“I wasn’t ogling,” she said, grateful he couldn’t see the scenario jumping deliciously into her mind. “I was merely acknowledging that you’re large enough to warn off any would-be muggers.”

“Oh, my darling girl,” he said, and she swore he was leering simply for the pure joy of it, “I’m large enough for all sorts of things.”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course, if the robbers were to get close enough, they would eventually realize you’re more likely to help them design new pickpocketing apparatus than fight them off.”

“I would certainly fight them off—what do you mean, new pickpocketing apparatus? Do they really have existing apparatus? All right, I would fight them off first, and when they were lying helpless on the ground I would ask them about their apparatus.…” He paused. “And now I’ve said ‘apparatus’ so many times it sounds like I’m referring to something else entirely. I’ll say ‘equipment’ instead. No, that has hidden depths as well. I think I’ll just abandon the attempt. Why houses?”

“What?”

“Is what I was asking you while you were out with the fairies. Why decorating houses?”

She shrugged. “I’m good at it,” she said. “And I needed the money.”

“All right,” he said.

She looked at him suspiciously, but he seemed content to let the subject drop. As they walked, the wrongness of her statement pressed against her, like a little betrayal. She didn’t owe him her whole soul, she argued. It had been the truth, as far as it went. She’d made a habit of not over-sharing, and this was such a tiny thing.

The omission wasn’t a betrayal of him, she realized suddenly. It was a betrayal of herself.

“I like things to be beautiful. And … people’s homes, where they live, they should … nurture. It doesn’t mean they have to be fancy, or large. I’ve seen it in a set of curtains in a French cottage, or a flower box. My first flat in Montmartre, it was only a few rooms.” She stopped, waiting for the pain that usually accompanied the memory of her little apartment. She’d left it shortly after the night of the ill-fated dinner party, unable to walk past the emerald wallpaper without remembering. But this time, she remembered the first buds of freedom she had planted there. How much she had liked that wallpaper. She’d chosen it with her friend Amelie, her neighbor and the first of the friends who had embraced her there so easily.

Amelie was a dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet, a tall, graceful woman with a mane of auburn hair, a kind smile, and eyes that turned wary when she thought no one was looking. There was a story there, as with so many of Montmartre’s residents, but unlike many of her neighbors Amelie seemed to prefer to keep it to herself.