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Chapters (45)
  1. Cover
  2. Blame Iton Paris
  3. Copyright Notice
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  5. Book One
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-one
  27. Book Two
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. Thirty-six
  43. Thirty-seven
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine

May I mention that I, personally, have always liked spies? They have all the moves.

Sébastien’s family might not be so bad either, at that. I had never expected them to invite his strange American girlfriend into their world so readily. I had lived in several countries and traveled in more, and I had never had an experience quite like this. I had always thought a “successful” relationship would close my world and limit my options, but that didn’t seem to be the case here. I felt embraced in something very special that not many outsiders got to see.

Now I started to wonder what Sébastien would think of my family and my world. And what they would think of him. My family, though, was on the other side of the world. And I was about to go back to it, while Sébastien stayed here.

Sixteen

The airport is horrible. Sébastien keeps shoving his hand across his eyes before anything can leak out. I bawl unashamedly. That’s one of the things we don’t have in common, our degree of self-discipline in public. Men with machine guns corral us at an unsafe distance from an abandoned piece of luggage. “How can we do this?” I cry. “We just can’t do this. It will never work. I’ll probably never see you again.”

The airport is like some failed dream of the future. All of its once-shiny moon-colony ramps have, long since construction, grown worn and grimy. It’s a pessimistic airport. It makes me feel that nothing can stay bright and beautiful. I refuse to say good-bye until ten minutes before my flight is due to take off, which is a serious miscalculation of how many moon-ramps lie between me and my gate. I reach my plane long after its doors should have closed. Flight attendants, pilot, and copilot all take a few minutes to scold me, but their voices dwindle off as I just sit in my seat crying.

Sébastien’s first e-mail was waiting for me when I landed. More followed. Even though our phone bills mounted to four hundred dollars a month, we tried to communicate mostly over e-mail. Sébastien proved wonderful at love letters, pouring out his heart into them every day. Sometimes he added his artwork: a 3D teddy bear with a heart gleaming in his hand that became my computer wallpaper, a comic drawing of his cat Indy grinning from behind a pumpkin for Halloween, the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame as seen from the Seine where he had been sitting and thinking about me. He saw his family today and they sent me kisses. Indy had peed on his DVD player, which now no longer worked, and he was going to kill that cat. He loved his job, but he missed me.