Down by the river, she watched the men fishing. They sat close together in a long line on the bank, but each was essentially alone.

You have only two options. The voice in her head was still Lulu’s. One: Get yourself pregnant and go back to Boston with Robert. Two: Fake a miscarriage and persuade him to stay in Paris. Tend to your marriage with the diligence your mother used in caring for her rose garden, but continue the affair with Paolo—quietly. Gazing out over the water, Genevieve tasted those options on her tongue, rolling them around her mouth like wine. The first was totally unpalatable. The second was all wrong, too—quite off.

On the Île Saint-Louis, soft voices were murmuring from within a walled courtyard. A cat basked in the sunshine. An attractive young man lounged on a first-floor window seat, reading. As she looked up, he smiled and waved, as though he knew her. As though they were old friends. She raised a hand to wave back, without quite knowing why. It was only after she’d already left the island that she realized she did know the boy a little. He was a barman from the Ritz.

Thinking about the Ritz made Genevieve nostalgic for the early days of her marriage. The fledgling relationship had seemed good raw material. She’d believed, then, that she could shape something interesting from it. She would have to work hard to convince herself that this could still be true.

Crossing to the Île de la Cité, she entered Notre Dame by the South transept, beneath the carving of the life and martyrdom of St. Stephen. Saul, a coldly isolated figure, stands and watches Stephen being stoned.

Notre Dame had always frightened Genevieve. So dark and cavernous. It was a haunted place. But there was nowhere better to be quiet and still. To sit so long that you’d lose all sense of time and wouldn’t even know if it was day or night outside. To try to isolate one voice from the cacophony inside yourself.

Today, though, Genevieve would not have time for contemplation. Shortly after she’d sat down, she found herself watching two women in black.

They made their way slowly up the aisle, their arms linked. They seemed to be leaning on each other. Certainly you had the sense that each could not have remained upright without the support of the other, though they weren’t old and didn’t appear frail. One wore a hat with a wide brim that obscured her eyes, and the other had a scarf wrapped around her head. Something weighed them down. A shared sadness. They stopped near Genevieve to light a candle. The woman with the hat dropped a coin in the box while her companion took up the candle, lit it and placed it with the others. Then she lifted her headscarf and laid it about her shoulders, and Genevieve suddenly realized who they were.