped. “That I’m sorry I couldn’t protect my own children? That I’m sorry I failed? That it’s all my fault?”
Before Paul could reply, the cabdriver pulled over by the side of a shabby Victorian row house with a crumbling front stoop and grunted the fare, staring at her in the rearview mirror with narrowed eyes. As she handed over a few bills and stepped out into the foggy morning, the gentle snowfall had turned into something wet and unforgiving, and for a moment, she simply stood there, looking around as the cab screeched away.
There was a grocery store on the corner with a giant Pepsi-Cola bottle cap on its sign, buildings with peeling paint and broken windows, a church called the Pillar of Fire listing Sunday services, Sunday school, and Thursday worship on its sign. A whitewashed soda and candy store sat beside a funeral home, and nearby was the Christmas tree lot Arthur had mentioned.
Lucie. She had to be there.