He grins. “You sure you’re not sick of it after all my letters?”

“Not at all. I want to hear it directly from you. Spare no details, tell me everything.”

And he does.

I don’t remember what we eat. I barely notice the food on my plate or the drink in my glass.

I stare at the pink of Oliver’s mouth as he speaks and his long fingers drumming on the table as he gets lost in his own stories.

“The classes are incredible,” he says, eyes bright. “Just two days ago I spent the whole day with my professors at the Louvre. Took a lecture right under Winged Victory.”

I nod like I have any idea what he’s talking about. There are so many ways in which Oliver and I speak the same language, but academics isn’t one of them. It’s embarrassing to remind him I left school right after learning complex multiplication. I never learned much about art or language or any of the other fancy things he knows. And it’s fine, really. He doesn’t understand the magic I teach or the classes I attend either.

“And the people, Frances, you’re going to love the people. There’s a show tonight, a brass band. You’re coming, bring Lena and Maxine, too, I beg you.”

It isn’t hard to convince me to spend time with him. “Of course.”

After our meal, we take a walk along the river in slow meandering steps, my hand in the crook of his elbow.

We don’t quite fit, but we’re learning.

It’s quiet, peaceful moments like this that are the hardest. That’s when the voices in my head are the loudest, when the memories roar back to life.

My boot slips on an unfamiliar cobblestone. Oliver steadies me.

The streets of Paris fan out in front of me, the buildings and hanging baskets of flowers like something from a dream.

But my vision tunnels until I’m somewhere else. There’s the snap of a neck, the way her body crumpled to the floor, another body in a hotel room, one in a shop, my scissors in his neck. The bullet burying itself in Oliver’s stomach, the bloom of blood spreading over his shirt as his eyes went glassy. It all happened so long ago, I don’t have to remember it here. I could let it go, if only I could figure out how. The feeling has grown, like tree roots, snaking through my being, wrapping around my bones. We’re now an inextricable being, this slick, sluicing guilt and me.

Oliver must see it on my face because he stops, reaches up, and presses a thumb right in the middle of my eyes, where my brow has furrowed. “You have that far-off look again.”

I shake my head. “I’m here, I’m here,” I reassure him.