“I’m not proud of it,” he said defensively. “I just—I don’t know. To pull a knife on someone. When he did that, I just snapped. I’m not even sure how I got the knife away from him and got him down on the ground, but I do remember my friends had to drag me away.” He was frowning deeply but then looked up and apparently imagined he saw something in my eyes again. “I’ve got a lot more self-control now,” he said quickly.

I blinked. “Are you apologizing for losing your temper when someone pulled a knife on you?” I lost my temper when I got a run in my hose. And I wasn’t going to start apologizing for it, either. I knew we weren’t in the same league. It might be a good thing I was going to Cambridge before he could get to know the real me.

“Well,” he said uneasily, “I was really mad. I think I could have hurt him. It wasn’t a great moment. I moved away from there as soon as I got my bac.” The bac is the big test that decides whether French high school students qualify to go on to college or not, so he must have been about nineteen. Had he started living on his own when he was nineteen? I’d never met any French person who did that. Most seemed to live at home until at least twenty-five.

“Why did he pull a knife on you?”

“He was trying to steal this girl’s moped, and I stopped him.”

Lady’s honor, lady’s moped—it was pretty close. “Where did you move?”

“Up near République, in the Tenth. I have an apartment my stepfather helped me remodel in exchange with the landlord for a good deal on the rent.”

So he had started living on his own that young. My eyebrows rose. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

Twenty-four. I fooled people all the time by acting like a spoiled thirteen-year-old, but really I was twenty-seven. I changed the subject as fast as I could, before he could find out I was an older woman. I wouldn’t want him to start expecting me to act mature. “So what about this one?” I touched the scar on his right wrist where it looked like he had broken a bone.

His mouth softened at my finger on his wrist, but then he realized what I was touching and coughed. “Oh. That.”

“Another fight?”

“No.” He cleared his throat. “That was a video game.”

I choked.

“It was impossible! I couldn’t manage to win it! They made the game too hard!”

“What did you do, hit the wall?” During my brothers’ teenage years, I had on several occasions watched them glumly spending a Saturday morning with plaster and paint, repairing an explosion of temper.

“Yes, but it was the outside wall of the house. Concrete,” he said mournfully.