The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(21)

“Don’t ever doubt that I love you. And always will.”

Those last words were like shards of glass in my throat. I started crying, and C.P. was snuffling, too, and I’d like to say that by the time I hung up the phone, I felt better.

I could say that.

But it would be a damned lie.





I know it’s hard to believe, but I loved my parents. Because even though they did heinous things to us, I’m pretty sure—no, I’m absolutely sure—that despite their craziness, they wanted us to become extraordinary.

They just didn’t realize they were also turning us into freaks. Or maybe they believed the end justified the means.

The pills they gave me were supposed to hone and heighten my analytical mind, and at the same time, they were designed to quash pesky, distracting, irrelevant emotions.

I didn’t feel much—anger, sadness, joy—and I didn’t know what I was missing.

When I met James, our love pushed through what years of experimental drugs had blocked. No wonder I was thunderstruck. To the core. This was first love of the epic kind.

Meanwhile, my mother convinced her biggest client—Royal Rampling—to invest heavily in Angel Pharmaceuticals, which was going bankrupt. It was as though a ginormous sinkhole had opened up and the family business fell through.

Mr. Rampling lost fifty million dollars because of my parents, and he had sued the Angels for every nickel.

After I’d said good-bye to C.P. on the phone, while I was washing my face and putting my clothes away, I thought about my reunion with James in Paris, the absolute best and worst twenty-four hours of my life. I remembered how he had reeled me in—only to smash my heart into subatomic particles.

I had always assumed that, like me, James was a victim of his terrible father.

Was it possible that James was not a victim? Had he set me up to hurt me as payback for what my parents had done to his family? Had he snuck into my heart under the cover of love and purposely shattered it?

Had James Rampling been my enemy all along?





After my hilarious but emotional conversation with C.P., and my postconversation depression, the week whizzed by, drama free. No word from James. No fights at school. No trouble from Harry’s heart or Gram Hilda’s apparently merciful board of judgment. And no one died.

Then we had a half-day school holiday—yay!

While Harry went to a studio to practice piano and Monsieur Morel drove Jacob and Hugo to watch a soccer camp practice game, I made a call. Then I dressed in skinny pants and heels and a fierce narrow-waisted checked jacket, and I pulled my hair back in a braided band. I put on makeup, too, for the first time since the Sisters of Charity got hold of me.

I caught a cab at the taxi stand down the street, and twenty minutes and eight kilometers later, my royal-blue Fiat taxi slowed to a crawl along a charming, narrow street in Le Marais.

We stopped in front of a two-story powder-blue building with high, sparkling windows and gold letters on the awnings over the glass-and-brass front doors.

We were at the Parfumerie Bellaire, my grandmother’s company and the prettiest shop I’d ever seen.

I walked through the doorway into a dazzling showroom, almost like a stage set in a theater. Clerks, not much older than me, wore colorful smocks over tights, with chunky jewelry and stylish hair fascinators. Behind the showcases, the walls were paneled with luminous photos of sunlit fields of flowers: lavender and roses and blue-eyed grass.

My grandmother had created this. This had been her passion.

I told a clerk my name, and the young woman clasped my hands in hers and said, “Monsieur Laurier is waiting for you. He asked me to bring you right in.”

The laboratory behind the showroom was a bright, open space with skylights overhead, furnished with wooden tables around the perimeter and tall, narrow shelves holding flasks and vials and copper beakers. Workers in pale-blue lab coats and gold net caps used little glass pipettes to blend tiny portions of fragrant oils. Wow, the air smelled absolutely heavenly.

Monsieur Laurier came downstairs from his office on the mezzanine. He strode toward me, introduced himself, shook my hand, and then—he hugged me.

He was a very handsome man of at least seventy. How can such an old dude be so gorgeous? I can only say that he was.

“Bonjour. I’m honored to meet you, Tandy. I am so glad for the chance to show you Bellaire.”

Monsieur Laurier walked me through the lab and explained that the young people at the tables had all been specially trained.

“They spent nine months learning to recognize a minimum of five hundred fragrances and must spend five more years in their apprenticeships before they can identify four thousand scents—and become a recognized ‘nose’ for Bellaire.

“Your grandmother was a great woman,” said Monsieur Laurier. “She inspired so many people—myself included.”

As we walked, Monsieur Laurier stopped at various stations to introduce me and to place drops of fragrant oil on fabric for me to smell. I sniffed vanilla and lemongrass, ylang-ylang and musk, sandalwood and amber, and all the while Monsieur Laurier was watching me, showing me, teaching me.

And he told me, “Your grandmother was an extraordinary nose. She had a genius for creating new fragrances that we still sell today. Even now, there is no one like her.”

A shadow crossed Monsieur Laurier’s face. Sadness or nostalgia, and suddenly I thought I’d seen him before. Was he one of the nude men in the photos I’d found in Gram Hilda’s locked attic room?