Read Chapter 7: The First Date

The telephone in the hallway of the residence rang twice before Claire reached it, her heart already pounding. Madame Bisset's voice had carried up the stairs like a summons, and Claire had nearly tripped on the hem of her robe in her hurry.

"Allô?"

"Claire." His voice was rougher than she remembered, worn thin at the edges. "I'm back. Earlier than I said."

She pressed the receiver closer to her ear, as if that might bring him nearer. The hallway smelled of floor wax and boiled cabbage. "You're—you're all right?"

A pause. Then a sound that might have been a laugh, or might have been something else entirely. "I'm in Paris. I'd like to see you. Tonight."

Tonight. She glanced at the clock on the wall—half past six. Her hair was still damp from the bath, and she had nothing to wear that felt like her own. "Where?"

"The Pont Neuf. The statue of Henri IV. In an hour." Another pause, longer this time. "If you can."

"I can."

She hung up and stood there for a moment, her hand still resting on the receiver. The hallway was empty. Through the window at the end of the corridor, the sky over Paris was the color of bruised plums. She could hear Solange's radio playing something by Françoise Hardy from behind their door.

Claire had been hiding the ruined negative inside the lining of her coat for three days now, checking it each morning like a wound that wouldn't heal. On her second day at the agency, she'd learned that the negative belonged to a batch Jean-Luc had sent from Algeria—nineteen frames of a story about the disappearances in the Casbah. Now there were eighteen, and one of them was folded inside her coat like a guilty secret.

She owed him the truth. She'd told herself this each night, lying awake in her narrow bed, rehearsing the words. But then his voice came through the telephone line, tired and alive at once, and all her rehearsals dissolved.

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The Pont Neuf at dusk was crowded with lovers and fishermen and old men reading newspapers on the benches. Claire arrived early and stood at the edge of the embankment, watching the river slide beneath the arches, dark and patient. She wore her blue dress—the one her mother had helped her choose for her goodbye party in Lyon, with the modest neckline and the skirt that flared just below the knee. She'd unpinned her hair, letting it fall loose around her shoulders, and she'd put on the silver locket with the new chain she'd bought from a vendor near the Sorbonne.

She heard his footsteps before she saw him. Or perhaps she felt them—the particular weight of someone walking toward you with purpose.

"Claire."

Jean-Luc stood a few feet away, a canvas bag slung over one shoulder, his jacket rumpled and his beard thicker than it had been a week ago. There was a healing cut along his jawline, pink and raw, and dark circles beneath his eyes that made him look older than the man who had given her the photograph of the prisoner.

"You're hurt," she said, reaching toward him before she could stop herself.

He caught her hand mid-air and held it, his palm rough against hers. "It's nothing. A scrape from a broken window." He said it lightly, but his grip lingered. "You came."

"Of course I came."

They walked along the Quai des Grands Augustins with the river on one side and the bookstalls shuttered for the night on the other. The bouquinistes had latched their green boxes, and the lamps along the bridge cast trembling circles of light on the water. Jean-Luc walked close enough that their arms brushed, and Claire felt every point of contact like a small detonation.

He talked in fragments at first—the flight from Algiers delayed by fog, the customs officer who had looked too long at his passport, the hotel where he'd slept four hours before calling her. But then, as they passed beneath the shadow of the Pont Saint-Michel, his voice changed.

"I saw things this time that I cannot unsee." He stopped walking and stared at the river, his profile sharp against the fading light. "There is a building in Algiers, on the Rue des Abderames. They took me there—a contact, someone I trust. I thought I was going to photograph the aftermath of a raid. Instead, they showed me a room.

"Batteries. Cables. A bathtub with rust stains that were not rust." His voice dropped. "They brought in a man—a young man, younger than me. He was a suspect in something, anything, nothing. They connected the wires and they asked him questions. And the whole time, a French officer sat in the corner reading a newspaper, as calm as if he were waiting for his coffee."

Claire's chest tightened. "My brother—Philippe—he's been missing in Algeria for a year. The army says he was on a routine patrol near Oran. They have no information. No body."

Jean-Luc turned to look at her, and something flickered in his eyes that she couldn't read. "What do you think happened to him?"

"I don't know." Her voice cracked. "I used to think he was dead. A clean death, a soldier's death, something I could mourn. But the more I learn, the more I wonder if it's worse than death. If he did something he'll never be able to live with. Or if they did something to him."

She hadn't said these words to anyone. Not to her mother in her letters, not to Solange, not to the priest at Saint-Sulpice who had noticed her lighting candles for Philippe's soul. But here, on the quay with the river rushing past and the lights of Paris scattered like fallen stars, they came out of her without effort.

"Is that why you came to the exhibition?" Jean-Luc asked. "To understand what happened to your brother?"

"Partly." She hesitated. "And partly because I saw you at the café, and I couldn't stop thinking about what you said. That I looked like someone about to jump."

Jean-Luc reached out and traced the line of her jaw with the back of his hand. His touch was gentle, almost reverent, and Claire felt her breath catch. "You still have that look. But I think I understand it better now. It's not that you want to jump. It's that you don't know which way to move."

He took her hand and led her down a set of stone steps to the water's edge, where the arches of the bridge curved overhead like the ribs of some great sleeping creature. The hum of the city was distant here, muted. The river lapped against the stone. In the shadow of the bridge, the world was reduced to the two of them.

"I don't know which way to move either," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "I've seen too much—done too much—to believe in the kind of world your family wants you to live in. But standing here with you, I remember what it was like to want to believe."

Claire tilted her face up to his. "Jean-Luc—"

He kissed her. It was not the tentative kiss of a first date, but something more urgent, more knowing—as if he had been carrying this kiss across the Mediterranean and had only now found a place to set it down. His lips were warm, tasting of cigarettes and coffee, and his hand came up to cup the back of her head, tangling in her hair. Claire felt the world tilt on its axis, the weight of her family's expectations and her mother's letters and the ruined negative in her coat all falling away for a single, vertiginous moment.

When he pulled back, his forehead rested against hers, and they stayed there for a long moment, breathing the same air.

"I should tell you something," Claire said. The words were already forming, the confession about the negative rising in her throat like bile. But then she felt the warmth of his hand in hers, and the confession collapsed back into her chest.

"Tell me later," he said, as if sensing what she'd been about to say. "Tomorrow, at the agency. I need to review the contact sheets from my last assignment—I promised Deschamps I'd have the selects to him by the end of the week."

The contact sheets. The eighteen frames. The one that was missing.

Claire forced a smile. "Tomorrow, then."

He kissed her again, softer this time, and when they finally climbed back up the steps to the quay, the stars had come out in force. Jean-Luc walked her back to the residence, his arm around her shoulders, and at the gate he kissed her knuckles like a character from an old film.

"I'm glad I came back early," he said.

"Because of your contact sheets?"

He smiled, and in the lamplight, his face lost its haunted edges. "Because of you, Claire. Because of you."

She watched him walk away until he disappeared around the corner, then climbed the stairs to her room on legs that felt like water. The locket was cold against her collarbone. The negative was still folded in her coat, a secret pressing against her like a second heartbeat.

Claire turned the lock, pressed her back to the door, and closed her eyes. She could still taste him on her lips. She could still feel the freedom of standing under that bridge, unobserved, unchecked, wholly herself.

But even as she reached for that feeling—that soaring, vertiginous lightness—her mother's face rose before her, pale and worried in the candlelight of their church in Lyon. And behind it, another face: the prisoner in Jean-Luc's photograph, his eyes fixed on a camera that should not have been there.

Tomorrow, Jean-Luc would come to the agency. He would ask for his contact sheets. And Claire would have to decide what kind of person she was going to be.