It was a one-room studio and, sure enough, there was no bed.
Simon walked to the wall unit, then slid the bookcases aside, revealing a bed built into the wall.
“Amazing,” she said.
He pulled a cord and the bed descended gracefully. It was neatly made, with pale blue sheets and a gray blanket.
“I can’t,” Josie said. She could feel her throat tightening.
Simon looked at her.
“It’s her bed. It’s where you sleep with your wife.”
“Josie.”
She shook her head. “I feel like Goldilocks in someone else’s house. I can’t do this.”
“The sheets are fresh. I made the bed this morning.”
“No.”
He came toward her and took her in his arms again.
“She’ll never know,” he said.
“Let’s go. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
Later, in their room on the fourteenth floor of the Clift Hotel, they lay in each other’s arms after sex and Ghirardelli chocolate and scotch and more sex.
“How did Brady do?” Simon asked.
Josie looked at him. “I wondered why you hadn’t asked.”
“I should have been there.”
“You’ll come tomorrow.”
“I didn’t want to be there with my wife. I didn’t want to stand next to her and shake your hand. She knows me too well.”
Josie climbed on top of him. She looked down into Simon’s face.
“We can’t do this, can we?”
“We have to do this.”
He pulled her face to his and kissed her.
“Why?” Josie asked.
“Because I have to trust this. I know what love is—I love my wife, I love my son—I won’t lie to you. But I’ve never felt this—I don’t know— need. Desire . I’ve never known this”—he pressed her close to him, finishing his sentence as a whisper in her ear—“before.”
Josie watched him for a moment. “I don’t know what this is,” she said. “I’ve had boyfriends, but this is not what that was. What is this?”
“Kiss me,” Simon said.
• • •
Josie can hear the shoe saleswoman and the tutor talking to each other. She hears the words petite amie: girlfriend. “Does your girlfriend do this often?”
The tutor doesn’t correct her. “No,” he says. “She’s not feeling well today.”
Josie rinses her hands in the tiny sink in the back of the store and considers slipping a pair of shoes into her bag. She has never shoplifted in her life, but who knows what she might be capable of now? The saleswoman didn’t want her in the bathroom of her piggy store, but Josie had marched through the curtains anyway and found a toilet to throw up in rather than the white marble floor. She picks up a pair of red shoes—Dorothy-in-Oz shoes—and clicks the heels.
There’s no place like home.
Why should she fly home on Sunday? Why not stay in Paris and become Nico’s girlfriend and shoplifter of expensive shoes?
She puts the shoes back on the shelf. She steps back into the showroom.
“Ça va?” Nico asks. He looks concerned. Most of his students are not pregnant, crazy ladies, she assumes.
“Ça va,” she sighs, and offers a smile. Poor guy. He deserves better in a girlfriend.
“I don’t want the shoes,” she tells the saleswoman. “I seem to be allergic to them.”
Nico nods and takes her arm, guiding her out of there.
“Does your boyfriend know?” he asks her when they are on the street, standing close to each other in the middle of a crowd of shoppers, all of them wearing extraordinary shoes.
She is not surprised; this tutor seems to be a jack-of-all-trades. Why shouldn’t he also be able to guess her secrets? She shakes her head.
“Will he be happy?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says, assuredly. “He will be very happy.”
“Good,” Nico says. “I once had a girlfriend who broke up with me and then, a month later, called to tell me she was pregnant. She wanted to have the baby. I told her I’d raise the baby with her. She said she was moving to Morocco and that she would send me pictures of the kid from time to time. I never heard from her again.”
“That’s