Read Chapter 16: The Reconciliation

The night air was cool against Evie’s skin, a thin sheen of sweat drying where the near-miss had left her trembling. She still felt the phantom pull of Julien’s sleeve in her fingers, the solidness of him yanked from death’s path. The taxi’s horn faded into the hum of the boulevard, swallowed by the rhythm of the city that cared nothing for almost-tragedy.

Julien stood a few feet away, his chest rising and falling in sharp, uneven bursts. His hair had fallen from its careful part, one dark lock slanting across his brow. He looked unmoored—a man who rarely lost composure and had just nearly lost his life.

“Julien.” Evie’s voice came out cracked and thin.

He turned to her, his eyes searching hers as if trying to determine whether she was real, whether the last five minutes had truly happened. And then his posture shifted, the tension flooding out of him, replaced by something she had never seen on his face before—open and raw, stripped of the careful irony he wore like a suit jacket.

“Evie.” He crossed the distance in one stride, his hands reaching for her forearms, gripping them just firmly enough to anchor himself. “I thought I’d lost you to that world. And then I nearly left you in this one without a word between us.”

She shook her head, the words tumbling out before she could shape them. “I never intended to climb into anything. I was—I was digging for information about Lily. About the orphanage. De Vilmorin knows something, and I couldn’t just wait while that debt hung over us unresolved.”

“I know.” He released one of her arms to brush an errant strand of hair from her temple, the touch featherlight, otherworldly. “Aubanel told me enough before you pulled me from that car to fill the gaps in my idiot jealousy. I accused you of the very thing I swore I’d never let color our partnership—the class rules that had me railing against your society engagements with one breath while using my mother’s name to secure them with the next.”

Evie’s throat tightened. She wanted to deflect, to point out that his anger had been wrong but not without cause—after all, she had hidden things. But his thumb traced her cheekbone and her words evaporated.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Julien said, his voice dropping to something near a whisper. “Not until we’ve found Lily. Not until you’ve sung every song you’ve promised the world. Not even then, if you’ll have me.”

The space between them collapsed. She felt his forehead touch hers, the intimacy of it so simple and so shattering that her breath caught.

“You mean—” she started.

“I mean everything I said on that bridge weeks ago, and more.” He pulled back to meet her eyes. “Whatever the world thinks of us, whatever the price of partnership, I would stand in front of every baron in Paris and confess it. I love you, Evie Hart. Not because you’re brave or beautiful or any of the adjectives society would pin to a woman like you—but because when I play and you sing, there is nothing else that matters. I want to build our music around that. I want to build our life around it.”

The city hummed on around them—a car engine turning over, a window being drawn shut, a distant rendition of a dance tune leaking from a ground-floor flat. But Evie heard none of it. She heard only Julien’s heartbeat, steady beneath his vest, and her own answering pulse.

“I don’t know what ‘our life’ means for a girl who ran from New York with nothing but a voice and a secret,” she said. “But I know I don’t want to run alone anymore.”

Julien laughed—bright, surprised, a sound she had never heard from him—and pulled her into a tight embrace, his cheek pressed to her hair. The silver locket lay warm against her collarbone, still refusing to click open, still holding whatever fragment of the past she couldn’t yet face. For now, she let it rest there.

They stayed like that until the cold seeped through their coats, until propriety no longer mattered because no one was watching and neither of them cared anyway. Then Julien stepped back, adjusting his cuffs in that precise way of his, anchoring himself in the familiar.

“All right,” he said, an artist’s light in his eyes. “If we’re to find Lily, to unmask whatever designs that baron and Aubanel’s employer have on you—on that debt—then we do it on our terms. No more solitary angles. We work together.”

“Together,” Evie repeated, testing the weight of it.

Ten minutes later, they found themselves drifting through the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, wrapped in that new, shared silence. Evie’s mind churned through fragments—the baron’s evasive smiles, Aubanel’s half-truths, the letter with its threatening neatness. The debt was no longer simply financial; it was a leash. But whose hand held the other end?

Julien stopped before a basement café, a worn tin sign swinging above the entrance that read *Le Petit Coin*. Through the grime-streaked windows, she could see a haze of cigarette smoke and the dim glow of electric bulbs, the silhouettes of men hunched over tables cluttered with glasses and sheet music. Low voices mingled with the click of cards.

“My cousin mentioned this place,” Julien said, nodding toward it. “American musicians, the ones who don’t play for aristocrats or club owners—they gather here. Talk shop. Keep company.”

Evie raised an eyebrow. “You kept a cousin who knows such places?”

“He’s the family disgrace.” A roguish half-smile pulled at his mouth. “I write to him regularly.”

They descended the stairs, the air thickening with pipe smoke and the scent of cheap wine. Heads turned as they entered—a fleeting, appraising pass—before the room went back to its murmur. Evie took in the faces: a clarinetist nursing a beer, a tall Black woman in a silk turban laughing at a corner table, two Black men in the far corner deep in conversation over a battered trumpet case.

Julien found them a small table against the wall, and Evie slid in beside him, her shoulder brushing his. A barman slouched over, two glasses of vin ordinaire in hand, setting them down without ceremony.

Before the wine could touch her lips, the trumpet case snapped open. The older of the two men lifted out a gleaming horn, inspected the valves, then touched the mouthpiece to his lips. He blew a soft, soulful line—a melody Evie recognized, transformed, reshaped into something new and mournful.

She was on her feet before she knew it, drifting toward the man. “That’s ‘St. James Infirmary,’” she breathed.

He lowered the horn, grinning up at her. “You got an ear, sister.”

“I’ve got more than an ear,” she said, and she sang the opening line low, her voice curled around the notes like smoke.

By the time the verse ended, the room had quieted. The trumpet player—he introduced himself as Marcus Webb, from New Orleans—was laughing with delight. “Well, shut my mouth. What’s a girl with a voice like that doing in a dive in the Latin Quarter?”

“Looking for someone,” Evie said. The words slipped out before she could check them, sharp and hopeful. “A girl. My sister. She was sent out of an orphanage years ago—given a new name, I think. She might call herself Lily. I’ve reason to believe she’s in Paris.”

Marcus’s expression shifted, a flicker of recognition passing across his face. He glanced at his companion, a rail-thin man with deep-set eyes who gave a slow, meaningful nod.

“Lily,” Marcus repeated, rubbing the back of his neck. “Now that’s a name I’ve heard in certain quarters. A young American girl, nearly grown now—sings like a bird trapped in a cage. Works the rooms in Montmartre, the ones that don’t ask questions when you can’t show papers.”

Evie’s heart seized in her chest. “Where?”

“She was holding court at a place called Le Chat Bleu, up by the Sacré-Cœur,” Marcus said. He met Evie’s eyes with a moment of pity. “That was three nights ago. But word was, she was thinking on leaving soon. A girl who draws that kind of attention—she don’t stay anywhere long. Something about her made folks uneasy. Like she was running from something.”

Julien had come to stand behind Evie, his hand a quiet presence at the small of her back. She could feel his warmth through the thin fabric of her dress, grounding her.

“Le Chat Bleu,” she repeated.

“You’d better hurry,” Marcus added, lifting his trumpet again. “Fast as girls like that vanish in a city this size, she might be gone by tomorrow.”