Alexandre's POV
The car ride home was quiet.
Not uncomfortable quiet — the other kind. The kind that had weight and texture and things moving through it that neither of us had decided yet to put into words. Paris at ten-forty p.m. doing what Paris did at ten-forty — golden and indifferent, the streets thinning out, the city shifting from its evening self into something slower and more private.
Claire was looking out the window.
She had taken her hair down in the lift on the way out of the hotel — one pin, then another, a small private act of decompression that she clearly hadn't thought about doing in front of me. Her hair fell to her shoulders and she pushed it back and looked out the window and I looked at the road and said nothing.
The dress was still midnight blue.
I was still no
