《The Wife I Betrayed Twice》

My name is Celeste Martin, and today is my third year and forty-five days in Montmartre Square painting portraits of tourists. The Parisian sunset, with its casual tenderness, paints the Sacré-Cœur dome a honey-colored hue and illuminates the spinach leaves that remain between the teeth of the American tourist's wife. I hold the charcoal, wrist move quickly, rustling, the paper gradually emerged on a slightly rich, but a friendly smile face. "Oh, my God! This is great, honey!" His wife took the sketchbook and exclaimed, while her husband immediately paid the bill. 50 euros. The paper money fell into the wooden box beside me with a cool touch. I thanked him with a smile, but my throat felt a little dry. There weren't many of them in the box, scattered like the last stubborn leaves of autumn, unable to cover the cold medical bill at the bottom. Anthoine, my brother. The name rolled through my mind with rusty bitterness. I rubbed my stiff fingers, which had thin calluses and little distortion at the knuckles from holding the pen for years. These hands, once praised by Mr. . Martin, the adoptive father, as having"A gift for capturing souls," are now valued for drawing as many faces as they can as quickly as they can for medical bills. "Next! Nice portrait, only fifty Euros!" I cleared my throat and greeted the thinning crowd. The evening wind, with the steam of the Seine, blew on the sheets of paper I had spread on the box as samples, on which there were laughing lovers and silent old men, and the jagged stone steps of Montmartre and its ever-bustling cafes. No one stays. Bus after bus of tour groups left, heading for their respective hotels with contentment and exhaustion. The locals are in a hurry, heading for warm dinners and homes. I was one of the last holdouts in the square, and the Algerian record vendor next to me, already closing his stall, whistled to me: "Hey, Celeste, back you go? It's getting dark." I gave him a strained smile, but said nothing. Back? Back to that ten-square-meter, draughty attic in winter and sweltering in summer? There was no warm dinner waiting for me, only Anthoine's cheerful phone call from the hospital and the mounting bills on the table. I looked down and slid a picture of Anthoine out of the drawer. In his hospital gown, he was as pale as a plaster of Montmartre, but his eyes were bright, like dark stones washed by a stream. He smiled at the camera, mouth arc but pulling my heart the most painful root of the nerve. He was still so young that life should have flourished like a white chestnut in the spring, not imprisoned in a room reeking of disinfectant and waiting for a hopelessly expensive operation. "Just one more picture and maybe we'll be able to cover tomorrow's Hospital Bill," I told myself, more like a hopeless prayer. Just when I was ready to pack up and accept the reality of today, an invisible pressure suddenly enveloped me. Not the wind, not the sound, a kind of... ... aura. Unconsciously, I lifted my head. At the edge of the square, the last rays of the setting sun framed an extremely tall figure. He was wearing a perfectly cut dark grey coat of a material that seemed perfectly insulated from the cold of late autumn in Paris. He stood backlit, and I couldn't see his face, only a cold, focused gaze that penetrated the twilight and locked onto me. It wasn't the curiosity of a tourist or the flirtatious gaze of a street thug. It's a kind of... ... appraisal, a kind of heavy gaze, like an expert in a museum identifying a lost antique. My heart skipped a beat and my hand unconsciously gripped the charcoal. Plainclothes officers? Or is it the city manager chasing us"Ugly" peddlers away? He moved and took steps towards me. The pace is steady, with a natural, unmistakable sense of control. As he approached, the light at last lit up his face. His short blond hair was meticulously combed, his features were as deep as classical sculpture, and the curve of his jawline was crisp and hard. Most striking of all were his eyes, ice-blue, like the deepest glaciers of the Alps, without a trace of heat. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, and every detail of him was a silent declaration of who he was -- a man from another world, out of place with me, out of place with the bustle of Montmartre Square. He stopped at my booth and looked at my paintings on display for a moment, then slowly moved up and landed on my face. Or rather, on the side of my face. His gaze, like a solid line of ice, ran down my forehead, browbone, and nose bridge, all the way to my jaw. The focus was almost anatomically brutal. I could feel his eyes flick over the tiny mole on my left cheek that Antoine once described as a"Stray starburst". Insecurity is like a vine that wraps around my heart. I have never been looked at in such a way as if I were not a living person but a painting, a specimen, or... ... A Phantom. How long did he watch it? Ten Seconds? Twenty seconds? In the background noise around the noise, this period of time was infinitely elongated, terrible silence. Finally, he turned his head slightly and whispered something to a solemn man in a suit half a step behind him. His voice was low, with a cold magnetic quality, but I couldn't hear the words. Then he looked at me again. This time, there seemed to be something extremely complicated in his eyes, which flashed away so quickly that I could not catch it. Shock? Confusion. Or... ? ... A Touch of unspeakable pain? I don't know. All I know is that under his icy blue gaze, I felt invisible, like a butterfly pinned to a specimen board. He didn't ask my price, he didn't speak to me, he didn't even give me a look of appreciation or disapproval. He looked at me this way for a moment, then, without warning, turned and left. As abrupt as he had come, the tall figure melted into the twilight and disappeared quickly at the end of Montmartre's winding downhill path. I froze until the cold night wind woke me up. The palm of my hand was already sweating thinly from holding the charcoal. "Wacko," the Algerian boy next to him leaned in and shrugged. "Rich Guy's wacko." I pulled at the corners of my mouth, unable to explain the strange pressure I had felt during the brief encounter. It wasn't a simple"Quirk." There was something in those eyes, something heavy, dark, distant and relevant to me. I shook my head, trying to dispel the inexplicable uneasiness. But now is not the time to think about it. I squatted down and began to pack away my drawing tools. I put the charcoal, eraser and fix-up liquid back into the drawing box. Finally, my eyes fell on the screen of the old mobile phone. No new texts, no missed calls. The hospital didn't ask for payment, and Anthoine didn't text me at this hour to ask, "How many pictures did you draw today, Sis? Are You Tired?" But the silence is more unnerving than a debt call. I took a deep breath of the cold air, pulled my woolen coat, which had been worn for three years and had been washed a little white, onto my back the heavy picture-box, and stepped on the worn-down Stone Road of Montmartre, walk up to my attic. Behind, the lights of Paris lit up, like a scattered stars, warm and bright. But that kind of warmth, from the parents died after the accident does not belong to me. What I didn't know was that the presence of the ice-blue-eyed man was not an insignificant episode. He is like a stone into my stagnant water like life, about to set off a wave swallowing everything. And my fate, from the moment of sight with him, has completely deviated from the track. Tonight, I'm still worrying about my brother's medical bills. But what I don't know is that tomorrow there will be a contract laid out before me that will stake my entire soul. ---