Read Chapter 2: The Locket

The room was still strange to her, the walls bare except for the one window that looked out onto the rue des Écoles. Morning light cut across the floor in a dusty blade, catching the motes I'd stirred by walking. I set my suitcase on the narrow bed and worked the brass clasps. Beneath my folded blouses, wrapped in a handkerchief of pale linen, was the locket.

I didn't need to open it. I knew the weight of it by heart, the cool silver oval that my mother had pressed into my palm at the Gare de Lyon with a look I couldn't read—fear, or hope, or both.

She'd said only: "Wear it, Claire. It will remind you who you are."

I placed it on the nightstand beside the bed. The silver caught the light. Behind its etched filigree face, I knew, was the portrait of a woman with dark eyes and a half-smile, the face I'd studied in secret since childhood. My aunt. My mother's sister. The one who died young.

The one no one ever spoke of.

A knock rattled the door, three quick raps, impatient and musical. Before I could answer, Solange pushed in, her hair a dark tangle, a paint-stained scarf trailing from her neck. She smelled of cigarettes and turpentine and something floral beneath.

"Good, you're alive," she said, taking in the room in a single sweep. Her eyes landed on the locket. "Oh. Pretty."

I picked it up before she could. "My mother gave it to me."

Solange didn't reach for it—she wasn't that kind. She just tilted her head, her gaze curious but not intrusive. "May I?" she asked, her hand extended, palm up.

I hesitated. Then I placed it in her hand.

She turned it over, traced the filigree with her thumbnail. "Old," she said. "Early nineteenth century, maybe. Or a copy of something earlier. What's inside?"

I opened the clasp for her. The tiny portrait looked up at us, the woman's face rendered in watercolor, her hair dark and pinned, her eyes two dashes of brown paint that somehow looked alive.

"Beautiful," Solange breathed. "Who is she?"

"My aunt. My mother's sister." The words came out clipped. I'd never said them aloud to anyone outside my family. "She died young."

Solange looked at me, and I felt her read what I hadn't said—the mystery, the silence that surrounded the woman like a held breath. She closed the locket gently and handed it back.

"Your mother keeps her close," Solange said. "But you're not your mother."

The words hit something in my chest. I didn't know what to do with them, so I turned to my suitcase and began to unpack.

"So," I emptied a stack of folded cotton blouses onto the bed. "This café. You said you know interesting people."

Solange grinned, dropping onto the corner of my bed, crossing her legs beneath her. She had the easy sprawl of someone who had never been told to sit like a lady. "The Café Procope. It's on the Left Bank, oldest café in Paris. Voltaire drank there. Diderot, Rousseau. These days it's full of painters and writers who haven't been discovered yet and a few who have." She lit a cigarette from a crumpled pack on the nightstand. "My friend Michel knows everyone. He's a painter. Terrible at it, wonderful at introducing people."

"Will there be—" I stopped, embarrassed at the question forming in my head.

"Men?" Solange laughed, smoke curling from her mouth. "Yes, Claire, there will be men. Painters, poets, a sculptor who talks to his clay. And women too. All of us the same shape of restless."

I laughed, surprising myself. "That's very poetic."

"I'm full of it." She stubbed out the cigarette half-smoked, which I was learning was her way—everything in motion, nothing held too long. "So you'll come?"

I looked at the locket sitting on the nightstand. My mother's voice in my head: *Be careful. Keep yourself to yourself. Remember who you are.*

And then Solange's voice, warm and reckless: *But you're not your mother.*

"Yes," I said. "I'll come."

"Good." Solange stood and straightened her scarf. "Wear something that isn't beige. Meet me in the hall in an hour."

She swept out as quickly as she'd come, leaving the door open, the smell of her cigarettes hanging in the air.

I finished unpacking. The blouses went into the wardrobe, the photograph of my parents went on the desk facing the bed—they would look at me while I slept, their faces small and stern in the cheap frame. The locket stayed on the nightstand, where I could see it. I thought I'd wear it, actually. I picked it up, considered the chain.

It wasn't delicate. It was a strong silver chain, the kind that could survive years of wear. My mother had worn it every day of her marriage, and her mother before her. I lifted it over my head and caught it on my chin. The clasp was tricky.

I stared at myself in the small mirror above the washbasin. The unfamiliar girl in the mirror looked back. New haircut that Solange would call "safe." Beige cardigan. My collar buttoned to the top.

I unbuttoned the collar. Took off the cardigan. My dress beneath was blue cotton, simple but not drab. I left the locket on the nightstand. I would put it on later, before bed. It wasn't that I was abandoning it—just that the silver felt heavy against my chest, warm with my mother's skin still, and I wanted tonight to be mine alone.

When I reached the hall, Solange was wearing red. Not a small red—the whole dress, bold as a wound. Her hair was up, her earrings were gold saucers. She looked at me and nodded.

"Better," she said. "Button's undone."

"You're kind."

"I'm honest." She looped her arm through mine and pulled me toward the stairs. "You'll meet people tonight who will change your life, Claire. I can feel it."

The Café Procope was everything it promised to be and more. Low ceilings, smoke so thick it felt like weather, the din of voices arguing over the rasp of espresso machines. Solange threaded through the crowd like she was walking through her own living room, nodding to a man with a beard, kissing a woman on both cheeks, shouting a greeting at someone across the room whose reply I couldn't hear.

She found a table in the back, where a group of men had pushed tables together, sketches spread over the surface. A man with paint under his nails—Michel, I presumed—rose to kiss Solange and look at me with open curiosity.

"New friend," Solange said. "Claire. In from the provinces. Art history." She said it like it was a secret password.

"Art history," Michel repeated, and introduced me around. The names flew by: an absurdist playwright, a sculptor built like a boulder, a poet who looked at me through a monocle that kept falling out. They were loud, and their attention was a spotlight, and I felt my cheeks heat as they asked where I was from, what I liked, whether I'd read Molière.

And then one of them, who had been quiet, looked up from his notebook and said: "You were in the taxi."

I froze.

It was him. The photographer from the riot. The one who had looked through the crowd and found me, who had smiled a smile I hadn't been able to shake, who had been watching the police and the students and the blood with a camera he'd raised again to his eye to capture me, or the moment, or both.

He was even more striking in person. His hair was dark, unruly, his jaw shadowed with stubble. He wore a worn leather jacket, and his hands, resting on the notebook, were strong and stained with ink, not paint.

His name was Jean-Luc. Someone had said it across the table. Jean-Luc Moreau.

"You saw me," I said, and my voice came out too small.

"I did." He didn't smile now. His eyes were steady, and there was something in them that made the café noise fall away, like a room going quiet when a certain note is struck. "You looked like someone who had just discovered the world was bigger than she'd been told." He leaned forward slightly. "You have the look of someone about to jump."

The words landed like stones in water. I had no response—I'd never been spoken to that way, by anyone, let alone a stranger I couldn't stop looking at.

I opened my mouth to say something—defensive, witty, anything—when a thought hit me with a jolt, cold as tap water.

The locket. I'd left it on the nightstand. I'd meant to wear it. And now I was here, in a café thick with strangers, and the photograph of a dead woman I'd never met was sitting alone in my dark room.

The feeling didn't quite make sense. The locket was safe. The door was locked. Nothing was wrong.

But the feeling pressed against my sternum, persistent and unshakable. I needed to go back. Now.

I stood, knocking the table with my hip. Solange looked up, alarmed. "Claire?"

"I have to—" I was already moving toward the door, shoving through the crowd, the noise, the smoke. I heard Solange calling after me but didn't stop. The night air hit my face as I burst onto the street, and I ran, heels clicking on cobblestones, heart hammering not from exertion but from certainty.

I took the stairs two at a time. The door to my room was closed, exactly as I'd left it. I fumbled with the key, cursed, got it in. The room was dark, lit only by the streetlamp outside the window, casting long shadows across the floor.

The locket was still there. I exhaled, a ragged breath of relief, and crossed to pick it up.

But I stopped, my hand hovering inches above it.

The chain was broken. Copper showed through the silver where the links had been snapped, as if someone had pulled it apart. As if someone had held it, tested it, deliberated over it. And let it go.

The room was cold. I felt it now, a slow crawl up my spine.

I was alone. I knew I was alone. The door had been locked. No one had been here.

But I picked up the locket, and I did not put it down for the rest of the night. I clutched it against my chest, walking to the window to check the street below.

It was empty.

The church bells began to toll midnight. I stood in the dark, listening, holding the broken chain in my sweating hand, and I did not know who had touched it. I did not know what they had wanted.

But I knew, somehow, that it had been about the woman in the locket. The woman no one ever spoke of.

And for the first time in my life, I was afraid of my mother's sister.