Before I went to bed that night, I booked my flight for the following afternoon. Then, because I was restless and lonely and not yet ready for sleep, I pulled up a freelance hiring website.

I hadn’t logged into this particular site since the year after my graduation from college. The layout had changed significantly since that first jobless summer, so it took me a few minutes to begin finding my way around. Everywhere, people were posting job offers and getting dozens, sometimes hundreds, of replies from eager freelancers. Feeling emboldened and energized by all the positive reviews, I wrote my own ad, saying I needed help finishing an article by eleven p.m. sharp on Thursday. Then, with a quick prayer, I pressed “post” and closed my laptop.

I was nearly asleep by the time my aunt came in that night, and she was still asleep when I awoke the next morning to make coffee. Over a half-hearted breakfast of stale cinnamon rolls, I scanned my emails and found, to my surprise, that I had gotten three responses. The first ghostwriter was having trouble with spelling—“journalism” has only one L and no Z—while the second appeared to have been written by a bot: would love to make your naughtiest dreams come true in Florida. But the third gave me pause:

My name is Irene Quick, and I’m a freelance writer and journalist based in Phoenix. I’ve ghostwritten—at last count—six novels, and my work under my own name has been featured in publications including Slate and Rolling Stone. If you’re in the area, I’d love to meet with you and go over the finer details of the project before we get started. Just let me know.

Impressed by her confidence and credentials, I typed out a response:

Hi, Irene. I’m leaving for Paris on a six p.m. flight but would love to meet up beforehand—maybe for lunch at the Pig and Pickle? Normally, I would just finish this assignment myself, but a death in the family has made that impossible. I’ll give you my number so we can continue this conversation over text.

I set down my phone with a warm glow of satisfaction, heedless of Aisha’s warnings from the night before.

* * *

We were only able to meet briefly, but I found Irene to be coolly—almost unnervingly—professional. She wore a black suit that paired well with her dark eyes and plain, shoulder-length dark hair. Her posture was rigid, and when she spoke, it was in a monotone whisper, as if she was afraid of being overheard by the family at the next table.

“Sorry about your loss,” she said over a plate of pork shanks. “I just recently lost an uncle who was closer to me than my own dad.”

“If I had lost my aunt, I think I would be a sobbing mess right now,” I said. “I don’t know what I would do without her.”

“Do you have the files for me?” she asked. The subject of our families seemed to make her uncomfortable, and she looked faintly relieved to have left it. “If you do, I can go ahead and get started as soon as we finish eating.”

“Yeah, I’ll email them to you now,” I said as I pulled my phone from my purse. “Honestly, it shouldn’t take more than twelve hours, which you can split into two days, if you’d like. And you will be compensated accordingly.”

“I’m happy to do it,” said Irene. “I know how terrifying deadlines can be. I still occasionally have that dream where it’s three weeks till the end of college, and I only just realized I’ve been skipping the one class I needed to take in order to graduate.”

“You have that dream, too? I thought I was the only one.”

* * *

Clay drove me to the airport for my flight. I was mostly quiet on the way there, feeling relieved to have found someone to shoulder the burden of finishing this article, but not looking forward to what would be waiting for me in Paris when I arrived. Ordinarily, the prospect of a trip to Europe would have excited me, but it was hard to get amped about seeing your own father’s coffin.

“You gonna be okay in Paris by yourself?” asked Clay as we eased into rush-hour traffic. The heat of the morning had given way to cool winds and grey skies with the taste of rain in the air.

“I’ve traveled before,” I reminded him. “I spent a whole month in Cambodia on my own. I’ll be fine.”

“I know, but you weren’t grieving at the time.”

“I’m not grieving now,” I said, a little too aggressively. “I’ll be fine, promise.”

Once on the airplane and safely seated, I scrolled idly through the comments on my last article. Around three dozen new comments had been added since I had checked the night before, most of them some variation on, “I hope you die.”

“Can’t we report these?” I had asked Garcia the first time a death threat had shown up in the comments.

“They’re anonymous,” she’d said, “so there’s only so much we can do. We can’t block them. We can’t alert the FBI. For your own sanity, it might be best not to read them.”

But I read them all with a morbid fascination, wondering what could possess someone to threaten the life of a stranger, someone they had never met, just for writing an article that offended them. I wondered if they would feel the same way if they’d been there, if they’d seen the conditions of the workers in that warehouse. Maybe not. They seemed very committed to their hate, and it was unlikely that even seeing the truth firsthand could change their minds.

By the time I tore myself away from my phone screen and put it on airplane mode before we took off, I was feeling gloomy and brokenhearted. I knew I shouldn’t be offended by the ramblings of strangers, but I had to keep a thick skin to accomplish that. I was reminded of every friend I had lost, every person who had blocked me on social media because of my reporting.

I sometimes wished my life was more than just journalism—that I had a husband to feed and fuss over or a couple of kids to wrangle—because maybe then, I wouldn’t get so irritated and upset over these petty rejections. I would have perspective.

I watched a movie, slept for a few hours, and when I awoke, we were approaching French airspace after a fourteen-hour flight. It was nearly four p.m. in Paris. A thick rain was falling as I left Charles de Gaulle airport in a taxi bound for a hotel in the fifth arrondissement—the Latin Quarter.

I hadn’t left Phoenix since last fall, and I had nearly forgotten how much I enjoyed traveling, once the inconvenience of packing and flying was factored out. My heart swelled as I gazed out the misted window at the department stores, kiosks, and hookah lounges on either side of us. A young woman in denim shorts and leggings was struggling to balance her textbooks in a basket as she navigated a bicycle along a pedestrian-crowded sidewalk shaded with chestnut trees. A small dog wearing a tartan pullover led its owner excitedly past the Musée d’Orsay, while behind them, houseboats floated lazily on the Seine.

We were only just approaching the fifth arrondissement—I even loved how the word sounded in my mouth—when the driver came to an abrupt halt and signaled for me to get out. I didn’t know much French beyond what Aisha had taught me, but I gathered that he had taken me as far as he could.

It didn’t take me long to see what the problem was: the streets here were so narrow, curved and crowded that only bikes and motorcycles could glide through them without difficulty. Every now and again, a car might work up the courage to try, but its driver would be mocked and hooted at for their efforts.

I bought a large foldout map of Paris from a local vendor, and suitcase in hand, worked my way west to Boulevard Saint-Germain. With each step I took along the cobbled streets, my mood seemed to brighten. I loved traveling because it allowed me to float a little above the limitations of home and career, to indulge however briefly in the illusion that I could reinvent myself in some foreign land.

I followed the bustling road, the map and my look of enchantment broadcasting the fact that this was my first time in the city. Open-door shops with burgundy-red awnings were selling bread and pastries, long hanging plants drooped artistically from baskets above storefronts, and a couple of women in matching turquoise dresses walked into a cosmetics shop carrying gelato, trailed by an exhalation of perfume.

It occurred to me that I could have easily grown up here, speaking French as fluently as I spoke English and not taking any more notice of the marvels around me than one of the beret-wearing art students laboring under a pile of books and canvases.

The rain had died down a little by the time I turned onto Rue Xavier Privas, a thin sliver of street wedged between art galleries and Greek restaurants with hardly enough sidewalk for walking.

The street merged after a short walk of three or four minutes onto Rue Saint Severin, and from there, to Rue de la Harpe, which was secluded and brimming with small cafes, patio seating, and decorative wrought-iron railings. A surprising number of stores were closed, and I assumed that they had gone out of business—only later would I learn that their owners had gone on vacation for the summer, something that would have been unthinkable in the States.

My thoughts drifted toward Aisha and what she might have had to say about this place. The Paris that she loved seemed to exist mostly in her imagination, and the real city with its constant hum of traffic and pedestrians showing their middle fingers to motorists would have only gotten in the way of the illusion. She’d have been disappointed to learn that you couldn’t actually see the Eiffel Tower from the window of every shop in Paris—in fact, it was about two miles away from where I stood at present.

Still, there was a certain beauty to it. She had been right about that.

Eventually, the rabbit’s warren of narrow, intersecting streets ended, opening out onto the broad Boulevard Saint-Michel. Here, where fountains and rain mingled and the sodden boughs of trees waved in a continuous susurrating song, the city seemed to reach a kind of apotheosis. Paris seemed most fully itself here—among the cigar shops and flower stalls and art supply stores.

By now, the air of the city was beginning to infect me. I felt like I could rave about Paris as enthusiastically as Aisha could, and to better purpose. If it weren’t for the stares I would likely have attracted, I might have pulled out my phone and recorded my walk. I wanted someone else to see what I was seeing—the striped crosswalks, the yellow mailboxes, the slate roofs under a pearl-gray sky—and to be as enthralled by the spectacle as I was.

* * *

My dad’s funeral was held on the following afternoon in a rainy corner of the ninth arrondissement. I stood under a tall aspen with a crowd of about eight or ten mourners—most of them business associates, judging from the way they had dressed—while a priest dressed all in black delivered a sermon I didn’t understand. A man in a pinstriped suit had a gold watch that he checked with growing impatience as the service wore on. I couldn’t even find it in my heart to be mad at him.

I waited until after the service to view the body, and I wasn’t expecting to feel much. If anything, I thought with a pang of guilt, maybe it was good that he had died when he had, because now, I could stop waiting for the phone call or invitation that would never come.

Still, a weird sense of disbelief enveloped me as I approached the coffin and it truly hit home that he was gone. Where was he now? No one on earth could answer that question with any certainty. And when I cried, I realized I wasn’t crying for him, but because of the relationship we would never have. Death had permanently swallowed up all my hopes of reconciliation.

By the time the service ended, it was nearing dusk, and an indigo mist had steeped the city in its own cold colors. Wanting to treat myself after the ordeal of the funeral, I went for dinner at a corner restaurant on Rue Saint-Georges. Not having made a reservation and only knowing a few words of French, I approached the smiling hostess with trepidation.

She asked me a question in French, but spoke too fast for me to catch any of the words. I nodded anxiously, not entirely sure what she was asking and just wanting to be seated. Perhaps it was just my imagination, but I could feel the stares of the people in line behind me, their growing impatience tangible.

“Suivez-moi, s’il vous plait,” the hostess said.

I followed along as she led me toward a corner booth with red velvet upholstery at the back of the room. Someone was already seated there: a bronze-skinned man in his mid-thirties with neatly trimmed black hair. He wore a dark blue expensive-looking suit and a pair of equally expensive-looking loafers.

“This isn’t the right table,” I said to the hostess with a helpless feeling. “I wasn’t supposed to be meeting anyone.”

She gesticulated frantically and said something else that I couldn’t understand. The man flashed his perfectly white teeth in a condescending smile. My insides shriveled in embarrassment. Here I was, in a foreign city with no understanding of the language, being pressed to eat with someone I had never met. I wished desperately that Aisha had come with me—not only because it would have been comforting to have her company, but also because she could speak the language fluently.

The hostess asked another question in French. I glanced imploringly at the man seated opposite. To my surprise, he said in perfect English, “Is this your first time in the city?”

I nodded, unable to bring myself to speak.

“It seems like she really wants us to sit together.” He laughed. “But that’s fine. I don’t mind if you don’t.”

My heart gave a nervous flutter. Was he really inviting me to sit with him? Or was my grasp of English suddenly as flawed as my comprehension of French?

“I’m supposed to be meeting here with a business partner,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his phone, “but we can always postpone.” Dismissing my objection with a wave of his hand, he added, “It’s no trouble, really. I was just saying to my nephew, it gets lonely being stuck in the office all day. I’d love to meet more people but don’t even know where to begin.”

He spoke a few words to the hostess in French, and she sauntered off. I watched her go with a feeling of relief. Despite the fact that I had only just met this man, his good humor and self-assurance immediately put me at ease.

“You sure you don’t mind?” I asked.

He shook his head, still texting. “I’ll be seeing him tomorrow morning, anyway. Whatever he wanted to say now, he can say then. Besides, you strike me as being much more amiable company.”

I wondered what I could have possibly done to make him think that. It was slightly mortifying being seated with a stranger who had been expecting someone else. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he had only invited me to join him because he felt sorry for me.

Before I could broach the subject, the handsome man scoffed in annoyance. “He’s calling. I’m so sorry; this won’t take more than a minute.”

I studied the backs of my hands with a surge of humiliation as he spoke to his partner. He locked eyes with me and shook his head as if eager to get off the phone and eat dinner with me.

After a minute, the man hung up and returned his phone to his suit pocket.

“He’s not happy, but he’ll get over it,” he said with a good-natured shrug. “In the meantime, there’s more important business to tend to. Good evening, distinguished table guest, my name is Salman. Now, what’s your name, where are you from, and what would you like to eat?”