“I sh-should go,” I say, placing my drink on a table next to me. I want to find Ansel. I want to pull him aside and tell him about this conversation. I want him to take me home and erase her thunderous expression from my memory.
Minuit reaches for my arm, stopping me. “But tell me, how are you enjoying my apartment, Mia? My bed? My fiancé?”
My heart literally stops, my vision blurs. “Your fiancé?”
“We were going to be married before you came along. Imagine my surprise when he came back from a silly American vacation with a wife.”
“I don’t . . .” I whisper, looking around the room as if anyone there would help me. A few people look on with sympathy, but no one seems brave enough to interrupt.
“He only called me Minuit, you see,” she explains, her red hair sliding over her shoulder as she leans forward, “because I could never fall asleep. We got a new bed for our beautiful flat. We tried everything to wear me out.” Tilting her head, she asks, “How do you like sleeping in our fancy new bed in our beautiful flat?”
I open my mouth, and then close it again, shaking my head. My pulse is racing, my skin clammy and flushed.
I’ll get you a new ring. We’ll do it all over again. We can find a new flat with memories that are only ours . . .
I need to get out of here.
“We were together for six years. Can you even grasp how long that is? Six years ago you were only a child.”
Her accent is so thick and I’m continually falling behind, grasping on to individual words to cobble together my comprehension. But I understand six years. Ansel called it “too long,” but I never in my wildest dreams imagined it would be such a significant fraction of their lives. Or that they were going to be married. I don’t even know when they broke up—I’d assumed they broke up when he moved back here almost a year ago—but from the circles under her eyes and the way her hand is shaking around her glass, I know I’m wrong.
My heart seems to tear apart, piece by piece.
I hear Ansel enter the kitchen, hear him yell, “J’ai acheté du vin!” as he holds up two open bottles of wine to the small crowd gathered.
But his expression falls as his eyes catch mine across the room and then drift to the woman at my side.
She leans closer, whispering directly in my ear, “Six years ago you had not yet been run over by a truck, huh?”
My head whips around, back to her, and I stare up at blue eyes so full of anger it takes my breath away. “What?”
“He tells me everything. You’re a tiny spot of time,” she hisses, pinching her thumb and forefinger together. “Do you have any idea how many times he does crazy things? You’re his most ridiculous impulse, and he has no idea how to fix this mistake. My taste was still fresh on his mouth when he saw you in your trashy hotel.”
I want to vomit. The only thing I know is that I need to move, but before I can manage to put one foot in front of the other, Ansel is at my side, his hand curling tightly around my arm.
“Perry,” he hisses to the woman. “Arrête. C’est ma femme. C’est Mia. Qu’est-ce que tu fous là?”
Perry?
Wait. Perry?
I blink down to the floor as it all makes sense. His best friends in the world, the four of them. Ansel, Oliver, Finn, and Perry. Not another man . . . a woman.
A woman he was with for six years.
Four of us, together all day long . . . I don’t know that I’ll ever know anyone in the way I know those three . . . Those relationships are some of the best and . . . complicated of my life . . . We missed our families together, we comforted each other, we celebrated some of the proudest moments of our lives.
I feel my face heat, my lips part in a gasp. How many times did Ansel let me assume Perry was another man, a friend? I told him everything about myself, about my life and fears and relationships, and he spoke only in vague generalities about Minuit and their “too long” relationship.
She looks thrilled, like a lioness that caught a gazelle. She wraps her arm around his bicep, but he shakes it off, reaching for me again.
“Mia.”
I pull out of his grasp. “I think I’ll probably leave now.”
There are a million other things I could say—a million other biting things someone like Harlow or Lola would say right now—but for once I’m glad I won’t give voice to any of them.
He calls after me but I’m already running to the stairs, tripping down the tight spiral. Behind me, his feet pound on the wood; my name echoes down along the banister.
“Mia!”
My mind bends away from understanding what just happened back at the party. Two magnets pushing apart.
The sidewalk is bare, cracked, and crooked as I turn on Rue La Bruyère, sprinting into the small curve at St.-Georges. It’s funny that I know where I’m going now, so I can properly run away.
I catch my breath between two buildings. I think he went looking for me the other way; I don’t hear him anymore.
There are too many things I have to figure out now: how fast I can pack, when I can leave, and why Ansel left me to be blindsided tonight by a woman he was planning to marry before I came along. I have no idea why he kept this from me, but I feel the shards of panic pushing deep into my lungs, making it hard to breathe.
How old this city is. The plaque on the building I’m up against states it was built in 1742. This structure alone is older than any love affair alive in this country. Ours might be the youngest, even though it always felt as though we were picking up where our souls left off on a thread much further up the line.