The envelope was cream-colored and heavier than it looked.
The woman at the gate desk held it out to me with both hands, the way you’d hand someone a gift. She was young, with a neat bun and a name tag that said JESSICA.
“Someone arranged for this to be delivered to you, Mrs. Wilson,” she said. “Before you board.”
“Who?”
“I’m afraid I only have instructions to give it to you.” She smiled. “And to tell you one thing.”
“What thing?”
She glanced down at a sticky note beside her keyboard and read it out carefully, like she didn’t want to get the words wrong.
“There’s something you still don’t know about this trip.”
I stood there with my carry-on bag strapped across my chest and my brand-new passport in my hand. Behind me, a toddler was crying. Somebody’s coffee smelled burnt.
I opened the envelope.
Inside was an old letter, folded in thirds. The paper had gone soft and yellow at the edges.
I recognized the handwriting before I read a single word.
The little loops on the L’s. The way the T’s were crossed too far to the right, like the pen was in a hurry to get somewhere.
My husband’s handwriting.
My husband, who had been dead for thirty-two years.
To understand why my knees almost gave out at Gate B14, you have to know a little about me. And about Richard.
So let me go back about four months, to a Friday afternoon in June, and a sheet cake.
I was sixty-eight when I finally retired after almost forty years of teaching elementary school.
Thirty-nine years, to be exact. Most of them in third grade at Lincoln Elementary in Dayton, Ohio. Room 12, at the end of the hall by the water fountain that never worked right.
I’d kept my maiden name, Wilson, when Richard and I got married. That was a bit of a scandal back then. His mother asked me at the wedding if I was “one of those women’s libbers.” I told her I just liked my name. After nearly forty years of teaching, it didn’t matter anymore anyway. Everyone in that part of Dayton simply knew me as Mrs. Wilson. Grown men with beards stopped me at the grocery store to say, “Mrs. Wilson! You taught me cursive!”
On my last day, the kids made me a banner out of construction paper. WE WILL MISS YOU MRS WILSON. The S in MISS was backwards. I didn’t fix it.
The other teachers threw me a little party in the teachers’ lounge. There was punch in a plastic bowl and a card everybody had signed. The principal, a nice young man named Mr. Okafor, gave a speech that made me cry into a paper napkin.
Then my daughter Emma walked in carrying a sheet cake.
It had blue frosting roses around the edges, and in the middle, in big swirly letters, it said:
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR FREEDOM!
“Freedom?” I laughed. “I still have thirty years of laundry waiting for me.”
“Then leave it, Mom,” Emma said. She set the cake down and kissed my cheek. “Do something you’ve always wanted.”
Everyone in the lounge said “Aww.”
I smiled and cut the cake and handed out pieces on paper plates.
But on the drive home, with the banner rolled up on the passenger seat, I kept thinking about what she’d said.
Do something you’ve always wanted.
And the problem was, I couldn’t think of anything.
I’d spent so long taking care of everyone else that I’d forgotten what I wanted.
My husband Richard died of a heart attack thirty-two years ago.
It happened on a Tuesday in March. He was in the driveway, scraping ice off the windshield of his Buick so he could drive to the airport for another work trip. I was inside packing Daniel’s lunch. I heard the scraper hit the ground.
I don’t remember much after that. I remember the ambulance lights on the snow. I remember Emma, who was twelve, standing in the doorway in her nightgown, holding her little brother’s hand. Daniel was nine. He kept asking, “Is Daddy going to the hospital? Is he going to be okay?”
He wasn’t.
He was thirty-eight years old.
Richard was my first love. We met in college, at a dance I didn’t want to go to. He stepped on my foot twice and apologized so many times that I finally laughed and said, “If you apologize one more time, I’m leaving.” He said, “Then I’ll just step on your foot again so you’ll stay.” We were married two years later.
After he died, there was a small life insurance policy, and the house, and me. That was it.
So I worked. I taught all day, and then I tutored kids after school, and in the summers I worked at a day camp and graded summer school papers at the kitchen table until midnight.
One night, Emma came downstairs at eleven o’clock and found me asleep with my cheek on a stack of spelling tests.
“Mom,” she said. “Why do you work so much?”
I sat up and wiped my face. There was a red ink smudge on my cheek. She laughed at it, but she didn’t look happy.
“Because I want you and Daniel to have everything you need, sweetheart.”
“And what about you?”
“I have you two,” I said. “That’s enough.”
She looked at me for a long time, the way only a twelve-year-old girl can look at you when she knows you’re not telling the whole truth.
Then she went back to bed.
I kept notebooks. I always had. Spiral ones from the drugstore, the kind with the cardboard covers that get soft at the corners. I wrote down things the kids said, funny things my students did, recipes, dreams I had at night, lists of places I wanted to go someday.
A few months after Richard died, I started writing letters to him in those notebooks.
Dear Richard, Daniel lost his first tooth at school today. He was so proud. He kept it in a little envelope and showed it to the mailman.
Dear Richard, the furnace broke. I called your brother. He said he’d come look at it, and then he didn’t come. I miss you most when things break.
Dear Richard, Emma got her driver’s license. She backed into the mailbox. I didn’t tell her you did the same thing when you were sixteen. I’m saving that for when she needs it.
One evening, Emma found me at the kitchen table writing.
“Who are you writing to, Mom?”
“Your dad, sweetheart.”
She frowned. “But he can’t read them.”
“I know,” I said. “But writing to him makes me feel like he’s still here.”
She didn’t say anything. She just put her hand on my shoulder for a second, and then she poured herself some milk and went upstairs.
I wrote to Richard for thirty-two years. I filled twenty-six notebooks. They’re in a cardboard box in my bedroom closet, labeled in black marker. RICHARD.
I never dated again. People tried to set me up. A widowed dentist from church. A gym teacher from another school. I went to dinner with the dentist once. He talked about his boat for an hour and a half. I went home and wrote Richard a very funny letter about it.
For thirty-two years, I believed I’d had a perfect love. Even if it had ended too soon.
I believed it the way you believe the sun will come up.
Three months after I retired, my doctor told me I had terminal cancer.
I’d been tired for a while. I thought it was just retirement. I thought my body was finally catching up on forty years of sleep. Then I started losing weight without trying, and there was a pain under my ribs that wouldn’t go away, and Emma made me go to the doctor.
Then there were scans. Then more scans. Then a biopsy.
Then a small room with a box of tissues on the table, which is how you know.
Dr. Patel was a kind man in his fifties with reading glasses on a cord around his neck. He’d been my doctor for fifteen years. He took his glasses off when I sat down.
“Mrs. Wilson,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s not good news.”
He told me what it was and where it had spread. I nodded like I was listening to a parent-teacher conference about somebody else’s child.
“Can you operate?” I asked.
“I’m afraid surgery won’t cure it, Mrs. Wilson.”
“Chemotherapy?”
“We can discuss treatment to manage your symptoms. To keep you comfortable.”
Comfortable. That’s the word they use when they mean the other thing.
“How much time?” I said.
“I can’t give you an exact number.”
“Please don’t protect my feelings,” I said. “I taught third grade for thirty-nine years. I’ve been lied to by experts. Just tell me.”
He sighed. He folded his glasses and held them in both hands.
“We may be talking about months rather than years.”
I nodded.
I thanked him. I actually thanked him. I shook his hand and said, “Thank you, Doctor,” like he’d just told me my blood pressure was fine.
Then I walked out to the parking lot, got into my little silver Honda, put my hands on the steering wheel, and cried for almost an hour.
I didn’t turn the car on. I didn’t call anyone. A woman parked next to me, looked over, saw me, and then looked away very quickly, the way people do. She got out and went inside. When she came back forty minutes later, I was still there.
She knocked gently on my window.
I rolled it down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just… do you need anything?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
She looked at me like she knew exactly what fine meant in a hospital parking lot. She nodded and went to her car.
I sat there another fifteen minutes.
Then I drove home and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich, because I didn’t know what else to do.
That evening, I couldn’t sleep.
I got out of bed and went to the closet and pulled down the cardboard box. Not the RICHARD box. The older one, underneath it. The one with my notebooks from before. From college. From the first years we were married.
I sat on the bedroom floor with my back against the bed and flipped through them.
There were grocery lists. Phone numbers of people I couldn’t remember. A pressed flower that crumbled when I touched it.
And there, on a page from the year we got married, in my own young handwriting, with a little heart drawn next to it:
See Paris someday.
Richard and I had always dreamed of visiting Paris together. We talked about it the way young couples talk about winning the lottery. We’d stand in front of the travel posters at the library. We bought a French phrase book at a garage sale for a quarter. Richard used to practice with it in the bathroom mirror. “Où est la bibliothèque?” he’d say, in the worst accent you’ve ever heard. Where is the library. That was the only sentence he ever learned.
But there was always a reason to wait. The house needed a roof. Emma needed braces. The car broke down. Next year, we’d say. Next year for sure.
Then there was no next year.
I touched the faded ink with my fingertip.
“Well, Richard,” I whispered. “I guess I’m finally going.”
The bedroom was very quiet.
“I just wish you could come with me.”
The next morning, I called Emma.
She picked up on the first ring. She’d known about the appointment. I’d told her it was routine. She knew it wasn’t.
“Mom? What did they say?”
“I’m going to Paris,” I said.
There was silence on the line.
“Mom?”
“I’m going to Paris, Emma.”
“Mom. What did the doctor say?”
So I told her.
I told her the way I’d told parents things for thirty-nine years. Calmly. Simply. Without too many big words.
She didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear her breathing. Then I heard her put her hand over the phone, and I heard a sound behind it that I knew she didn’t want me to hear.
When she came back, her voice was thick.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. And Paris?”
“I’ve never been abroad,” I said. “Not once in sixty-eight years. Your father and I always meant to go. I want to go, Emma. I want to see it. Before.”
She was quiet again.
Then she said, “Then you’re going.”
Just like that. No arguments. No Are you sure, Mom. No What about your treatment.
I think that’s when I realized my daughter had grown up into a better person than me.
Daniel was a different story.
He came over that Sunday for dinner. He drove two hours from Columbus with his wife, Rachel, and their two boys. I made pot roast, because it’s his favorite. I’d told him about the diagnosis on the phone. He’d been quiet. Daniel has always gone quiet when he’s scared. He’s just like his father that way.
He didn’t eat much pot roast.
After dinner, while Rachel took the boys out to the backyard, he helped me with the dishes. He washed. I dried. That’s how we’d always done it.
“Emma says you’re going to Paris,” he said, scrubbing a pot.
“I am.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“Mom.” He put the pot down in the water. “You shouldn’t travel alone. Not now. What if something happens? What if you get sick on the plane?”
“Then there’ll be a plane full of people to help me.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I can take a week off. Rachel’s fine with it. I already asked her.”
I put down the dish towel and looked at my son. He was forty-one years old. He had gray coming in at his temples. He had his father’s jaw and his father’s habit of rubbing the back of his neck when he was worried, which he was doing right now.
“Daniel,” I said. “I taught thirty eight-year-olds how to behave during fire drills. Every year, for thirty-nine years. I can manage an airport.”
He laughed, even though he didn’t want to.
“That’s not the same thing, Mom.”
“I know it’s not.” I picked up his wet hand and held it. “But I need to do this one by myself, honey. I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve never done anything by myself. Not really. I went from my parents’ house to your father’s house to being your mother. I’ve never even eaten in a restaurant alone.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
He looked at me for a long time.
“Will you call me?” he said. “Every day?”
“Every day.”
“And if you feel bad, you’ll go to a doctor? You won’t be stubborn about it?”
“I’m always stubborn about it.”
“Mom.”
“I’ll go to a doctor,” I said.
He sighed and went back to the pot.
“Dad would’ve gone with you,” he said quietly.
“I know,” I said. “That’s the whole problem.”
I got my first passport. I had to go to the post office and have my picture taken against a white wall. The man behind the counter told me not to smile. I looked like a woman being arrested for shoplifting.
I booked a modest hotel in a neighborhood I couldn’t pronounce. It had a little picture of a balcony with red flowers on the website. I booked it for eight nights.
I bought a plane ticket. Dayton to Chicago, Chicago to Paris. I bought it on the computer at the kitchen table, and my hands were shaking so badly that I typed my credit card number wrong three times.
When the confirmation email came, I printed it out and stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an apple that a student had given me in 1994.
I stood in the kitchen and looked at it.
Then I opened my notebook and wrote Dear Richard, I bought the ticket, and I stopped.
I didn’t know what to write after that.
For the first time in thirty-two years, I didn’t finish a letter to him.
On departure day, Emma drove me to the airport in Dayton. I arrived three hours early. She tried to talk me into one hour. I said three. We compromised on three.
She hugged me at the curb for a long time.
“Call me when you land.”
“I will.”
“And Mom?” She was holding both my arms. Her eyes were doing something strange. Like she was excited and nervous at the same time. “Just… keep your heart open, okay? Whatever happens.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” She smiled. “It’s just a thing people say.”
It wasn’t a thing people said. Not people like Emma, anyway. But I was too nervous to think about it.
My first flight went to Chicago. It was short and bumpy. I gripped the armrests the whole time.
In Chicago, I had a three-hour layover before the flight to Paris. I found my gate, B14, and I sat down, and I checked my passport.
Then I checked it again.
Then I checked it again, because what if it had fallen out of my bag in the forty seconds since I’d last checked it?
I checked my boarding pass. I checked the screen above the gate desk. PARIS CDG. ON TIME. I checked my boarding pass against the screen.
A man sitting across from me, an older man with a cane, watched me do this about six times.
“First time?” he said.
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’ve checked that passport more times than my wife checks the stove,” he said. “And she checks the stove a lot.”
I laughed.
Then a wave of weakness came over me. It started in my stomach and went up into my head. The gate and the people and the big windows full of airplanes all went soft and gray around the edges.
I put my head down. I took a sip from my water bottle. I breathed slowly, the way the nurse had shown me.
“You okay, ma’am?” the man with the cane asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”
I waited for it to pass. After a few minutes, it did.
I sat there with my hands in my lap, and I thought, What are you doing, Margaret? You’re sixty-eight years old and you’re dying and you’re sitting alone in an airport in Chicago. Daniel was right. This is foolish.
Then the loudspeaker crackled.
“Mrs. Wilson. Passenger Margaret Wilson. Please come to the desk at your boarding gate.”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
My first thought was that something was wrong with my ticket. That I’d typed something wrong on the computer. That my passport picture looked too much like a shoplifter and they weren’t going to let me on.
My second thought was that something had happened to Emma. Or Daniel. Or one of the grandkids.
I grabbed my bag and hurried to the desk. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m Mrs. Wilson. Is something wrong with my ticket?”
The young woman behind the desk, Jessica, looked up and smiled.
“Not at all,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me?”
“Someone arranged for this to be delivered.”
And she handed me the cream-colored envelope.
“Who sent it?” I said.
“I’m afraid I only have instructions to give it to you.” She read the sticky note. “There’s something you still don’t know about this trip.”
I opened the envelope.
Inside was the old letter, folded in thirds. And underneath it, a small black-and-white photograph and a few pages of thin paper, stapled together, covered in French.
I unfolded the letter.
My darling Sparrow,
I had to put my hand on the desk.
Nobody had called me Sparrow in thirty-two years. Nobody alive even knew he’d called me that. Not even the kids. It was just ours.
My darling Sparrow,
I finally bought that little apartment in Paris we always dreamed about. I wanted it to be your anniversary surprise. I can already see your face. You’re going to talk for ten minutes straight and not let me get a word in, and I’m going to let you.
One day, we’ll sit on the balcony together. I’ll bring the coffee. You bring the phrase book.
All my love, Richard.
At the bottom was an address. A street name I couldn’t pronounce and a number. Appartement 3.
The photograph showed a pale stone building with iron balconies, on a narrow street. Someone had drawn a little arrow in pen pointing to a window on the third floor.
The stapled pages had an official stamp on them and Richard’s signature at the bottom, next to a date thirty-seven years ago.
A purchase document.
“My husband wrote this,” I whispered.
Jessica was watching me. Her smile had faded a little.
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
“He died thirty-two years ago,” I said.
Her face changed completely.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t… they just told me to…”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”
Then a voice came over the loudspeaker. “We’ll now begin boarding Flight 142 to Paris, Charles de Gaulle. Group one, please make your way to the gate.”
I stood there with the letter in my hand.
Jessica touched my arm.
“Ma’am? That’s your flight.”
I boarded carrying the envelope against my chest like it might fly away.
I found my seat, 23A, by the window. I buckled my seatbelt. I put the envelope in my lap and unfolded the letter again and read it over and over while the plane taxied and took off and Chicago got small beneath us.
I finally bought that little apartment in Paris we always dreamed about.
Richard had bought an apartment in Paris.
Thirty-seven years ago. Five years before he died.
And he’d never told me.
I’d been his wife for fourteen years. I’d balanced our checkbook every month at the kitchen table with a calculator and a pencil. I knew exactly how much money we had, down to the penny. We’d argued for a week over whether we could afford a new washing machine.
How do you buy an apartment in Paris without your wife knowing?
And if he’d bought it for me, then why had nobody ever said a word about it after he died? Not the lawyer. Not the bank. Not his company.
Where had it gone?
I boarded carrying one question, and it got bigger with every mile.
Why had Richard hidden an apartment from me?
The woman in the seat next to me was a college student named Priya, going home to visit her grandmother in Lyon. She noticed me staring at the letter for the fourth hour in a row.
“Is that a love letter?” she asked shyly.
“I think so,” I said. “From my husband.”
“That’s so sweet. Is he meeting you in Paris?”
“No,” I said. “He died a long time ago.”
She went pink. “I’m so sorry.”
“Everybody keeps saying that today,” I said. “It’s all right. I’m used to it.”
She offered me half of her chocolate bar. I took it. Then she put her headphones on and fell asleep against the window shade, and I was alone with my memories again.
During that flight, somewhere over the dark ocean, I remembered the early years of our marriage.
Our first apartment was above a dry cleaner on Third Street. It always smelled like steam and chemicals. The radiator banged all night. We had one good chair, and we took turns sitting in it.
One winter night, we were lying on the floor of that apartment on a blanket, eating popcorn out of a mixing bowl, because we didn’t have a couch yet. Richard was looking at the ceiling.
“Someday, Sparrow,” he said, “I’m taking you to Paris.”
He called me Sparrow because I was always rushing around, talking a mile a minute. Hopping from one thing to the next. He said the first time he saw me at that dance, I talked so fast he only caught every third word.
“With what money?” I said.
“I’ll figure something out.”
“And where will we stay?”
“Our own apartment.”
I laughed so hard I spilled the popcorn. “Our own apartment? In Paris?”
“Why not?”
“With a balcony?” I said, teasing him.
He turned his head and looked at me very seriously.
“Obviously,” he said.
I’d thought it was just one of those silly things young people say on the floor at night. Something you say because it feels good to say it.
I’d never once thought he meant it.
Then came the bills. And the children. Emma, then Daniel. A house with a yard on Briar Lane. A mortgage. Car payments. Doctor bills.
Richard got a job with a company that sold industrial machine parts. Halvorsen Industrial. He was good at it. He could talk to anybody. Within a few years, they made him their sales manager for Europe.
That meant trips. A lot of trips. Germany, Belgium, Holland.
And Paris. Mostly Paris.
He’d come home with little gifts. A box of chocolates from a shop with gold paper. A silk scarf for me. A tiny Eiffel Tower keychain for Daniel that Daniel carried around for years.
I’d be standing at the stove, and he’d come in with his suitcase and kiss the back of my neck, and I’d say, “Paris again?”
“The company’s expanding, Maggie,” he’d say. “These trips help pay the mortgage.”
“I know,” I’d say. “I just miss you.”
“I miss you too, Sparrow. Every minute.”
I’d believed him.
Of course I’d believed him. Why wouldn’t I?
He’d be gone a week. Sometimes two. Sometimes three or four times a year. I’d take care of the kids and the house and my classroom, and when he came back, I’d be so happy to see him that I never asked many questions.
Sitting on that plane, with his letter in my lap, I started to wonder.
Maybe he’d been saving. Secretly. A little bit from every trip. Maybe he’d been planning this huge surprise for years, and then his heart had stopped in the driveway before he could give it to me.
That would be just like Richard. Wanting to make a big grand gesture.
That was the version I wanted to believe.
But there was still the question I couldn’t get past.
If he’d bought that apartment for me, why hadn’t anyone mentioned it after his death?
By the time my plane landed in Paris, the sun was coming up, pink and gold over gray runways.
Priya woke up and stretched.
“Welcome to France,” she said. “Do you know where you’re going?”
I looked down at the address on the letter.
“I think I do,” I said.
I’d made a decision somewhere over the ocean.
I wasn’t going to my hotel first. I wasn’t going to take a nap or unpack or eat breakfast.
I was going to that address.
The taxi driver looked at the address on the letter, nodded, and said something in French that I didn’t understand. Then he drove like he was being chased.
I held on to the door handle and watched Paris go by through the window.
I’d seen it in pictures my whole life. I wasn’t ready for it anyway. The old buildings the color of butter. The little cafés with their tiny round tables out on the sidewalk. The bridges over the river. People on bicycles with long loaves of bread sticking out of their baskets, exactly like in the movies. I almost laughed out loud.
Richard, I thought. You’d love this.
Then I remembered that he’d seen it. Many times. Without me.
The taxi stopped on a narrow street lined with trees.
I got out and stood on the sidewalk with my suitcase.
The building was right there in front of me. The same as the photograph. Pale stone walls and iron balconies with curly black railings. There were red geraniums in a window box on the second floor. A little bakery on the corner, the smell of bread drifting down the street.
It was exactly Richard’s taste. He always loved old things. Old houses. Old cars. Old jazz records.
I looked up at the third floor.
There was a balcony. Two small chairs on it. A little round table between them. A pot of something green.
Someone lived there.
The front door of the building was open. A man was carrying a bicycle out. He held the door for me without even looking at me.
I climbed the stairs. They were old wooden stairs, worn down in the middle from a hundred years of feet. My legs were heavy. I had to stop on the second landing and hold on to the railing and breathe.
On the third floor, there was only one door. Dark blue, with a brass number 3.
I stood in front of it for a long time.
Then I knocked.
Footsteps. A lock turning.
The door opened, and an elegant woman about my age was standing there.
She was tall and slim, with silver hair cut short and neat. She was wearing a cream sweater and gray trousers and small pearl earrings. She had reading glasses pushed up on her head. She looked like the kind of woman who’d never once owned a sweatshirt.
“Bonjour?” she said.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m sorry. Do you speak English?”
“A little.”
“My name is Mrs. Wilson. Margaret Wilson. I’ve come from America.” I took a breath. “I believe my husband owned this apartment.”
She frowned.
I held out the letter.
She took it politely and glanced at it. Her eyes moved down the page.
Then they stopped at the bottom.
At his name.
I watched her face change. It happened in one second. The polite curiosity disappeared. Her mouth went tight. All the color left her cheeks.
She looked up at me.
She started talking very fast in French. I didn’t understand a single word. But I didn’t need to. I knew the tone. I’d heard it from mothers at parent-teacher night when I told them their child was struggling. It was the sound of someone getting scared and angry at the same time.
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
She stopped. She pushed the letter back into my hands.
“You must leave,” she said in English.
“Please, I only want to ask…”
“This is my home.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t. I just…”
She turned and went inside, leaving the door open. I heard a drawer open. She came back with a folder and pulled out some papers and held them up in front of my face. There was a stamp on them, like the one on the papers in my envelope.
“My name,” she said, tapping it. “My apartment.”
“I understand,” I said. “Perhaps you bought it from him? I’m only trying to find out what happened. He died a long time ago, and I never…”
Her face hardened.
“Leave, please.”
Then I saw it.
Over her shoulder. Inside the apartment. On a wooden shelf by the window, between a stack of books and a little blue vase.
A framed photograph.
Richard.
He was young in it. Younger than I’d seen him in years. He was standing on a bridge with the river behind him, in a tan jacket I didn’t recognize. His hair was blowing in the wind.
He was smiling.
And he had his arm around the woman standing in front of me.
I just stood there.
For a second, my brain went looking for a reasonable explanation, the way it does. Had she worked with him? He’d traveled to Paris on business for years. Maybe she was a colleague. A secretary. A client. People take pictures at company events. People put their arms around each other in pictures.
“Wait,” I said. “Did you know my husband? Through his company? Halvorsen Industrial?”
Her face went completely white.
Then she slammed the door.
I stared at that dark blue door with the brass number 3.
I could hear her on the other side. She wasn’t walking away. She was standing right there, just like me. I could hear her breathing.
“Who are you?” I whispered to the door. “And what was Richard doing here with you?”
She didn’t answer.
I picked up my suitcase and started down the stairs.
Halfway down, the dizziness hit me again. Worse this time. The stairs tilted. The walls went gray. I dropped my suitcase, and it banged down three steps, and I grabbed the railing with both hands and sat down hard on the step.
I stayed there. I put my head between my knees. I breathed.
In for four. Out for four.
For the first time since Dr. Patel’s office, I felt truly afraid. Not of dying. I’d made a kind of peace with that in the hospital parking lot, or started to.
I was afraid that I wouldn’t have the strength to find out the truth.
That I’d come all this way, and my body would give out before I knew who that woman was.
After a while, the man with the bicycle came back. He saw me sitting on the stairs. He said something kind in French and picked up my suitcase and carried it down for me and then held my elbow the rest of the way.
“Merci,” I said. It was the only French word I was sure of.
He smiled and patted my hand and went on his way.
My hotel was a twenty-minute taxi ride away. It was small and clean, with a tiny elevator that fit exactly one person and one suitcase. My room was on the fourth floor, and it did have a balcony, with red flowers in a box, just like the picture.
I didn’t go out on it.
I sat on the edge of the bed in my coat and called Emma. It was early morning back in Ohio. She answered anyway.
“Mom! You made it! How was your flight? Did you see the apartment?”
I froze.
“What apartment?” I said.
Silence.
“Emma?”
“Oh, Mom,” she said. Her voice had gone very small.
“How do you know about it?”
There was a long pause.
“Because I arranged the envelope,” she said.
“You did what?”
“Mom, let me explain…”
“Emma Louise.”
I hadn’t used her middle name since she was fifteen and snuck out to a concert.
“Remember when we cleaned out Dad’s old things?” she said quickly. “Back in the spring? Before your retirement? When you finally decided to clear out the attic?”
“Yes.”
I remembered. It had taken us two weekends. I’d finally given away his suits to the church clothing drive. I’d kept his watch and his reading glasses and his old jazz records. Emma had asked if she could take his wooden box. A little cedar box he used to keep his cufflinks and tie clips in. It had sat on his dresser our whole marriage. I’d said yes.
“I found his letter inside that wooden box,” Emma said. “There’s a little felt lining in the lid. It was coming loose. I went to glue it back down, and there was an envelope tucked behind it.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“Emma, that letter is over thirty years old!”
“I know, Mom. I know. But when you said you were going to Paris, it was like… it was like a sign. Like Dad wanted you to have it. I thought maybe Dad had left you something nobody ever discovered. Something wonderful.”
“Did you check whether he still owned it?”
“I tried, Mom.” Her voice cracked. “I really tried. I spent weeks on it. But the French property records were so confusing, and everything was in French, and I couldn’t find a clear answer. I called a lawyer here, and he said he’d need months and a lot of money to find out. And you didn’t have months, and…”
She stopped.
“So you sent me there anyway,” I said.
“I thought Dad might have left you something wonderful,” she said. “That’s all. I’m sorry.”
I closed my eyes.
I thought about Emma at twelve, standing in the doorway in her nightgown, holding her brother’s hand, watching the ambulance lights on the snow. I thought about her bringing me that sheet cake. Do something you’ve always wanted.
“I know you meant well, sweetheart,” I said. “But I wish you’d told me before I came here.”
“I wanted it to be special,” she said. “That’s why I called the airline. They were so nice about it. I asked them to give you the envelope at the gate and say that one line. There’s something you still don’t know about this trip. I thought it would be like a movie.” She sniffed. “But Mom. What’s wrong? You sound strange.”
I didn’t want to tell her.
But I needed to know why that woman had looked so frightened when she saw Richard’s name. And I couldn’t carry it by myself in that little hotel room.
So I told her. About the woman. About the slammed door.
And about the photograph on the shelf.
Emma went very quiet.
“Maybe she bought the apartment,” she said slowly. “After Dad. And maybe she just… kept some old pictures? Things that were left there?”
“Why would she keep your father’s photograph, Emma? On a shelf? In a frame? For thirty-two years?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “But I’m going back.”
“Mom, please. Please don’t upset yourself. You’re not well. Just enjoy Paris. Forget the apartment. Forget I ever sent it. Please.”
I looked out the window of my hotel room at the rooftops of Paris. Gray and silver, with little chimney pots like toy soldiers.
