Fabienne was packing her suitcase the next morning when her phone rang. She leaped on it when she saw Will’s name on the screen. “Good morning.”
“And good morning to you.”
Was it possible that he sounded even sexier this morning than he had last night? She conjured up the memory of that kiss, the kiss she had replayed all night, a kiss that couldn’t go anywhere because they were in a public park and he had to get back to his sister, a kiss that had made her whole body ache. “How’s Melissa?” she asked, snapping back to reality.
“Still asleep. I know you’re flying out soon but do you have time for a coffee before you go? Liss’ll probably sleep for a bit longer so I have an hour or so.”
“Sure,” she said. “If you think you can stand the hipster factor, Ob-La-Di is nearby and has good coffee.”
“It can be as hip as it likes,” he said softly. “I’ll only be looking at you.”
Fabienne felt her stomach flutter. “Will…” she said. Don’t make me fall in love with you, she wanted to say. I live in Sydney. You live in New York. Don’t be the nicest man I’ve ever met. Perhaps it was just because she was in Paris. She’d fallen under its spell, become a cliché, was having a weekend fling without the sex.
“I’ll see you there in half an hour,” she said.
She finished her packing and walked up to Rue de Saintonge, where she saw Will waiting on the footpath. She waved and he solved the problem of how she should greet him by leaning over and giving her a gentle kiss.
Of course the temptation was just to stay there, but she was aware of the harried waiters with trays of coffee and the tiny footpath so she broke away. “Mmmm. I think we should stop that before we get thrown out for causing an obstruction.”
“Shame though,” he said, smiling at her, and leading the way inside.
Over coffee, he asked about her new job and she told him that it was what she’d been working toward since she left university. “It’s the crème de la crème for an Australian curator with an interest in fashion,” she said. “Like being offered a curatorship at the Met. I start on Wednesday and I should be nervous but I’m too excited to feel anything besides a desperation to get in there and start planning my first exhibition. Is that how you felt when you got the job at Tiffany?”
He nodded. “Once I decided to take it, I did. But Liss was right, it took me about a week to accept because I was terrified of screwing it up. Then once I’d agreed to do it, that all fell away. Jean Schlumberger has always been an inspiration to me and to be able to see all of his work in the archives and be a Tiffany designer like he was is pretty incredible.”
“The Tiffany Head of Design, no less,” she said, smiling at the way he’d described himself, as if he was just one of many designers. “Does jewelry design work like fashion design? You start with a sketch and go from there?”
He nodded. “I think it’s probably much the same. You have an idea of a theme for a collection, you sketch out the pieces, get them made up, some of them work, some of them don’t, and after lots of trial and error, you have a collection.”
“So simple,” she teased.
“Do you sketch as well? Fashion, I mean.” He signaled to the waiter for more espresso for both of them.
“I do. My father taught me. He was so talented, was supposed to take over the business from my grandmother. He’d been immersed in fashion design since he was a boy and he had such a feel for it.”
“What happened?” asked Will.
“He fell in love,” she said, telling the story that everyone swooned over when her father used to relate it. “He went to Australia for a summer holiday, for inspiration. He’d designed just one collection for Stella and it was a sensation. An iconic fashion moment. The press said he had the potential to be even better than Estella. But in Australia he met my mother at a party. She was an oncologist and she’d just set up a clinic specializing in women’s cancers. Of course she couldn’t up and leave and go to New York, not when women’s lives depended on her. So my father gave up everything for her instead. Back then there was no internet, no way to work overseas. So his are the shoes I’d have to fill, the lost potential I’d always feel I had to compensate for. It seemed easier not to try, I guess.”
“It was a big move for your father.”
Fabienne tried not to read anything into his words, tried not to ascribe to him any particular thoughts on the trickeries of long-distance relationships and the inevitable sacrifices that were involved. “He always said it wasn’t love if you wouldn’t give up everything for the other. Otherwise it was just a flame, not worth the candle it was lit upon.” And every time he said that, he’d look at my grandmother and she would turn away and her eyes would be full of tears and I would think it was because he’d moved so far away from her but now I’m not so sure, Fabienne thought but didn’t say.
“Your father was very poetic.”
“And an utter romantic. I miss him.” The words fell out before she could stop them, her voice wavering a little as she spoke.
“Did something happen to him?” Will asked, reaching out for her hand.
“He died last month. A stroke. Nothing’s been quite the same since.”
“I know what you mean,” he said and she knew that he did, that nothing in his life would have been the same since his sister had been told she was dying. The prospect of death changed everything, made all the ordinary rules of restraint and politeness fall away, made beautiful moments into precious keepsakes, made the future, once taken for granted, seem extraordinary.
Church bells sang through the morning, ringing in the hour, and Fabienne realized she’d been so engrossed in their conversation that time had flown by, that she hadn’t once looked around the café at the beautiful Parisians sipping coffee or taken in the hipper-than-hip decor. Will Ogilvie had arrested her full attention.
“I have to go,” she said reluctantly. She searched through her handbag and extracted a card. “You have my phone number but here’s my e-mail address too. New York and Sydney aren’t that far away via e-mail,” she added lightly, as if the distance was a paltry thing, wanting to emphasize that she didn’t expect grand gestures like her father’s, which belonged to a less prudent past.
“And here’s mine.” Will passed her a card. “I’m glad you bumped into me twice,” he said, smiling as he stood up.
“Technically, I only bumped into you once. The second time I said excuse me before I pushed past you.” Light and easy, thought Fabienne. They were doing such a good job of light and easy. Until they reached the footpath and a cab pulled over then he put her suitcase in the trunk and she said, “I think I have to kiss you again before I go.”
She stepped into his arms, lips brushing his. How was it possible for a kiss to be so heady, for the hard muscles of his back to feel so good beneath her hands, for the press of his body against hers to feel like something she could lose herself in forever?
“Fabienne,” Will murmured eventually. “We need to stop otherwise I will do everything I can to persuade you to stay here for one more night and then you’ll miss your plane.”
The way he looked at her was more than enough to convey exactly how he’d like to spend that one more night. She moved back reluctantly. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t stay. She had a six-hour layover in Manhattan, which she needed to use to ask her grandmother some questions, and then she was on the last possible flight to Sydney in order to start her new job on time.
“Thanks for a perfect weekend,” she said and then she climbed into the taxi and closed the door before temptation won out over sense.
On the way to the airport, she saw that he’d sent her a friend request on Facebook, which she accepted. She spent the next ten minutes scrolling through his profile and looking at all the pictures of him, of which there weren’t enough. Then she received a text from Melissa, which read: Will’s just arrived back looking like the cat who ate the canary. I take it you two have been getting along. I’m glad. He hasn’t smiled like that in a long time. I’ve stolen your number from him so we can keep in touch. I hope you don’t mind. x
Fabienne texted back: I don’t mind at all. I’d love to keep in touch. So glad I met you both. x
And then one from Will: I miss you already.
So do I, she texted straight back. So do I.
For once, the plane was on time and as soon as she’d landed in New York and cleared customs, Fabienne took a taxi to her grandmother’s house in Gramercy Park. She unlocked the door and let herself in, listening. No movement, no sound; her grandmother must be in bed.
She hurried upstairs and found the nurse propping Mamie up onto the pillows. Fabienne kissed Estella’s cheeks, the thinness of the skin like a translucent gauze crumpled into folds, not able to withstand the everyday wear and tear of living for much longer.
You can’t die too, Fabienne suddenly thought, for the first time genuinely shocked by Mamie’s fragility. Of course she knew her grandmother was old, that she was ninety-seven, couldn’t walk, had to go everywhere in a wheelchair, rarely left the house except if Fabienne or the nurse pushed her awkwardly over the gravel paths in Gramercy Park. But she suddenly seemed finite, whereas Fabienne had always thought of her as immortal. Perhaps that meant she shouldn’t ask, that she should let her grandmother keep whatever secret her father’s birth certificate implied. But Fabienne knew she couldn’t do that. With the death of Xander, Fabienne’s father, Estella had become the last thread connecting the past and the present and if Fabienne didn’t ask now, she knew she never would.
“Paris seems to have agreed with you,” Estella said, eyeing Fabienne in a way that made her blush. “What happened there to make you look like that?”
Fabienne picked up her grandmother’s curled hand, smoothing out the fingers, tracing over the veins that ridged the skin like skeins of purple wool. “I met someone,” she said.
Estella lifted Fabienne’s chin and her gaze took in the smile Fabienne was unable to hide, the flush of red on her cheeks, the way her eyes tried to duck and dodge Mamie’s stare. “He must be quite someone,” Estella said.
“He was,” Fabienne said. “He really was.”
“Was? Or is?”
“He lives in New York. Ours is destined to be no more than an e-mail correspondence, or a series of flirtatious text messages.”
Estella cackled. “Ahh, the text message. I wonder how I ever survived or loved without it? But surely you can see him again?”
“In a year’s time when I’m back in New York? It’s not the way to have a relationship. Besides, we didn’t really talk about it.”
“Young people never talk about what matters,” Estella scolded. “Everyone’s too busy protecting their own hearts to do what’s best for them. I sometimes think you all need to go back seventy years and see how we used to get along when we had no other way to communicate besides speaking to one another. To a time when courage was saved for things that mattered, rather than simply being open about your feelings. It might do you all a world of good.”
Perhaps it would, thought Fabienne. And so she opened her purse and unfolded her father’s birth certificate, then held it out to Estella.
“What is it?” Estella asked, reaching for her glasses and peering at the paper.
Fabienne’s finger pointed to the words. Estella Bissette was not named as Xander’s mother. And Fabienne’s grandfather was not named as Xander’s father.
“Who are Alex Montrose and Lena Thaw?”