Every time I said “hamster,” she would oink. And every time I told her that wasn’t the sound a hamster made, she’d laugh. In that way, she reminded me a lot of Emmett. She did things just to amuse herself with my reaction.
Their sense of humor was such a striking resemblance that one morning I caved and called Emmett to introduce him to Lucie.
They talked easily and exchanged goofy stories for over an hour, which surprised even me. While still on the phone, Lucie asked me when she would meet her uncle, and Emmett and I looked at each other, took a breath and just like that, overlooked the wall between us to book him a flight to France. Lucie was so thrilled she darted off to make him a welcome card despite the fact that his flight was two weeks away. At least it was till he canceled it.
Two days after our great conversation, Emmett texted and said he couldn’t come, and not to call him anymore – that Mom was hurt over how he was trying to embrace the family I had replaced them with. I did my best to explain, and I think he tried to listen, but the call ended before any good could come of anything.
And just like that, another brick cemented itself to the ever-heightening wall between us.
So I spent as much time as I could with Lucie.
We loved watching the surfers together in the morning, before Liz even woke up. Despite how often she asked, I was hesitant about teaching Lucie to surf. But after seeing so many fathers out there with kids as young as two years old, I yielded. She was an absurdly good swimmer, anyway, with no discernible fear of the water. Paddling out was always my biggest challenge on a board, but Lucie aced it like it was nothing.
Staring out at the water this morning, I spotted a boy a little older than her out there, and I wondered how Lucie stacked up against him now. She had said in one of her letters that she still surfed when she could, but that was awhile ago. Realistically, she’d forgotten surfing the way she had English. Remembered the basics. Not well enough to want to practice.
“Hoult, Turner told me great things about the hot stone treatment here.”
Returning my eyes to the table, I eased smoothly back into the conversation. Irv and Robert were talking about the spa that Turner had apparently raved about. I offered to schedule them appointments there before our dinner tonight.
But despite my convincingly undivided attention on them, I was thinking about the distance.
I was probably an hour-and-a-half away from Lucie by plane right now. I could actually take the jet and be there faster than that. I’d ask a trusted member of the hotel staff to join me, and that person would serve as my translator, so I could explain everything to Lucie.
I had no idea what her mother had told her about me.
I didn’t want to think about it, but knowing Liz, it was something cruel – probably that I had willingly left them because I was too busy for a family. That I had asked them to move out. I could tell from the waning excitement in the letters Lucie sent that her image of me was changing as she grew. I imagined she could better understand the stories her mom told her. Whatever the French words were for “abandoned” and “unavailable,” she probably heard them a lot when Liz spoke about me. If Lucie badgered her enough, I wouldn’t put it past Liz to mention that she wasn’t biologically mine. She was ruthless when it came to hurting people. She said she’d learned that from me.
So I believed fully that she would hurt Lucie for the sake of dragging me through the mud. And for that reason, I wished badly for a chance to explain myself. I’d considered the short plane ride about a thousand times during this lunch alone.
But as much as I wanted to and technically could see Lucie, I knew well that reappearing in her life now would only hurt her.
In her letters, she mentioned friends and school, and all the new memories she was creating in place of the ones we once had. She was moving on. Kids did that well. They were quicker than adults when it came to looking at a different reality and accepting it as their new one.
It wasn’t to say Lucie didn’t hurt over me. There were probably many nights of questions and crying shortly after they moved out of the house. But over time, that heartbreak subsided, and by now, Lucie had hit her stride in terms of forgetting about me. The decreasing frequency of her letters, and the way they spoke happily of friends showed me that much. Now, she was simply focused on being a happy little girl.
So as I sat at this table with Turner Roth’s advisors, I decided to finally let her go.
If there was a bright side, it was that I had my own new chapters ahead of me.
32
SARA
I’d covered everything from the beach to the aquarium to the Musée Bonnat by the time I returned to the resort around five.
For excluding me from the meeting this morning, I was hell-bent on staying at least grouchy with Julian, but that didn’t work. He had texted me all day during my adventures, asking for updates on what I’d seen. After a good deal of badgering, he even caved to my request to download Snapchat, an idea he was fervently against till about 2PM.
But from that point on, I sent him picture after video after picture of where I was. And wherever I was, I stopped and grinned to read whatever he promptly sent back. For shots of scenery, it was usually “very nice” and a suggestion of something cool to see or peruse nearby. But for selfies, Julian’s replies grew increasingly urgent, starting with “you look gorgeous” to “damn it Sara,” before finally reaching “come back now so I can take your dress off.”
ME: If you actually have the time between meetings to do that, I will happily skip the Casino Barrière
JULIAN: Come back to me please
ME: Everything okay?
JULIAN: Not bad considering I haven’t had to deal with either Turner or Carter all day
ME: Not bad but not good either?