On departure day, Emma drove me to the airport in Dayton. I arrived three hours early. She tried to talk me into one hour. I said three. We compromised on three.
She hugged me at the curb for a long time.
“Call me when you land.”
“I will.”
“And Mom?” She was holding both my arms. Her eyes were doing something strange. Like she was excited and nervous at the same time. “Just… keep your heart open, okay? Whatever happens.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” She smiled. “It’s just a thing people say.”
It wasn’t a thing people said. Not people like Emma, anyway. But I was too nervous to think about it.
My first flight went to Chicago. It was short and bumpy. I gripped the armrests the whole time.
In Chicago, I had a three-hour layover before the flight to Paris. I found my gate, B14, and I sat down, and I checked my passport.
Then I checked it again.
Then I checked it again, because what if it had fallen out of my bag in the forty seconds since I’d last checked it?
I checked my boarding pass. I checked the screen above the gate desk. PARIS CDG. ON TIME. I checked my boarding pass against the screen.
A man sitting across from me, an older man with a cane, watched me do this about six times.
“First time?” he said.
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’ve checked that passport more times than my wife checks the stove,” he said. “And she checks the stove a lot.”
I laughed.
Then a wave of weakness came over me. It started in my stomach and went up into my head. The gate and the people and the big windows full of airplanes all went soft and gray around the edges.
I put my head down. I took a sip from my water bottle. I breathed slowly, the way the nurse had shown me.
“You okay, ma’am?” the man with the cane asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”
I waited for it to pass. After a few minutes, it did.
I sat there with my hands in my lap, and I thought, What are you doing, Margaret? You’re sixty-eight years old and you’re dying and you’re sitting alone in an airport in Chicago. Daniel was right. This is foolish.
Then the loudspeaker crackled.
“Mrs. Wilson. Passenger Margaret Wilson. Please come to the desk at your boarding gate.”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
My first thought was that something was wrong with my ticket. That I’d typed something wrong on the computer. That my passport picture looked too much like a shoplifter and they weren’t going to let me on.
My second thought was that something had happened to Emma. Or Daniel. Or one of the grandkids.
I grabbed my bag and hurried to the desk. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m Mrs. Wilson. Is something wrong with my ticket?”
The young woman behind the desk, Jessica, looked up and smiled.
“Not at all,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me?”
“Someone arranged for this to be delivered.”
And she handed me the cream-colored envelope.
“Who sent it?” I said.
“I’m afraid I only have instructions to give it to you.” She read the sticky note. “There’s something you still don’t know about this trip.”
I opened the envelope.
Inside was the old letter, folded in thirds. And underneath it, a small black-and-white photograph and a few pages of thin paper, stapled together, covered in French.
I unfolded the letter.
My darling Sparrow,
I had to put my hand on the desk.
Nobody had called me Sparrow in thirty-two years. Nobody alive even knew he’d called me that. Not even the kids. It was just ours.
My darling Sparrow,
I finally bought that little apartment in Paris we always dreamed about. I wanted it to be your anniversary surprise. I can already see your face. You’re going to talk for ten minutes straight and not let me get a word in, and I’m going to let you.
One day, we’ll sit on the balcony together. I’ll bring the coffee. You bring the phrase book.
All my love, Richard.
At the bottom was an address. A street name I couldn’t pronounce and a number. Appartement 3.
The photograph showed a pale stone building with iron balconies, on a narrow street. Someone had drawn a little arrow in pen pointing to a window on the third floor.
The stapled pages had an official stamp on them and Richard’s signature at the bottom, next to a date thirty-seven years ago.
A purchase document.
“My husband wrote this,” I whispered.
Jessica was watching me. Her smile had faded a little.
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
“He died thirty-two years ago,” I said.
Her face changed completely.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t… they just told me to…”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”
Then a voice came over the loudspeaker. “We’ll now begin boarding Flight 142 to Paris, Charles de Gaulle. Group one, please make your way to the gate.”
I stood there with the letter in my hand.
Jessica touched my arm.
“Ma’am? That’s your flight.”
I boarded carrying the envelope against my chest like it might fly away.
I found my seat, 23A, by the window. I buckled my seatbelt. I put the envelope in my lap and unfolded the letter again and read it over and over while the plane taxied and took off and Chicago got small beneath us.
I finally bought that little apartment in Paris we always dreamed about.
Richard had bought an apartment in Paris.
Thirty-seven years ago. Five years before he died.
And he’d never told me.
I’d been his wife for fourteen years. I’d balanced our checkbook every month at the kitchen table with a calculator and a pencil. I knew exactly how much money we had, down to the penny. We’d argued for a week over whether we could afford a new washing machine.
How do you buy an apartment in Paris without your wife knowing?
And if he’d bought it for me, then why had nobody ever said a word about it after he died? Not the lawyer. Not the bank. Not his company.
Where had it gone?
I boarded carrying one question, and it got bigger with every mile.
Why had Richard hidden an apartment from me?
The woman in the seat next to me was a college student named Priya, going home to visit her grandmother in Lyon. She noticed me staring at the letter for the fourth hour in a row.
“Is that a love letter?” she asked shyly.
“I think so,” I said. “From my husband.”
“That’s so sweet. Is he meeting you in Paris?”
“No,” I said. “He died a long time ago.”
She went pink. “I’m so sorry.”
“Everybody keeps saying that today,” I said. “It’s all right. I’m used to it.”
She offered me half of her chocolate bar. I took it. Then she put her headphones on and fell asleep against the window shade, and I was alone with my memories again.
During that flight, somewhere over the dark ocean, I remembered the early years of our marriage.
Our first apartment was above a dry cleaner on Third Street. It always smelled like steam and chemicals. The radiator banged all night. We had one good chair, and we took turns sitting in it.
One winter night, we were lying on the floor of that apartment on a blanket, eating popcorn out of a mixing bowl, because we didn’t have a couch yet. Richard was looking at the ceiling.
“Someday, Sparrow,” he said, “I’m taking you to Paris.”
He called me Sparrow because I was always rushing around, talking a mile a minute. Hopping from one thing to the next. He said the first time he saw me at that dance, I talked so fast he only caught every third word.
“With what money?” I said.
“I’ll figure something out.”
“And where will we stay?”
“Our own apartment.”
I laughed so hard I spilled the popcorn. “Our own apartment? In Paris?”
“Why not?”
“With a balcony?” I said, teasing him.
He turned his head and looked at me very seriously.
“Obviously,” he said.
I’d thought it was just one of those silly things young people say on the floor at night. Something you say because it feels good to say it.
I’d never once thought he meant it.
Then came the bills. And the children. Emma, then Daniel. A house with a yard on Briar Lane. A mortgage. Car payments. Doctor bills.
Richard got a job with a company that sold industrial machine parts. Halvorsen Industrial. He was good at it. He could talk to anybody. Within a few years, they made him their sales manager for Europe.
That meant trips. A lot of trips. Germany, Belgium, Holland.
And Paris. Mostly Paris.
He’d come home with little gifts. A box of chocolates from a shop with gold paper. A silk scarf for me. A tiny Eiffel Tower keychain for Daniel that Daniel carried around for years.
I’d be standing at the stove, and he’d come in with his suitcase and kiss the back of my neck, and I’d say, “Paris again?”
“The company’s expanding, Maggie,” he’d say. “These trips help pay the mortgage.”
“I know,” I’d say. “I just miss you.”
“I miss you too, Sparrow. Every minute.”
I’d believed him.
Of course I’d believed him. Why wouldn’t I?
He’d be gone a week. Sometimes two. Sometimes three or four times a year. I’d take care of the kids and the house and my classroom, and when he came back, I’d be so happy to see him that I never asked many questions.
Sitting on that plane, with his letter in my lap, I started to wonder.
Maybe he’d been saving. Secretly. A little bit from every trip. Maybe he’d been planning this huge surprise for years, and then his heart had stopped in the driveway before he could give it to me.
That would be just like Richard. Wanting to make a big grand gesture.
That was the version I wanted to believe.
But there was still the question I couldn’t get past.
If he’d bought that apartment for me, why hadn’t anyone mentioned it after his death?
By the time my plane landed in Paris, the sun was coming up, pink and gold over gray runways.
Priya woke up and stretched.
“Welcome to France,” she said. “Do you know where you’re going?”
I looked down at the address on the letter.
“I think I do,” I said.
I’d made a decision somewhere over the ocean.
I wasn’t going to my hotel first. I wasn’t going to take a nap or unpack or eat breakfast.
I was going to that address.
The taxi driver looked at the address on the letter, nodded, and said something in French that I didn’t understand. Then he drove like he was being chased.
I held on to the door handle and watched Paris go by through the window.
I’d seen it in pictures my whole life. I wasn’t ready for it anyway. The old buildings the color of butter. The little cafés with their tiny round tables out on the sidewalk. The bridges over the river. People on bicycles with long loaves of bread sticking out of their baskets, exactly like in the movies. I almost laughed out loud.
Richard, I thought. You’d love this.
Then I remembered that he’d seen it. Many times. Without me.
The taxi stopped on a narrow street lined with trees.
I got out and stood on the sidewalk with my suitcase.
The building was right there in front of me. The same as the photograph. Pale stone walls and iron balconies with curly black railings. There were red geraniums in a window box on the second floor. A little bakery on the corner, the smell of bread drifting down the street.
It was exactly Richard’s taste. He always loved old things. Old houses. Old cars. Old jazz records.
I looked up at the third floor.
There was a balcony. Two small chairs on it. A little round table between them. A pot of something green.
Someone lived there.
The front door of the building was open. A man was carrying a bicycle out. He held the door for me without even looking at me.
I climbed the stairs. They were old wooden stairs, worn down in the middle from a hundred years of feet. My legs were heavy. I had to stop on the second landing and hold on to the railing and breathe.
On the third floor, there was only one door. Dark blue, with a brass number 3.
I stood in front of it for a long time.
Then I knocked.
Footsteps. A lock turning.
The door opened, and an elegant woman about my age was standing there.
She was tall and slim, with silver hair cut short and neat. She was wearing a cream sweater and gray trousers and small pearl earrings. She had reading glasses pushed up on her head. She looked like the kind of woman who’d never once owned a sweatshirt.
“Bonjour?” she said.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m sorry. Do you speak English?”
“A little.”
“My name is Mrs. Wilson. Margaret Wilson. I’ve come from America.” I took a breath. “I believe my husband owned this apartment.”
She frowned.
I held out the letter.
She took it politely and glanced at it. Her eyes moved down the page.
Then they stopped at the bottom.
At his name.
I watched her face change. It happened in one second. The polite curiosity disappeared. Her mouth went tight. All the color left her cheeks.
She looked up at me.
She started talking very fast in French. I didn’t understand a single word. But I didn’t need to. I knew the tone. I’d heard it from mothers at parent-teacher night when I told them their child was struggling. It was the sound of someone getting scared and angry at the same time.
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
She stopped. She pushed the letter back into my hands.
“You must leave,” she said in English.
“Please, I only want to ask…”
“This is my home.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t. I just…”
She turned and went inside, leaving the door open. I heard a drawer open. She came back with a folder and pulled out some papers and held them up in front of my face. There was a stamp on them, like the one on the papers in my envelope.
“My name,” she said, tapping it. “My apartment.”
“I understand,” I said. “Perhaps you bought it from him? I’m only trying to find out what happened. He died a long time ago, and I never…”
Her face hardened.
“Leave, please.”
Then I saw it.
Over her shoulder. Inside the apartment. On a wooden shelf by the window, between a stack of books and a little blue vase.
A framed photograph.
Richard.
He was young in it. Younger than I’d seen him in years. He was standing on a bridge with the river behind him, in a tan jacket I didn’t recognize. His hair was blowing in the wind.
He was smiling.
And he had his arm around the woman standing in front of me.
I just stood there.
For a second, my brain went looking for a reasonable explanation, the way it does. Had she worked with him? He’d traveled to Paris on business for years. Maybe she was a colleague. A secretary. A client. People take pictures at company events. People put their arms around each other in pictures.
“Wait,” I said. “Did you know my husband? Through his company? Halvorsen Industrial?”
Her face went completely white.
Then she slammed the door.
I stared at that dark blue door with the brass number 3.
I could hear her on the other side. She wasn’t walking away. She was standing right there, just like me. I could hear her breathing.
“Who are you?” I whispered to the door. “And what was Richard doing here with you?”
She didn’t answer.
I picked up my suitcase and started down the stairs.
Halfway down, the dizziness hit me again. Worse this time. The stairs tilted. The walls went gray. I dropped my suitcase, and it banged down three steps, and I grabbed the railing with both hands and sat down hard on the step.
I stayed there. I put my head between my knees. I breathed.
In for four. Out for four.
For the first time since Dr. Patel’s office, I felt truly afraid. Not of dying. I’d made a kind of peace with that in the hospital parking lot, or started to.
I was afraid that I wouldn’t have the strength to find out the truth.
That I’d come all this way, and my body would give out before I knew who that woman was.
After a while, the man with the bicycle came back. He saw me sitting on the stairs. He said something kind in French and picked up my suitcase and carried it down for me and then held my elbow the rest of the way.
“Merci,” I said. It was the only French word I was sure of.
He smiled and patted my hand and went on his way.
My hotel was a twenty-minute taxi ride away. It was small and clean, with a tiny elevator that fit exactly one person and one suitcase. My room was on the fourth floor, and it did have a balcony, with red flowers in a box, just like the picture.
I didn’t go out on it.
I sat on the edge of the bed in my coat and called Emma. It was early morning back in Ohio. She answered anyway.
“Mom! You made it! How was your flight? Did you see the apartment?”
I froze.
“What apartment?” I said.
Silence.
“Emma?”
“Oh, Mom,” she said. Her voice had gone very small.
“How do you know about it?”
There was a long pause.
“Because I arranged the envelope,” she said.
“You did what?”
“Mom, let me explain…”
“Emma Louise.”
I hadn’t used her middle name since she was fifteen and snuck out to a concert.
“Remember when we cleaned out Dad’s old things?” she said quickly. “Back in the spring? Before your retirement? When you finally decided to clear out the attic?”
“Yes.”
I remembered. It had taken us two weekends. I’d finally given away his suits to the church clothing drive. I’d kept his watch and his reading glasses and his old jazz records. Emma had asked if she could take his wooden box. A little cedar box he used to keep his cufflinks and tie clips in. It had sat on his dresser our whole marriage. I’d said yes.
“I found his letter inside that wooden box,” Emma said. “There’s a little felt lining in the lid. It was coming loose. I went to glue it back down, and there was an envelope tucked behind it.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“Emma, that letter is over thirty years old!”
“I know, Mom. I know. But when you said you were going to Paris, it was like… it was like a sign. Like Dad wanted you to have it. I thought maybe Dad had left you something nobody ever discovered. Something wonderful.”
“Did you check whether he still owned it?”
“I tried, Mom.” Her voice cracked. “I really tried. I spent weeks on it. But the French property records were so confusing, and everything was in French, and I couldn’t find a clear answer. I called a lawyer here, and he said he’d need months and a lot of money to find out. And you didn’t have months, and…”
She stopped.
“So you sent me there anyway,” I said.
“I thought Dad might have left you something wonderful,” she said. “That’s all. I’m sorry.”
I closed my eyes.
I thought about Emma at twelve, standing in the doorway in her nightgown, holding her brother’s hand, watching the ambulance lights on the snow. I thought about her bringing me that sheet cake. Do something you’ve always wanted.
“I know you meant well, sweetheart,” I said. “But I wish you’d told me before I came here.”
“I wanted it to be special,” she said. “That’s why I called the airline. They were so nice about it. I asked them to give you the envelope at the gate and say that one line. There’s something you still don’t know about this trip. I thought it would be like a movie.” She sniffed. “But Mom. What’s wrong? You sound strange.”
I didn’t want to tell her.
But I needed to know why that woman had looked so frightened when she saw Richard’s name. And I couldn’t carry it by myself in that little hotel room.
So I told her. About the woman. About the slammed door.
And about the photograph on the shelf.
Emma went very quiet.
“Maybe she bought the apartment,” she said slowly. “After Dad. And maybe she just… kept some old pictures? Things that were left there?”
“Why would she keep your father’s photograph, Emma? On a shelf? In a frame? For thirty-two years?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “But I’m going back.”
“Mom, please. Please don’t upset yourself. You’re not well. Just enjoy Paris. Forget the apartment. Forget I ever sent it. Please.”
I looked out the window of my hotel room at the rooftops of Paris. Gray and silver, with little chimney pots like toy soldiers.
“Emma,” I said. “I’ve spent thirty-two years talking to a photograph. I deserve a conversation with someone who can actually answer.”
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay on the narrow hotel bed and listened to motorbikes buzzing past on the street below. I kept seeing that picture. Richard on the bridge, his hair blowing, his arm around her.
I tried to remember if I’d ever seen that tan jacket. I hadn’t. I knew every piece of clothing that man owned. I’d ironed all his shirts for fourteen years. I’d sewn the buttons back on his coat. I’d never seen that jacket in my life.
Around three in the morning, I got up and opened my notebook to write to him.
Dear Richard,
I sat there with the pen over the page for a very long time.
Then I closed the notebook without writing another word.
The next morning, I bought flowers.
There was a flower stall on the corner by my hotel, run by an old man with a white mustache. I pointed at some yellow roses and some little white flowers I didn’t know the name of. He wrapped them in brown paper and tied them with string. I paid him too much. He tried to give me change. I shook my head.
Then I took a taxi back to the narrow street with the trees.
I climbed the stairs again. Slower this time. I stopped on every landing.
I knocked on the blue door.
The same woman opened it.
She looked tired. Like she hadn’t slept either. Her glasses were on her nose this time, not on her head.
When she saw me, she sighed.
“You again?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I told you…”
“I’m not here to take your apartment,” I said.
She hesitated. Her hand stayed on the door.
“I don’t want it,” I said. “I promise you. I don’t want your home. I don’t want anything from you except to talk.”
She didn’t close the door. But she didn’t open it wider either.
“My husband was Richard,” I said. “Richard Hale. He died thirty-two years ago. A heart attack in our driveway. He was thirty-eight.” I swallowed. “And I’m very ill. I have cancer. The doctors say I don’t have much time left. I don’t know how much. Months, maybe.”
Her face changed again. Slowly this time. Her shoulders came down a little. Something in her eyes softened.
“I only want the truth,” I said. “That’s all I came for. I’ve been wondering since the airport in Chicago. I don’t want to die still wondering.”
She looked down at the flowers in my hands.
“Why did you bring those?” she said.
“Because my mother taught me not to arrive empty-handed.”
For a second, almost against her will, the corner of her mouth moved. She almost smiled.
“My name is Claire,” she said.
“Mrs. Wilson,” I said. “Margaret.”
“I know,” she said.
My heart sank all the way into my shoes.
“You know me?”
She took the flowers from my hands. She held them against her chest.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Claire said quietly. “When I saw you, I panicked.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought you’d come to take the apartment.” She looked down at the yellow roses. “And I was terrified you’d discover the truth about Richard.”
“What truth?” I said. My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. “What are you hiding from me?”
She hesitated for a long moment.
Then she stepped aside.
“Come inside,” she said.
The apartment was beautiful.
That was the first thing I noticed, and I hated that I noticed it.
It was small, just one big main room with a kitchen at one end and a hallway leading to a bedroom. But it had tall ceilings and wooden floors that creaked and big windows full of morning light. There were books everywhere. Plants on the windowsills. A soft blue couch with a knitted blanket over the back. And the balcony, with its two little chairs and the round table.
It smelled like coffee and old paper.
It was exactly the kind of place Richard and I used to dream about, lying on that blanket on the floor above the dry cleaner, eating popcorn out of a mixing bowl.
Claire put the flowers in the blue vase on the shelf.
Right next to the photograph.
She picked it up and looked at it for a moment.
“He loved this picture,” she said.
I stood in the middle of her living room with my purse in both hands.
“Did you work with Richard?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Then how did you know him?”
She put the picture down. She turned around to face me. She folded her arms across her cream sweater like she was cold.
“Richard and I were together,” she said, “for almost four years.”
