The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(6)

Hugo yelled with all the air in his lungs, “Noooooooo!”

He got up on his chair and threw his arms around Matty’s neck. “Don’t gooooo.”

“I’ll call you every night,” Matthew said. “I promise.”

“You’re going right now?” Harry asked. “Like tonight?”

“My flight takes off in three hours. I love you all. Now tell me you love me, too.”

I was going to miss the hell out of my great, larger-than-life big brother. We told him so.

Wow. Something amazing just happened.

We made Matthew cry.





Late that night, I lay sleepless, sandwiched between goose-down blankets and silk sheets in a huge canopied bed, maybe the same bed Gram Hilda had slept in once upon a long time ago. I’d gotten past hating James Rampling and had moved halfway back to loving him again.

I couldn’t help it.

I could still feel his mouth. I could still remember the way he looked at me. I was starting to think I’d been unfair.

Maybe James hadn’t left me because he didn’t love me.

He’d said he’d left me because he did. And there was good reason.

The last time I’d seen James, six long months ago, it had been under circumstances both different from last night and somewhat the same.

We were alone together, but instead of lying entwined inside a small one-star hotel in Paris, we were walking in the damp sand of the Hamptons. The sea breeze was blowing through my hair, and James and I were cooling off at the edge of the ocean, not quite ready for the bed in the cottage just behind us in the dunes.

We hadn’t known each other very long, but we were getting close, kissing, sharing secrets, finding out how alike we were—when headlights came out of nowhere and pinned us where we stood. And thanks to my parents and his father, that had been the last I’d seen of him, until yesterday.

So maybe what James said in his note was all true: that his father was the devil, and I wasn’t safe. If I loved James, I had to trust him, right?

But would I ever see him again?

The sky was dark, and there was only the faintest moonlight coming in through the window, just as it had when James and I clutched each other in the small bed at just this time in his room last night.

I thrashed around in the enormous, luxurious bed, but there were almost too many pillows. And so I used them well, packing myself in between them so that it felt like James was holding me every way I turned.

I wound my hair around my fingers, twisted it at the nape of my neck. I opened the top buttons of my pajamas, threw the sheets and bedcovers off me. My skin was hot and tingling, and I was thinking about James.

I wondered if he was lying in bed somewhere thinking about me.





Friend, I tried desperately to sleep as the night wore on. I couldn’t find the soft spot or the quiet place in my mind, but I tried. I counted backward from a hundred. I changed positions from this way to that. I balled up the pillows. I remade the bed. I did math in my head, and I recited poetry to myself.

But I confess… no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about James.

In my own defense, how could I let go of what was clearly unfinished?

I stared up at the canopy over Gram Hilda’s big bed. In the dark, it glowed softly, like a blank page for writing a letter to James in my mind.

Dear James,

It’s me, the very same Tandy who lay beside you last night. The note you left was, as you said, not enough for me.

You were right.

I feel lost without a map or a compass or any way to understand what has happened to us—or to find my way home.

Last night, I held nothing back. You told me you love me, and I said I love you, too. And so I just can’t understand how you could leave me like this.

We aren’t finished, James. Whatever your father threatens doesn’t matter. Find me and tell me you won’t ever leave me again.

Tandy



I imagined my unwritten, unspoken letter wafting through the window and finding its way to James.

Stranger things than that have happened.

“Good night, James,” I said to myself in the dark.

I cried a little bit. Then I clutched the pillows and finally rocked myself to sleep.





I reached for James—and I got my arms around pillows. Only pillows.

My eyes flashed open, and with a sickening wave of disappointment, it all came flooding back: the whole twelve-hour drama of dreams fulfilled, just before they crashed, burned, dried up, and blew away, leaving me with a million questions that came down to this one: Why?

I patted the nightstand until I found my phone. It was a few minutes before six. It was just about this time yesterday morning when I’d stumbled out of the hotel as though I’d been hit with a piano and walked home alone, wondering what had really happened with James. Why had he abandoned me? Where had he gone? Would I ever see him again?

If he had left me, could I just accept that it was over?

Or was I going to torture myself with whats and whys for-freaking-ever?

I sat up in bed and looked around at Gram Hilda’s room with its pale-peach-painted walls, wood-burning fireplace, and antique Aubusson carpets. I shook James out of my head long enough to think about this extraordinary many-roomed stone house, which, like Gram Hilda herself, was an intriguing mystery.