Lost in Paris by Elizabeth Thompson (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

prepared for us for dessert. It’s like tasting heaven on a spoon. “Would it be too cold to eat outside?”

“I could prepare a menu that would warm up everyone. Who doesn’t want to have a picnic under the Eiffel Tower no matter the temperature?”

I want to have a picnic under the Eiffel Tower, I think. Especially since I’ve been in Paris for weeks now and I’ve only seen it in the distance.

“We could start with some onion soup or foie gras on a crispy baguette and then move on to cassoulet,” he says. “I have a great recipe. I could serve a mixed-greens salad with a Dijon vinaigrette and we could end with crème brûlée. What do you think?”

“I think it sounds delicious, but you’d better give me a budget. And where are you going to cook this feast? I’d love to offer my apartment, but the setup is circa interwar. Marla and I have been subsisting mostly on cafés and takeout and the occasional one-pot meal she prepares.”

“Where I cook is the last thing you need to be concerned with. Don’t worry about me. I have my resources.”

Our gazes snare and he’s radiating the same electric warmth as the first time I saw him. He doesn’t seem to be nursing a grudge over the way the evening ended when he was in Paris. I’d fully prepared myself for him to use it as an excuse to push me away.

“So, you’re saying I should trust you?” I say.

“Well, yeah. Have I ever given you reason not to?”

No, Aiden, you haven’t. But I still worry that one day I’ll discover you’re like all the rest.

“I usually don’t give people a chance to let me down when it comes to work, but lately I’ve been throwing caution to the wind.”

“How so?”

I tell him about hiring Marla.

“My mother and I have a complicated history, but she’s proving she really wants to make things right. Am I stupid for trusting her?”

“I’m sensing trust doesn’t come easily to you.”

“Trust and I have a fraught relationship. But I won’t bore you with that.”

“You wouldn’t be boring me,” he says. “I’d really like to hear about it. I want to know more about what makes you… you.”

I don’t quite know where to start or whether I should laugh it off and steer the conversation in another direction.

“Do you really want to know what makes me the damaged person I am?”

I cringe. The words sounded much better in my head and that’s exactly why I’d rather not get into it—

“I really do want to know.” He smiles and reaches for my hand. “Don’t think of it as damage. Think of it as texture.”

I take a deep breath and jump off the high dive before I can chicken out.

“Basically, my grandmother raised me. I’m just discovering that my great-grandmother—her mom—had this secret life no one knew about. It’s weird. You live with someone and you think you know them. Then you find out there was a secret side to them you never knew at all. That they were keeping something this big. I don’t even know what I think about it yet. Add to that the fact that I’ve never known my father. And I spent a lot of years with someone once, but he… he—”

The word gets stuck behind the lump in my throat.

“Let’s just say things didn’t work out…”

“Hannah, I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be. It was for the best. We dated for three years and one night our conversation meandered down the dreaded where-is-this-relationship-going path and he told me he didn’t see a future for us. He said I’d helped him realize that he never wanted to get married. So we broke up. It was amiable and very adult. There wasn’t a big fight. I didn’t cause a scene or create a lot of drama. It was like one day we were a couple and I thought we were heading for forever, and the next I discovered that he wanted something completely different than I did. I was sad, of course, because I loved him. He said he still loved me, but there was no sense in dragging out the inevitable.”

“Do you still talk to him?”

“Oh no. Here’s the kicker. He ended up marrying someone else less than a year later. And he had the audacity to invite me to the wedding.”

I hope my laugh doesn’t sound bitter.

It’s hard to read Aiden’s expression. I hope I haven’t overshared, but I feel like I have. I hate feeling this exposed. I glance at my watch. “Oh, look at the time. It’s been a lovely evening, but I need to go. Aiden, thank you.”

I stand to leave. I realize we are the only two left in the restaurant besides servers and other staff.

“Let me take you home.”

“No. Thank you, but I’ll be fine. Get me a quote for the food for the tour dinner and I’ll see if it works with our budget.”

He hesitates. “I won’t let you down, Hannah.”

I’m not sure if he’s talking personally or professionally, but I want it to be both, and my neediness makes me want to run as fast as I can.

When I get home around midnight, Marla is nowhere to be found. I wonder where she’s gone, but I’m too tired to text.

Either Cressida or Tallu comes in around 2:00. The other comes in about forty-five minutes later.

Even after they’ve settled in, there’s still no sign of Marla. I lie awake, thinking about the heartbreak she has suffered in her own right. What a toll it must’ve taken to feel responsible for her father’s death and know that’s the reason her own mother emotionally canceled her.

That kind of grief has to change you. It must break you apart and put you back together again differently, practically rewriting your DNA.

Or maybe Gram passed the gene that keeps people from sustaining healthy relationships to Marla and Marla passed it to me. As I drift off to sleep, I wonder if that’s why Aiden scares me.