"At the restaurant," she said. "While you were on your phone." She still had not turned around. "She said she knew you. For some time, four years perhaps, she said. She said you loved her." A pause. "She said a wife in your world does not get certain things because they belong to someone else already."
The window held her reflection faintly, pale and ghosted against the Paris rooftops, and I looked at it and thought about a woman in a restaurant bathroom who had found my wife on our second day in Paris and said those specific things, and I felt something move through me that was cold and deliberate and would need to be addressed at a later time with the thoroughness it deserved. Like I didn't have enough on my plate.
"Look at me," I said.
She turned.
Her face was the composed one, the
