She glanced at the car window. The vague dark shapes of fields and houses slid silently through the reflection of her face in the glass. He had turned off the périphérique to the A-6 Autoroute Sud towards Lyons. Wake up Kelly, she urgently told herself, but there was only the pain in her hands and the pain told her with a horrible certainty that it wasn’t a dream.

She had spent her life living in a fool’s paradise, she told herself bitterly. One moment everything was just as it had always been and suddenly, it was as if she had taken a single step off a curb and the gutter had turned out to be a dark and bottomless pit. It was all the more shocking because the day had begun so well …

It had been one of those rare sunny days in Paris when the city seems to shimmer with light, when the flowers in the Tuileries sparkle with color and when even the taxi drivers manage a smile now and then. She and Lori wanted to take advantage of the light and spent the morning snapping photos of the barges and flower stalls along the pea-green Seine from the Ile St. Louis. In the afternoon it had rained on and off. Strands of drops hung like pearls from the café awnings, each of them a tiny miniature of the street. In Paris, the summer rain is warm and teasing, like a brief flirtation.

They went shopping for an umbrella at the Galeries Lafayette near the Opéra. It was still raining when they came out and they stopped off for a kir at the nearby Café de la Paix to wait it out. She remembered how they laughed when an American woman at a nearby table had slipped the Dubonnet ashtray into her purse, self-righteously assuring her husband that “they expect you to take it.”

When the contact came, it wasn’t at all what she’d expected. They met Randy, a long-haired American in jeans searching for the ghosts of ’68 at the café. He was with Jean-Paul, a good-looking would-be actor. They went to the Bois and passed around some joints and wound up at Ondine’s. The crowded chrome-plated club on the rue de Ponthieu was one of the places that everyone went to, if only to say they’d been there. Later, they all climbed into Jean-Paul’s battered Renault and went to a party on a private barge moored near the Pont d’Iena.