Chapter 72

PARIS, FRANCE

They arrive in Paris in the evening. Ryan is exhausted, every part of him aches. Ali and her father had crammed into the Mini Cooper, allowing only two small bags. It was better than using one of their vehicles, Michael said.

The next flight to the U.S. is in the morning. Ali’s father booked them three tickets out of Charles de Gaulle. They should be safe until then. O’Leary is probably getting wise that something’s up with his men, but there hasn’t been time to send reinforcements yet. It’s possible O’Leary might have someone in law enforcement who can track the airline ticket purchase or Michael’s credit card usage, but again, probably not this quickly.

They stay at an apartment in the 7th arrondissement on Rue St. Dominique. The place has been in Ali’s family for generations. The furniture is covered with white sheets and the place smells musty. But it has a stunning view of the Eiffel Tower.

“We should stay in,” Ali’s father tells them. Her father walks to the large windows facing the Eiffel and pushes a button. Metal roller shades come down covering all the windows.

Ali says nothing and retreats to a bedroom.

“There’s another room in the back,” Michael says to Ryan. “You should get some sleep.”

Ryan knows sleep is unlikely, but he heads to the room and sits on the bed. The space is compact. It has two twin beds pushed next to each other and a wardrobe with a long mirror affixed to the door. He looks like hell in it: scruffy hair, dark circles under the eyes, scrapes on his face. Hands raw and swollen.

Sitting on the bed, he tries to make sense of the past couple days.

She’s alive.

It’s still a glorious fact and he feels something like euphoria as he processes it, but this achievement has come at great cost. Ryan tries not to think of the couple in England, the man at the gallery whom Ali’s father killed with an experienced twist of the neck. And then there was whoever was in that car he blew up. Her father is obviously not merely an accountant.

There’s a tap on his door. A quiet, timid, knock.

Ryan opens it and Ali ducks inside.

She makes a shhhh sound, pulls on his arm to follow.

An hour later, they’re at the Louvre. The museum closes soon. They barely said a word on the thirty-minute walk on Paris’s beautiful streets.

She guides him through the white marble halls of the museum. She doesn’t want to see the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo or the Great Sphinx. She takes him to the ground floor, past the statues of Roman emperors, and to the junction between Vestibule Denon and Galerie Daru. He loves the look on her face as she admires the memorial plaque honoring the Louvre’s defenders, which included her great-great-great-grandfather.

Afterward, they stroll past the giant glass pyramid outside the museum, threading through the crowds of tourists and street merchants. Couples stand on elevated stumps built into the ground to take selfies. Others hold out their arms, point a finger so the photo will look like they are touching the tip of the pyramid.

Ali leads him past a pond where she used to play with remote-control boats, and to the street where they walk along the Seine, the water choppy as boats filled with vacationers float by. They turn in to a small park, trees canopied over them, and stroll back into the 7th. It’s strange how little they’ve spoken, comfortable in each other’s presence, perhaps neither sure whether this is real. But it’s more than that, he knows.

She leads him to the grounds surrounding the Eiffel Tower where young and old sprawl out on blankets in the grass. She gazes at the tower and its intermittent twinkling lights. They pass more street vendors with their own blankets on the pavement displaying tower-shaped trinkets.

On the walk down Rue St. Dominque, she stops in front of Au Canon des Invalides. Ali says something to the man working the front of the place in French, he smiles, and takes them to a table outside that faces the street, a prime spot that has a straight line of sight to the Eiffel.

A couple in wedding attire shuffle into the intersection when there’s a lull in traffic. A photographer hastily is taking shots. Ali glances at them, and the melancholy returns to her face.

She orders a gin and tonic, and it dawns on him how little he knows about this young woman. When they were kids, it was cheap beer from the 7-Eleven. Tonight, he has a 1664.

The only way to truly experience a city, or a country, for that matter, is to experience it with a local. Though Alison Lane isn’t a local, Sophia Rosseau is.

Ryan’s thoughts oddly jump to Nora. He remembers Nora’s dad taking Ryan and their classmates to dinner in Georgetown before the trip to Italy. She said her dad loved a good steak, so Ryan said, “So we’re going to Clyde’s?” Nora scoffed. “Clyde’s is for tourists. He’ll take us to Martin’s Tavern.”

Funny how we all hate tourists even though we’ll all be tourists at some point…

“You know what my father said about you?” Nora said to Ryan later that night.

Nora’s father is head of litigation at Arnold Porter’s D.C. office, a legit big shot.

“What? That I ordered too much food. I’m six-four and I—”

“He said you’ll make a great lawyer someday.”

“Why do I sense a but coming?”

“He said you’ll be a great lawyer if you can get out of your own way.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Nora never answered.

Ryan looks at Ali’s profile—Sophia’s profile—in the glow of the streetlamps.

He decides to say it: “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

It hangs in the humid air.

“Tell you what?” she replies. She doesn’t look at him. But she knows what he means. They dated for four years, nearly all of high school, yet she’d never trusted him enough to tell him about her past. Tell him her real name. That they were in hiding.

That’s confirmed when she says, “I liked Alison better.”

It’s unusual to hear her talk about herself in the third person.

“What do you mean?”

“Taylor…” She pauses. “Taylor wasn’t a good person.”

“You were only in ninth grade when I met you. You were a good person.”

“You don’t understand.” And that’s when she tells him. About a boy named Anthony O’Leary. A boy whom her friends ruthlessly bullied. A boy who couldn’t take it anymore. A boy who killed himself after a cruel prank. A boy whose father is a mobster who had her friends killed one by one.

“When I became Alison, I swore I’d be the best me.” A single tear runs down her face. He wants to brush it away, but he doesn’t. “I wanted to be assertive, take-charge, confident.”

“Mission accomplished,” he says with a smile. But his attempt at levity fails.

“I didn’t want you to know the ugly me, so I buried Taylor Harper.”

Ryan thinks about this. “You went through something traumatic. And you’re being too hard on yourself. You were a kid.”

More tears. “I lured Anthony O’Leary to the party. I’m the one who told him my friend liked him. I’m the one who led him to that room where they were waiting for him.”

Ryan reaches across the table for her hand, but she pulls it away.

“You didn’t know they were going to do that to him,” Ryan says, “didn’t know they—”

“But I did. Taylor did.”

For some reason, Ryan’s mind flashes to the viral video of Ali, taking down those bullies who were tormenting the kid at their school. The fierceness, the bravery. It all makes sense.

He reaches for her hand again, grabs it before she pulls away.

“Look at me,” he says. She averts her eyes, but his remain fixed on her until she reluctantly returns his gaze.

“It’s time to forgive yourself.”

“What if I can’t?”

He thinks of the anchor around his neck at the guilt over not saving Ali from The Monster. Then he recalls the touch of Nora’s lips on his, even after he’d exposed his ugliest self to her.

“You were the love of my life,” he says. “The center of my world. And I couldn’t forgive myself for so long.”

She stares at him with those eyes.

“But you’ll never be truly you—not Taylor, not Alison, not Sophia—until you forgive yourself. You’ll never be able to give yourself to someone until you do.”

This time, it’s Ali who reaches for him, cradles his chin in her hand. “I’m so happy for you, Ryan.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you found someone to give yourself to.”

He’s about to protest, about to say that he hasn’t given himself to anyone but her, but she puts a finger on his lips.