That did not sound like Win either, she nearly added.
“Quite the opposite,” Jamie said. “They wouldn’t decide.” He pulled a salad bowl from the cabinet. “So Gads picked for them. A real pain in the backside, those two. Do you like anchovies?”
“No, thanks,” Annie said, fiddling with a napkin.
Jamie placed the salad tongs on a paper towel and paused. He glared into the bowl as if trying to find meaning in the lettuce.
“I have to ask,” he said. “Is your mum still married?”
“My mom? God no. She has been extremely unmarried for my entire life. It’s absurd for me to even imagine her as anyone’s bride.”
“So she didn’t stay with your father?”
“I’ve never even met the guy. And he’s dead now. Apparently.”
Jamie blanched.
“He is?”
“That’s what I’ve been told. It’s not why the marriage ended, though she left him when she was pregnant with me. But, like I said, he’s dead now.”
“Which was…?”
“Which was what?”
“When were you born?” Jamie asked and set two salad plates on the table.
“Nineteen seventy-nine,” Annie said.
“Interesting.”
“Why is that interesting?”
She glanced up. Jamie looked apprehensive, as though she’d caught him committing a minor crime.
“Oh. Well,” he stuttered, and retrieved two more plates. “It’s hard to explain. And it’s not really my place…”
All of a sudden they heard the click of a key in a hundred-year-old lock, followed by the creak of the door.
“Do you…” Annie started. “Guests? Your wife?”
“Well, Miss Haley,” Jamie said, and handed her a blue and white dish piled high with meat. “Here’s your hachis Parmentier. And that, I believe, is the sound of my brother.”
Seventy-eight
?LE SAINT-LOUIS
PARIS
NOVEMBER 2001
Gus took one glimpse of Annie and looped back out of the kitchen and down the hall toward the front door.
“Lord Winton!” Jamie yelled. “Get your arse back in here! Is that any way to treat a lady?”
Jamie disappeared, the clunk of his footsteps echoing down the hall.
Annie braced herself, heart thumping at a million beats per minute as sweat beaded along her hairline. If Jamie didn’t catch his brother, it was a-okay by her. Annie didn’t know what she could possibly say to the man.
“That doesn’t fit the legal definition of entrapment,” she heard Jamie say. “The girl showed up looking for you but not knowing it was you … oh, no, no, no. You will go in there and talk to her … I guarantee you’ll come across far more favorably in your version of events than you would in mine.”
Annie strained to hear the rushed-whisper of Gus’s words, while thinking of the message she left for Laurel at the inn. Would her mom come to Paris? Did Annie even want her to? God, what a disaster of a vacation. She should’ve just stayed in her room and eaten cakes.
“Anyone know where a fellow can get a little meat and potatoes round here?” said a voice.
Annie looked up, a smile crashing across her face. Gus, her old pal Gus.
“Hachis Parmentier,” she said and frowned.
No, she was not happy. She was mad. The man had lied. Or maybe he hadn’t.
He had led Laurel on. Or so it seemed.
But, at the very least, he broke Laurel’s heart, or broke her altogether, otherwise she would’ve stayed in Paris. Everyone knew the best way to solve an immigration problem was with a wedding. The Laurel in Gus’s story wouldn’t have left unless she had to.
“Well, well, well,” Annie said. “If it isn’t the Missing Writer of The Missing Duchess. What was it you said to me on that first day? ‘The man who wrote that book is long since gone.’”
“The old fella went to Paris in 1973 and in Paris he remains.”
“We were acquainted at one time.”
“That man is unknowable.”
“Long gone,” Annie said, eyes narrowing as she poked at her dinner. She was suddenly not that hungry. “Or right in front of my face. Oh, thanks for the tape recordings, by the way. Jolly good time listening to the details of my mother’s Parisian sexual awakening. I suppose it’s nice to know she hasn’t always had her shit together.”
“Whoa,” Jamie said, entering the room. “You told her about having sex? With her mum? You’ve some balls on you, guv’nor. Of course, telling Annie about said balls was probably in poor taste.”
“Probably?” she said.
Jamie took a seat across from her. He placed a napkin on his lap, as if this were an ordinary meal and not the start of some kind of very jacked-up dinner theater. The man had expended great effort on making the hachis Parmentier and evidently nothing was going to keep him from it.
“You told me the writer was long gone,” Annie reminded Gus, who remained fixed in the doorway. “You said he was in Paris.”
Jamie motioned his brother toward the food but Gus waved him away.
“So, nothing?” Annie said. “You have zero response?”