“Oh Manon—ma jolie—mon coeur te dit—bonjour.”

Simone started to laugh and coughed blood. On her blouse. On the blanket. And I tried to quiet her.

But she pleaded with me not to stop. To keep singing. She needed to hear my voice. Needed to know I was there beside her.

She clutched my hand tightly. And so with tears clouding my eyes I sang that silly song over and over as Simone’s grip eased and the only woman I have ever loved died in my arms.

29

I splashed cold water on my face, the image of Simone dying in Vincent’s arms still resonating in the back of my mind. I could not remember ever feeling like this, my usual MO to turn sadness into anger or simply bottle it up and pretend not to feel anything. More than one girlfriend had pointed that out. I had come here looking for facts, not feelings, but the journal was affecting me in ways I’d never imagined.

I was sorry I had not stolen it yesterday. And I would have if Riccardo and Chiara had not come back into the research room at precisely the moment I was sliding the journal off the desk and about to cram it into my jeans. I had to stop. Stealing from the Laurentian Library would surely carry a substantial fine and undoubtedly bar me from ever using the library again, maybe even get me arrested and prosecuted. I pictured myself in some crummy Italian prison, the futile calls to the American embassy where they’d look up my juvenile history and that would be that. I wasn’t about to end up like my teenage posse, two of them dead, one in prison, the others, who knows?

Perhaps it was for the best, safer that the journal remained in the library where no one else could get it.

I looked into the restroom mirror and splashed more cold water into my red-rimmed eyes.

Back at the long table, I read how they had made it to the hospital in time where an emergency-room doctor slit open Simone’s belly and saved her baby, Vincent conveying the scene in vivid detail over several pages. I was reading so intently that when someone tapped my arm, I practically jumped and closed the journal fast.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you,” Alexandra said, looking down at me, asking if I was okay.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look it.”

Chiara shushed us.

“She hates me,” Alexandra whispered.

“Really? I think she likes me.”

“That’s why she hates me.”

I managed a smile, stopped myself from saying how much I had thought about her, how much I’d missed her. “How long have you been here?”

“An hour or so. You were so wrapped up in your reading, you didn’t see me come in.” She asked again if I was okay, and I told her I had a bit of a headache from too much reading, and she suggested I quit, it was almost seven, the library about to close. And when she proposed dinner, I gave her a cool “Sure, why not?” while my inner voice shouted YES!