“How can you eat so much in this heat?”
She’d gained four kilos. Right now she didn’t care. “Eating for two.” With any luck she wouldn’t throw this up. Sated, she took a breath and noticed for the first time that Martine was looking with longing at the woman smoking by the handrail. “Now I know what’s different,” said Aimée. “You’re not smoking.” She grabbed Martine in a hug. “Only one thing would ever make you quit. A baby.”
She felt Martine’s shoulders quiver. Her blonde hair brushed Aimée’s cheek as she shook her head.
“What’s the matter?”
Martine bit her lip. “Nicotine withdrawal.”
“Liar. Did you break up with Gilles?” Finally, and come to your senses, she almost said. Martine’s lover had a multitude of children and an ex-wife living below their big flat overlooking the Bois de Boulogne.
“Does this look like a break-up tan?” Martine asked, indignant. “After two weeks on Martinique?”
A fight and make-up tan, then. “What’s his ex-wife done now?”
Martine was upset. Even though Aimée had other things on her mind, she’d have to hear it. Martine was her friend.
“Quiet for once,” said Martine. “She’s got the children in July.”
“Then what’s …?”
“Your emergency?” Martine interrupted. “I dropped my meeting I was so worried. Did something happen at your doctor’s appointment?”
The appointment Martine couldn’t go to.
“Baby’s fine. It changed me, looking at it and really seeing it.” As she reached for the sonogram, her eye caught on Martine’s open agenda sticking out of her bag on the terrasse.
A red circle around a date two weeks ago. Martine’s indicator of bad news. Aimée noticed she’d lost weight.
“No one loses weight after they quit smoking, Martine.”
“I’m not ill.” Martine’s eyes brimmed. “I’m not being a good friend right now.”
A cold shaft traveled Aimée’s spine.
“Did I do something?” Again? And she had to ask another favor of Martine.
Pain radiated from Martine’s face. “Two weeks ago,” Martine paused. “I didn’t want to tell you …”
“Tell me what?” Worried now, Aimée took Martine’s shaking hand.
“Or mar your happiness. I couldn’t face you. I had a miscarriage.”
A knife pain of guilt lanced her. “Mon Dieu, I’m so sorry, Martine.”
She should have read the signs. So caught up in her own world of this baby and wondering if she should even have it, how to take care of it—all those doubts she’d shoveled on Martine since the beginning of her pregnancy.
“Martine, you have the stable relationship,” she said. “You want a baby and yet here I am, the unfit candidate, moaning about my feet swelling.” She put her fork down. Insensitive again and in hormonal overdrive, as René pointed out to her often these days. It seemed so wrong.
She thought of what the woman in the park had said. “You’d be a better mother than me,” she said. “And you have a posse to help you.” Martine had a mother, tons of sisters, aunts and uncles, not to mention the baby’s father on site.
Martine averted her gaze.
Merde—stuck her foot in her mouth again. She couldn’t get anything right. First Zazie and now her best friend.
“Désolée, Martine, it must be difficile for you to watch me go on like this.” She grabbed her hand. Squeezed it. “So terrible for you. Forgive me?”
“Really, it’s okay, the doctor says I’m fine,” said Martine. “We’ll try again in a few months.”
Thinking of Martine’s support system, of her own total lack of one, her head began to swim. How could this be happening? What was Aimée thinking, having a baby? She’d end up like her mother and abandon her child. Or leave others to raise it while she cluelessly doled out money. Like her mother.
“Et alors, if I’m the godmother shouldn’t I see the sonogram?” said Martine.
Aimée’s phone vibrated on the table. Caller ID showed Virginie. “Excusez-moi, Martine, got to take this.”
She put her hand over one ear to listen.
“Oui?”
“They haven’t found Zazie.” Virginie’s voice vibrated with fear. Aimée’s heart fell. “No trace of her at that suspect’s … keep saying she’s a runaway.” But the conversations on the terrasse made it impossible to hear.
“Un moment, let me call you back when I’m somewhere I can hear,” said Aimée. She hung up. “Martine, this is the emergency. What ever happened to that friend of yours, the interviewer on that TF1 show? What’s it called? On the Rue?”
Martine blinked. “Nadine, the sensationalist? The muckraker?” She blotted her eye with a napkin. “Another bohème with a trust fund.”
“Like all of them,” Aimée said. “But I remember meeting her at that faux Leftist gathering back when you were in Sciences Po together.”
She had to reach out to the media via Martine, and she wouldn’t let Nadine’s mudslinging reputation put her off. Time mattered. As the hours ticked by, Zazie’s danger grew.
“C’est ?a,” said Martine, uninterested.
“Can you call her?”
“She’s not a close friend. Why?”
Sunlight blazed and sparked on l’Opéra’s verdigris cupola, lighting the gold trimmings on fire. So close Aimée felt she’d burn.
“Ask her if she wants a bombshell interview on the street where a woman’s daughter disappeared—how it links to unsolved cases of three twelve-year-olds raped in the same arrondissement.”
Martine’s eyes perked up. “What’s it to you?”
“The flics never put it together. Zazie did, and now she’s missing.”
Martine dropped her fork. “Zazie from the café, your little shadow?”
“Not so little. She just turned thirteen. Her mother’s on the phone, frantic. She’s been missing …” Aimée glanced at her watch. “… almost twenty-two hours.”