The first meeting of our second day in Biarritz was streamlined to include only Colin, two advisors and myself. It was just before noon, so as far as I knew, Turner and Carter were both asleep. Sara was on another drive around town that I’d arranged in the same green Eldorado.

I knew she was displeased when I left for the meeting this morning from my hotel room. As I knotted my tie, she sat at the edge of my bed in a yellow dress that went off her shoulders. She had her ankles primly crossed and her hands folded in her lap while looking thoroughly pissed at me. It was oddly charming, and I couldn’t stop glancing in her direction, but I didn’t change my mind.

I wanted to go to this meeting without her. The topic of discussion for today was well beyond the study materials Colin and I had given her about the resort, and it didn’t make sense for her to attend.

On top of that, it was probably time to start separating her from the project.

So I sent her on a little adventure for the day, hoping that by night, I could listen to her talk breathlessly on and on about it.

“Now this is quite the view,” Turner’s advisor, Irv, said as we sat on the wide terrace of the resort’s fine dining restaurant overlooking the coast. “To be frank with you, Julian, the Roths have long made up their mind. I think you know that,” he chuckled, holding his hands up in slight apology. “At this point, we really only need to go through formalities. Then we’ll get into the extensive paperwork, but as you know, we’re all very pleased with how well this suits Turner and Carter’s endeavors. I realize it’s barely noon, but we should toast to that.”

“Just in time,” Colin remarked as the servers came back with the bottles of champagne I’d ordered.

“Of course, you’re always a step ahead,” Irv laughed, waving the server off to pour the flutes himself while his colleague, Robert, gazed out at the ocean. It looked particularly blue under this morning’s sun.

“Do you surf, Julian?” he asked.

“I do.”

“Ah, of course you do. What don’t you do?”

“I haven’t in a long time,” I admitted, squinting in the sun since I’d given my Persols to Sara. “I’m not sure how well I’d fare out there after so many years.”

“How many years has it been?”

However many years it’s been since I’ve seen Lucie.

“Probably five now. Maybe six,” I replied, peering out at the water.

I could see the exact spot where I’d spent dozens of mornings with Lucie. I could still remember those ridiculous golden pigtails wagging in the wind. Her hair was short. To her mother’s dismay, it refused to grow. But Lucie was never bothered by it. She loved ribbons and bows, so she still did her own hair in the morning, securing two inch-long pigtails at the top of her head that I called her hamster ears.

Every time I said “hamster,” she would oink. And every time I told her that wasn’t the sound a hamster made, she’d laugh. In that way, she reminded me a lot of Emmett. She did things just to amuse herself with my reaction.

Their sense of humor was such a striking resemblance that one morning I caved and called Emmett to introduce him to Lucie.

They talked easily and exchanged goofy stories for over an hour, which surprised even me. While still on the phone, Lucie asked me when she would meet her uncle, and Emmett and I looked at each other, took a breath and just like that, overlooked the wall between us to book him a flight to France. Lucie was so thrilled she darted off to make him a welcome card despite the fact that his flight was two weeks away. At least it was till he canceled it.

Two days after our great conversation, Emmett texted and said he couldn’t come, and not to call him anymore – that Mom was hurt over how he was trying to embrace the family I had replaced them with. I did my best to explain, and I think he tried to listen, but the call ended before any good could come of anything.

And just like that, another brick cemented itself to the ever-heightening wall between us.

So I spent as much time as I could with Lucie.

We loved watching the surfers together in the morning, before Liz even woke up. Despite how often she asked, I was hesitant about teaching Lucie to surf. But after seeing so many fathers out there with kids as young as two years old, I yielded. She was an absurdly good swimmer, anyway, with no discernible fear of the water. Paddling out was always my biggest challenge on a board, but Lucie aced it like it was nothing.

Staring out at the water this morning, I spotted a boy a little older than her out there, and I wondered how Lucie stacked up against him now. She had said in one of her letters that she still surfed when she could, but that was awhile ago. Realistically, she’d forgotten surfing the way she had English. Remembered the basics. Not well enough to want to practice.

“Hoult, Turner told me great things about the hot stone treatment here.”

Returning my eyes to the table, I eased smoothly back into the conversation. Irv and Robert were talking about the spa that Turner had apparently raved about. I offered to schedule them appointments there before our dinner tonight.

But despite my convincingly undivided attention on them, I was thinking about the distance.

I was probably an hour-and-a-half away from Lucie by plane right now. I could actually take the jet and be there faster than that. I’d ask a trusted member of the hotel staff to join me, and that person would serve as my translator, so I could explain everything to Lucie.

I had no idea what her mother had told her about me.

I didn’t want to think about it, but knowing Liz, it was something cruel – probably that I had willingly left them because I was too busy for a family. That I had asked them to move out. I could tell from the waning excitement in the letters Lucie sent that her image of me was changing as she grew. I imagined she could better understand the stories her mom told her. Whatever the French words were for “abandoned” and “unavailable,” she probably heard them a lot when Liz spoke about me. If Lucie badgered her enough, I wouldn’t put it past Liz to mention that she wasn’t biologically mine. She was ruthless when it came to hurting people. She said she’d learned that from me.

So I believed fully that she would hurt Lucie for the sake of dragging me through the mud. And for that reason, I wished badly for a chance to explain myself. I’d considered the short plane ride about a thousand times during this lunch alone.

But as much as I wanted to and technically could see Lucie, I knew well that reappearing in her life now would only hurt her.

In her letters, she mentioned friends and school, and all the new memories she was creating in place of the ones we once had. She was moving on. Kids did that well. They were quicker than adults when it came to looking at a different reality and accepting it as their new one.

It wasn’t to say Lucie didn’t hurt over me. There were probably many nights of questions and crying shortly after they moved out of the house. But over time, that heartbreak subsided, and by now, Lucie had hit her stride in terms of forgetting about me. The decreasing frequency of her letters, and the way they spoke happily of friends showed me that much. Now, she was simply focused on being a happy little girl.

So as I sat at this table with Turner Roth’s advisors, I decided to finally let her go.

If there was a bright side, it was that I had my own new chapters ahead of me.