Justine Holliday was a combination of two names picked out of a board of directors’ listing on a pamphlet for the Christian organization that sponsored a halfway house where the doctors had wanted her to stay for a few days once she’d been discharged. Like being saved on her way out the door was going to change how her broken, adrenaline-flooded mind worked. Please.
Justine Holliday. That’s who she’d become. Her progenitor was brilliant at creating characters, remember. She tried on the persona, felt it mold to her body like cashmere.
Justine Holliday was young and single, in Paris to follow the dream. She was a fan of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. She knew her way around the City of Light. She was writing a memoir—can you imagine that? Trying to, at least. She had money, some from her family, some that she’d saved, a minuscule amount from an advance against the sale of the book, and had taken a flat in the 7th Arrondissement, which was more affordable than some of Hemingway’s old stomping grounds, but still expensive enough for an expat to be safe and anonymous.
Justine Holliday was from Hollywood, Florida (how silly of my parents—we were known as the Hollidays from Hollywood). She’d grown up in a normal, middle-class house with a screened-in back porch with a pool, the only way to keep their two small dogs safe from alligators. They’d had a normal, middle-class, know-everyone-in-your-town upbringing. Her mother made cookies for the school bake sale. Her father coached the Little League teams. Her older brother was a high school football star who worked at a car dealership now, was married to his prom queen date, a girl he’d known since they were thirteen, and had a baby on the way.
Justine Holliday was blissfully, completely, emptily normal. She had her whole life stretched out in front of her. She was in Paris to write, had a handsome young man named Constantine Raffalo buying her champagne, and was currently experiencing a decidedly non–Justine Holliday emotion, a small tingle squeaking up her spine that said, “Go to bed with him. It will be fun.”
Perhaps the enjoyment of sex with relative strangers should be part of Justine Holliday’s life. Yes, an enjoyment, but plain-Jane vanilla missionary sex was Justine’s thing, with maybe a hint of tie her up and ride ’em cowgirl, if she knew you very, very well and had been charmingly overserved.
Yes. There. That worked.
Justine was simple and carefree and looking for a good time, and shook her black hair off her face.
Justine wasn’t a murderer.
“Tell me about growing up all over the world,” Justine said to Constantine, leaning forward just a bit. “It sounds terribly exciting.”
“You have the terrible part right.” Constantine laughed. “Every time I had to pack up my model airplanes and stuffed bears into this old green duffel of my dad’s, I thought, ‘This is the last time.’ Of course it wasn’t. We never stopped moving.”
“And your mother? Did she enjoy moving house and having new adventures?”
His face changed slightly, becoming at once harder and more vulnerable. “She died when I was eight. We were in Düsseldorf. She caught pneumonia and was gone within the week. She never had time to say goodbye. One day she was fine, a little glassy-eyed and coughing. We were playing Hearts—the card game, you know it? We’d played at least fifty rounds, all afternoon, and she hadn’t cooked dinner, and my dad was so mad when he got home to a cold stove. They had a fight, she went to her room pleading a headache. Dad and I cleaned up the cards, ate toast and beans, which was fine by me, I loved toast and beans. I knocked on her door and shouted good-night, not knowing she was so sick. They told us later that by then, when I knocked, she was already too far gone to save. She never woke the next morning, and died a week later.” He shook his head, gave her a rueful smile. “I’ve never told anyone that before. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“The Scotch, probably, or the pollen from the cherry blossoms.”
Justine was witty! Imagine that.
“I think it’s you,” he said, those electric eyes on her mouth. “I think Justine Holliday is making me senseless.”
“Pas possible, mon enfant.” God, why had she called him that? A pet name, already? They hadn’t even known each other for twenty minutes. Don’t be an idiot, Justine. She sipped her champagne casually. “We’re simply ships passing in the night.”
An offer, passed on. She noticed Constantine relax a bit, saw right into his thoughts in the uncanny way she had. (Justine isn’t like that, Sutton warned herself.)
He’d been trying very hard to make this a romantic moment, something to remember, perhaps a wonderful anecdote to trot out at parties and tell their grandchildren. “Your grandmother fell in love with me over champagne at a tiny table in a seedy café in Paris, children. Watch, and learn.” He was a man on the make, a man looking for love in the most romantic city in the world. He’d found a willing target and was going to work hard to sweep her off her feet.
He probably had genital warts. Or herpes.
His smile was more relaxed now, too, and his eyes had gone from predatory to warm, inviting, comfortable. She could sink right in, like walking through waves into a deep, blue ocean.
“So tell me about you, Justine.”
“About me?” She touched his bare forearm with a curious finger and the voice in her head said, Watch out for sharks.
A BABY IS BORN
Then
Dashiell Ethan Montclair came two weeks early, practically in the parking lot of the post office where Sutton had just dropped their check in the mail. Thank goodness Ethan saw her double over as she exited the building with their PO box mail in her hand. He managed to get her to the hospital with fifteen minutes to spare.
Dashiell was always in a hurry.
Ethan complained the name sounded like a hero from one of Sutton’s novels. She explained, in unending detail, why she’d chosen the name. After Hammett, of course. A crime writer. A man’s writer. A man’s man, Hammett. For heaven’s sake, Ethan, you call yourself a writer?
After the nearly inauspicious beginnings to the child’s life, Ethan caved. Whatever Sutton wanted, Sutton got. That was their deal.
Dashiell was an adorable baby. All fat cheeks and pink lips and deep blue-gray eyes, just like his mother. He was a watcher, quiet and calm, easily amused, with a gurgling, contagious laugh, always willing to go down for a nap so Sutton or Ethan could work. Sutton kept him in a basket on the floor next to her desk, like a cat, or a dog. She’d tap the edge with her foot, set it to rocking, and Dashiell would lie content and sated in his nest.
Ethan adjusted to their new life faster than Sutton. She was—admittedly—a selfish woman. She liked their old life. Parties at night, late-sleeping mornings, sex anytime they wanted, travel galore. Liked not having to answer to anyone, not having a boss, nor having a get up and leave the house and sit in traffic and make jokes at the watercooler about last night’s Dancing with the Stars job.
They had freedom still, yes, and now they had a child, which made Ethan happier than anything before.