I shook my head. “I never stick to diets. I’ve no willpower.”
“Your other resolution was much better.”
“What was that?” I had forgotten. Working on the diary had pushed less important details from my memory.
Luc reminded me, “To find a job.”
“Oh. Right.”
“What will you look for? What, in your view, is the perfect job?”
I took an olive from the dish between us. “One that lets me work alone.”
“You said that very quickly. Don’t you like to work in teams, then?”
“No.” I didn’t give an explanation, but I did admit it was a problem. “Most programming jobs involve teamwork.”
“You program computers?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Nothing, it’s nothing. I think it’s a very good job for an amateur code breaker,” he said. “My brother is also a programmer.”
I nodded in the way I’d noticed people did when making small talk, but I had no interest in Luc’s brother. I was interested in Luc, though, which for me was quite unusual. Since I’d left university, relationships with men had all conformed to the same pattern: I would meet someone I found attractive, one of us would ask the other out for dinner or for drinks, we’d spend some time together—maybe several evenings or a weekend here or there, but never longer than a month—then I would end it. Neat and tidy and controllable.
There had been four men, all nice enough, but never had I taken any interest in their lives beyond the time we’d spent together. Never had I taken any notice of their gestures or their habits or the little things about them, but with Luc I noticed everything. I really wasn’t used to that. Nor was I used to being curious enough about his life to ask, “How many brothers do you have?”
“Just one. And you?”
“There’s only me. My parents were both only children. They enjoyed it, so they wanted me to be an only child as well.”
He broke a piece of bread and asked me, “And did you enjoy it as they’d hoped, to be the only one?”
“I didn’t mind it.”
“I don’t know what that would be like,” he confessed, “to have no one to argue with.”
“I always had my cousin.”
“Yes, I can imagine she’d be very good to argue with.”
I couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was serious or teasing, but I wondered something else. “Is it that you’re worried that your son’s an only child? Is that why you want to know whether I like it?”
It seemed when his left eyebrow lifted like that I’d surprised him, though not necessarily in a bad way. He smiled. “Children teach you worries that you never knew you had, it’s true. But no, that isn’t why I asked. I—” He was interrupted by the sudden ringing of his mobile, in his pocket. He excused himself to check the number, made a face and said, “This one is work, I have to answer it. I’m sorry.”
When my cousin got a business call while eating at a restaurant, she would answer it while sitting at the table. Luc was either too polite or just too private to do likewise. Pushing back his chair, he told the caller in a low voice, “Just a moment,” and sent me a nod I took for reassurance as he headed for the stairs.
The room seemed large without him. Large and busy. Where before I’d noticed only Luc, I now became aware of all the other people sitting at their tables, all the other conversations. I tried finding something steady I could focus on and settled on my water glass, which worked until the waiter brought another couple to the table right beside our own. The woman wore a rich floral perfume and sat too close beside me on the leather banquette, and I pulled our motorcycle helmets closer to my leg to make a kind of shield as I rummaged in the pocket of my jacket for the one thing that I knew could calm me down at times like this, when all my senses were on overload.
I’d brought the little booklet of Sudoku puzzles with me when I’d come to France. I hadn’t had to use one, until now.
I was half finished with it when Luc took his chair again. “I’m sorry about that. We’re in the middle of an audit.”
“That’s all right.” I closed the booklet with my pen inside to mark the page, and tucked it back into my pocket.
Luc had noticed. “You like numbers.”
“I like puzzles,” I replied.
The waiter brought our drinks, and I sat back to give him room to set them down. Luc watched, and smiled.
“Me, too,” he said. And reached across to pour my tea.
Chapter 16
The dagger glittered in his hand. He whistled as he went.
—Macpherson, “Fingal,” Book Five
Paris
February 1732
“The tea is cold,” warned Jacques as Mary joined him at the breakfast table.
“I am sorry to be late.” She’d overslept a little, having passed a night so filled with restless nightmares of light-footed thieves and shadows sprung to sudden life that chased her ceaselessly through empty streets, that she suspected she’d have done much better never to have slept at all. Her gown and hair were tidy but she felt disheveled on the inside and disordered in her thoughts.
Jacques stood and waited while she sat, then took his chair again and said, “Had you been half an hour earlier you would have found the tea no warmer. It was cold when it was set upon the table. I was thinking to complain, but Cook is nearly at the limits of her temper as it is, and I am doubtful our new housemaid has the wits to boil water.”