Page 55 of My One Week Husband
“I had to get away from London. It contained all the memories of Jonathan and my time with him. There was only one place I wanted to go. I felt like Paris welcomed me with open arms. It helped me to heal.”
He runs a hand along my wrist. “Because it’s your home. It’s where you feel you belong. And you needed that.”
“Perhaps I did. The river was like my shrink.” I dip my head, a little shy, a little embarrassed. But it’s freeing, too, to tell him that.
“Is that so? You and the river talk to each other?” His voice is lighthearted. This is the Daniel who delights in fun and games.
“We have many, many conversations,” I say playfully, no longer embarrassed.
“Does it give good advice?”
“Sometimes it does,” I say with a coy shrug. “Sometimes it gives me stock tips. Sometimes it tells me who to bet on in the World Series.”
“Lucky you. I want to have your river. That’s why you’re such a financial wunderkind.”
I laugh as a breeze kicks up from the water, gusting through my hair, blowing it behind my shoulder. He reaches for the strands, tucking some over my ear. “Tell me more about why you loved Paris when you moved there a few years ago.”
As we both gaze out at the Rhône, I picture the Seine—the heart of my answer. “I loved to walk across the bridges. I came to know all of them. How they made me feel. What they could do for me. As I was trying to make sense of what had happened in my marriage, I’d think and walk. I’d wander across them, stop in the middle, rest my elbows on the railing,” I say, sliding down onto my elbows here as if to demonstrate. “And then I would tell the river what made me sad.”
“Did the river say anything back to you?”
His question is wholly serious. So is my answer as I say, “I would pretend it would reply. I’d pretend it was listening.” I take a beat. “Maybe that sounds foolish.”
“It doesn’t sound foolish at all. Sounds like you needed it. Like it helped you get through a difficult time. And I can see that rivers are like that. They’re not as daunting as oceans. They feel like they could talk to us, right?”
He gets it. He gets me. “Like they have something to say. They feel, too, like they’ve seen more interesting things than the ocean, don’t you think?”
He moves his hand in front of him, wiggling it back and forth to imitate the river winding through the city. “Rivers snake through cities. They spy on us. They know what we’re up to. Maybe they know our darker secrets,” he says as something black flickers across his eyes. Almost like he has a deep, dark secret, perhaps one he’s shared with a river. Then he’s quiet, possibly drifting off to thoughts of those secrets. I sense he still has them. I can hear their echoes in the words he doesn’t say, the way he sometimes quiets at the end of a sentence or a thought.
Leaving so much unsaid.
I’m not like that though. Now that I’ve opened up to him, I see no need to hold back. “My love of the river came from my parents,” I say with a contented sigh. “My dad was like that. He was the one who loved it and took me to it, and he was the one who said the river would talk to me.”
“You got that from him,” he says, wonder in his voice.
“I did.”
Daniel stares off in the distance across the Rhône, his profile inscrutable.
Is he thinking of his own family? I want to know what’s in that faraway gaze of his. I’m tempted to ask, when he turns back to me and says, “Do you ever see yourself living any place besides Paris?”
I shake my head. “It’s my home now. I’ve no reason to leave. What about you? What about London? For all intents and purposes, that’s your home base. Even though you’re really only there half the time.”
“I don’t seem to put down roots, do I? I’m constantly drawn to Paris though,” he says, his eyes going flirty, journeying over my body, letting me know that I’m one of the reasons he’s drawn to that city. My God, I hope I can keep being one of those reasons.
I want to tell him to stay in Paris. Don’t go back to London. Camp out, stay with me. But that’s dangerous. That’s so damn dangerous. We’re ending.
Even though the more we talk, the more it feels like we’re only just beginning.
“I suppose I don’t feel like I’ve had a home in a long time, honestly,” he says, his tone melancholy. “I don’t think I’ve really felt that way since my parents died. I’ve been all over the world since then.”
