“That's a great idea. May I offer a cab?” She nodded, and they walked to the nearest taxi stand, and he helped her in, and she gave the address of a bistro she knew that stayed open very late, and had tables out on the sidewalk. It was still a warm night, and neither of them had any desire to go back to the hotel, although they both seemed a little shy with each other. It was she who broke the ice first, as she looked at him with a teasing expression.
“Do you do that a lot? Follow women, I mean.” Suddenly, the whole thing amused her, and he had the grace to blush in the taxi as he shook his head.
“I've actually never done that before. It's absolutely the first time, and I'm still not sure why I did it,” except that she looked so vulnerable and so frail, that for some insane reason he wanted to protect her, but he didn't say that.
“I'm actually very glad you did,” she said, looking genuinely amused and surprisingly comfortable with him, as they reached the restaurant, and a moment later, they were sitting at an open-air table with two steaming cups of coffee. “What a great idea.” She smiled at him. “Now tell me all about you,” she said, putting her chin on her hands, and looking surprisingly like Audrey Hepburn.
“There's not much to tell,” he said, still looking faintly embarrassed, but excited to be there.
“I'm sure there is. Where are you from? New York?” she guessed, fairly accurately. At least he worked there.
“More or less. I work in New York. I live in Greenwich.”
“And you're married, and have two children.” She filled in the gaps for him, smiling at him wistfully as she did so. His life was so happy and so ordinary probably, so unlike hers with all its tragedies and disappointments.
“Three sons,” he corrected her. “And yes, I'm married.” And then as he thought of his abundance of sons, he felt guilty toward her and the little boy she had lost to cancer. He had been her only child and he knew, as did the entire world, that she had had no children since then.
“I live in Washington,” she said quietly, “most of the time.” She did not offer to tell him whether or not she had children, and knowing what he did of her, he didn't ask.
“Do you like Washington?” he asked gently, and she shrugged as she sipped her coffee.
“Not really. I hated it when I was young. I suppose if I thought about it, I'd hate it more now. It's not the city I dislike, it's the people and what they do to their lives there. Theirs, and everyone else's. I hate politics and everything it stands for.” And as she said it, he could see how fervently she meant it. But with a brother, a father, and a husband deeply entrenched in politics, she had little hope of escaping its clutches now. And then she looked at him, she hadn't introduced herself yet, and she would have liked to believe that he had no idea who she was, and she was just a woman in loafers, jeans, and a T-shirt. But she could see in his eyes that he knew her secret. It may not have been why he was there, having coffee with her at two A.M., but he wasn't unaware of it either. “I suppose it would be unrealistic to think you don't know my name …or do you?” she asked with wide eyes, and feeling sorry for her again, he nodded. The anonymity would have been nice for her, but it wasn't her destiny, not in this lifetime.
“I do, and yes, it would be unrealistic to think people don't know who you are. But that shouldn't change anything. You have a right to hate politics, or anything, or go for a walk on the Place de la Concorde, or say anything you want to a friend. Everybody needs that.' He sensed easily how badly she did.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “You said before that everybody's shoes pinch sometimes. Do yours?”
“Now and then,” he said honestly. “We all get into tight spots sometimes. I'm the head of a company, and sometimes I wish that no one knew that and I could do anything I wanted.” Like right now. For one tiny moment with her, he would have liked to be free again and forget he was married. But he knew he could never do that to Katie. He had never cheated on her in his life, and he didn't intend to start now, not even with Olivia Thatcher. But that was also the last thing on her mind. “I think we all get tired of our lives sometimes, and the responsibilities placed upon us. Probably not as tired as you do,” he said sympathetically, “but I think, in our own ways, we all wish we could walk out of the Place Vendome sometimes, and disappear for a while. Like Agatha Christie.”
“I've always been intrigued by that story,” Olivia said with a shy smile, “and I've always wanted to do that.” She was impressed that he knew about that. She had always been fascinated by why Agatha Christie had simply disappeared one day. They had found her car crashed against a tree. And the famous author had vanished. She did not reappear until several days later. And when she did, she offered no explanation whatsoever for her absence. At the time, it had caused an enormous ruckus, and there had been headlines all over England about her disappearance. In fact, around the world.
“Well, you have done it now, for a few hours anyway. You've walked right out of your life, just as she did.” He smiled at her, and she looked at him with eyes full of mischief as she smiled.
Olivia laughed at the idea, and for a moment she loved it. “But she was gone for days. This is just for a few hours.” She looked faintly disappointed as she said it.
“They're probably all going completely crazy by now, looking for you everywhere. They probably think you were kidnapped by King Khaled.” She laughed even harder at that, and she looked like a kid when she did, and a few minutes later, Peter ordered them both a sandwich. And when the sandwiches came, they both devoured them. They were starving.
“I don't think they're even looking for me, do you know that? I'm not sure that if I truly disappeared anyone would even notice, unless they had a rally to attend that day, or a campaign speech in a women's club. I'm very useful at times like that. Otherwise, I'm not very important. I'm sort of like one of those artificial trees they bring out to decorate the stage. You don't need to feed or water them, you just roll them out to look good when you need a little window dressing to set the main showpiece off.”
“That's an awful thing to say,” Peter chided her, though from what he had seen, he wasn't sure he disagreed with her. “Is that how you really feel about your life?”
“More or less,” she said, knowing that she was daring a great deal. If he turned out to be a reporter, or worse yet, someone from the tabloids, she'd be mincemeat by morning. But in a way, she almost didn't care. She needed to trust someone sometimes, and there was something incredibly warm and appealing about Peter. She had never talked to anyone as she did to him now, and she didn't want to stop, or go back to her life, or ever return to the Ritz Hotel. She wanted to stay here in Montmartre with him forever.
“Why did you marry him?” he dared to ask after she put down her sandwich again, and she looked into the night thoughtfully for a moment and then back into Peter's eyes.
“He was different then. But things changed very quickly. A lot of bad things happened to us. Everything seemed right in the beginning. We loved each other, we cared, he swore to me he would never go into politics. I saw what my father's career did to us, to my mother particularly, and Andy was just going to be a lawyer. We were going to have children, horses, and dogs, and live on a farm in Virginia. And we did, for about six months, and then it was all over. His brother was the politician in the family, not Andy. Tom would have been president eventually, and I would have been happy never to see the White House except when they lit the tree at Christmas. But Tom was killed six months after we were married, and the campaign types came after Andy. I don't know what happened to him, if he felt obligated after his brother was killed, obliged to step into his shoes and do 'something important for his country,' I've heard that line until it choked me. And eventually, I think he fell in love with it. It's heady stuff, this thing called political ambition. I've come to understand that it demands more from you than any child, and seems to offer more excitement and passion than any woman. It devours everyone who gets near it. You can't love politics and su
rvive. You just can't. I know that. Eventually, it eats everything you have inside, all the love and goodness and the decency, it eats whoever you once were, and leaves a politician in its place. It's not much of an exchange. Anyway, that's what happened. Andy went into politics, and then to make it up to me, and because he said we would, we had a baby. But he didn't really want it. Alex was born during one of his campaign trips, and Andy wasn't even there then. Or when he died.” Her face kind of froze over as she said it. “Things like that change everything …Tom …Alex …politics. Most people don't survive that. We didn't. I don't know why I thought we should have. It really was too much to ask, and I think when Tom died, he took most of Andy with him. The same thing happened to me with Alex. Life deals out hard hands sometimes. Sometimes you just can't win, no matter how hard you try, or how much money you have on the table. I put a lot on this game, I've been at it for a long time. We've been married for six years, and none of it has been easy.”
“Why do you stay?” It was an amazing conversation to have with a stranger, and they were both surprised at the boldness of his questions and the candor of her answers.
“How do you go? What do you say? Sorry your brother died and your life got all screwed up …sorry our only baby …” She started to say the words but couldn't, and he took her hand and held it, and she didn't pull it away. The night before they had been strangers in a swimming pool, and suddenly, at a cafe in Montmartre, a day later, they were almost friends.
“Could you have another child?” Peter asked cautiously, you never knew what had happened to people, what they could and couldn't do, but he wanted to ask her, and hear her answer.
But she shook her head sadly. “I could, but I wouldn't. Not now. Not again. I don't ever want to care that much again for another human being. But I also don't want another child in this world I live in now. Not with him. Not in politics. It almost ruined my life and my brother's when we were young …and more importantly than that, it ruined my mother's. She's been a good sport for nearly forty years, and she has hated every moment of it. She's never said that, and she'd never admit it to anyone, but politics has ruined her life. She lives in constant terror of how people will interpret every move she makes, she's afraid to do or be or think or say anything. That's how Andy would like me to be, and I can't do that.” And then as she said the words to him, she looked genuinely panicked, and he knew instantly what she was thinking.
“I won't hurt you, Olivia. I will never, ever repeat any of this. To anyone. It's between us, and Agatha Christie.” He smiled and she looked at him cautiously, deciding whether or not to believe him. But the odd thing was she trusted him. Just looking at him, she could sense that he wouldn't betray her. “Tonight never happened,” he said carefully. “We'll go back to the hotel separately, and no one will ever know where we've been, or that we were together. I've never met you.”
“That's comforting,” she said, looking truly relieved and very grateful, and she believed him.
“You used to write, didn't you?” he asked, remembering something he had read about her years before, and wondering if she still did write.
“I did. So did my mother. She was actually very talented, she wrote a novel about Washington that set it on its ear, early in my father's career. It was published, but he never let her publish anything again, and she really should have. I'm not as talented, and I've never published, but I've wanted to write a book for a long time, about people and compromises, and what happens when you compromise too much or too often.”
“Why don't you write it?” He was sincere, but she only laughed and shook her head.
“What do you think would happen if I did? The press would go wild. Andy would say I had jeopardized his career. The book would never see the light of day. It would be burned in a warehouse somewhere, by his henchmen.” She was the proverbial bird in the gilded cage, unable to do anything she wanted, for fear it might hurt her husband. And yet she had walked away from him, and had disappeared to sit in a cafe in Montmartre and empty her heart to a stranger. It was an odd life she led, and he could tell how close she was to breaking out of it as he watched her. Her hatred of politics and the pain it had brought to her was obvious and abundant. “And what about you?” She turned her deep brown eyes to Peter then, wondering about him. All she really knew was that he was married, had three sons, was in business, and lived in Greenwich. But she also knew he was a good listener, and when he held her hand, and looked at her, she felt something stir deep inside her, it was a part of her she thought had died, and suddenly she could feel it breathing. “Why are you here in Paris, Peter?”
He hesitated for a long time, still holding her hand and looking into her eyes. He hadn't told anyone, but she had trusted him, and he needed to tell her now. He knew he had to tell someone.
“I'm here for the pharmaceutical company I run. We've been working on a very complicated product for four years, which isn't actually such a long time in this field, but it has seemed like a long time to us, and We've spent an enormous amount of money. It's a product that could revolutionize chemotherapy, and it's very important to me. It seemed like my one contribution to the world, something important that makes up for all the frivolous, selfish things I've done. It means everything to me, and it has passed all our tests with flying colors, in every country we work in. The last tests are being conducted here, and I came to wrap things up. We're asking for permission to do early human trials, from the FDA, based on our testing. Our laboratories here are going through the final steps, and until this point, the product has been flawless. But the tests here show something very different. They are not completed yet, but when I arrived here yesterday, the head of our laboratories told me that there could be serious problems with the drug. To put it bluntly, instead of a godsend to help save the human race, it could be a killer. I won't know the whole story till the end of the week, but it could be the end of a dream, or the beginning of long years of testing. And if that's the case, I have to go home, and tell the chairman of my company, who is coincidentally my father-in-law, that our product is either on the shelf or out the window. It's not going to be a popular announcement.”
She seemed impressed as she looked at him and nodded. “I should think not. Have you told him what they said yesterday?” She was sure he had, and it was almost a rhetorical question, but she was stunned when he shook his head and looked faintly guilty.
“I don't want to say anything till I have all the information,” he said, dodging the issue. Her eyes looked deep into his as she watched him.
“This must be quite a week for you, waiting to hear,” she said sympathetically, and only beginning to glimpse from the look in his eyes how important it was to him. “What did your wife say?” She said it, assuming that other people enjoyed a relationship she didn't. She had no way of knowing his particular problem of not being able to say anything to Katie without her telling her father.
But he stunned her again, this time even more so. “I didn't tell her,” he said softly, and Olivia looked at him in amazement.
“You didn't? Why not?” She could not imagine the reason.
“It's a long story.” He smiled sheepishly at Olivia and she wondered. There was something in his eyes that whispered to her of loneliness and disappointment. But it was so subtle, she wondered if he was even aware of it himself. “She's extremely close to her father,” he said slowly, thinking about what he was saying. “Her mother died when she was a child, and she grew up alone with him. There's absolutely nothing she doesn't tell him.” He looked up at Olivia again, and he could see that she understood him.
“Even things that you tell her in confidence?” Olivia looked outraged at the indiscretion.
“Even those,” he smiled. “Kate has no secrets from her father.” It tugged at his heart as he said it. He wasn't sure why, but it bothered him more than it had in years as he explained it.
“That must be uncomfortable for you,” Olivia said, searching his eyes, trying to see if he was unha
ppy, or even knew it. He seemed to be suggesting that Kate's loyalty to her father, even to that degree, was not only acceptable to him, but normal. And yet his eyes said something else. She wondered if that was what he had meant when he said everyone's shoes pinched sometimes. To Olivia, to whom privacy and discretion and loyalty meant almost everything, Peter's shoes would have given her bunions.
“It's just the way things are,” he said simply. “I accepted it a long time ago. I don't think they mean any harm by it. But it means that sometimes I just can't tell her things. They have a tremendous attachment to each other.” Olivia decided, for his sake, to stay off the subject. She had no intention of peeling away protective layering, or of hurting him by pointing out how unsuitable his wife's behavior was. After all, Olivia hardly knew him, and she had no right.
“It must have been lonely for you today, worrying about the outcome of those tests, and having no one to talk to.” She looked at him sympathetically. She had gone straight to the heart of it with the words she used. They exchanged a warm smile of understanding. They both had heavy burdens on their shoulders.
“I tried to keep busy, since I couldn't tell anyone,' he said quietly. “I went to the Bois de Boulogne, and watched the kids play. And then I went for a walk along the Seine, and to the Louvre, and eventually I went back to the hotel, and worked, and then the alarm went off.” He grinned. “And it's been a pretty good day ever since then.” And it was going to be a new day soon. It was almost five o'clock in the morning, and they both knew they had to go back to the hotel before too much longer. They went on talking for another half hour after that, and finally at five-thirty they reluctantly left the cafe, and went to find a taxi. They walked slowly along the streets of Montmartre, in her T-shirt and his shirtsleeves, hand in hand, like two young kids on a first date, and they looked incredibly comfortable with each other.
“It's odd how life is sometimes, isn't it?” she asked, looking up at him happily, thinking of Agatha Christie, and wondering if she had done something like this, or something even more daring, during her disappearance. Once she returned, the famous author had never explained. “You think you're all alone, and then someone comes out of the mists, completely unexpectedly, and you're not alone any longer,” Olivia said quietly. She had never, ever dreamt though that she would meet anyone like him. But he met a deep need for her. She was starving for friendship.
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