The parcel was wrapped in brown paper and tied with an unblemished silk ribbon. This was quite a feat, given that the package had traveled all the way from Paris to New York. A tiny bow perched on top, its ends snipped short—almost, Cat thought, as if the person who had wrapped it was attempting to be economical. The sender’s details were written in faded sepia pen: Monsieur Gerard Lapointe, ninth arrondissement, Paris. Cat had never heard of him.
She gave the parcel a gentle shake. Something solid rattled inside, but just as Cat was reaching for her kitchen scissors, there was a knock on her front door. Christian was right on time. Cat put the parcel down on the kitchen bench, picked it up again, put it back, and went to answer the door.
Christian wore a new suit. His fair hair was slicked back, Gatsby style. “You haven’t changed yet?” He looked at his watch.
“Do I need to?” Cat laughed.
Christian strolled through Cat’s tiny Brooklyn apartment, looking half as if he owned it and half as if he couldn’t wait to return to the Upper West Side.
“How about that little black dress I bought you last week?”
Cat hid her smile as Christian paused in front of her latest treasure, a vintage peacock-patterned shawl that she had picked up at a flea market for a song. Cat had spent hours fixing the tiny rents in the fabric and combing tangles out of its ancient fringe. Now it was draped over her red sofa.
Christian seemed to be conducting an internal debate over whether he should be polite about that shawl or not.
“I had to rescue it. It was in such a state of disrepair… I suppose I could get changed.” There was no doubt that the minimalist black dress Christian had bought for her last week would be far more suitable for the evening ahead than the pale green 1940s trouser suit that Cat had chosen. He did so love to buy her clothes. It was something that was both endearing and yet a little awkward at times. She’d been crazy about vintage since her late teens, but the main thing, of course, was not to hurt his feelings. She moved toward her bedroom.
Christian caught her hand on the way. “Michael and Alicia chose tonight. The Lemon Tree. Apparently they have a new menu. But—” He adjusted his suit sleeve and glanced at his watch again.
“We’ll be on time.” Cat slipped the new dress over her head. She handed Christian the silver necklace that he had bought her for her thirty-fourth birthday, turning her back to him and raising her honey-colored hair so that he could slide the clasp together.
“I love you in this.”
Cat turned and eyed him. “Don’t think I plan to make a habit of it.”
“Never.”
She dabbed some perfume on her wrists. “A charming little package came in the mail today. From Paris. I’m dying to see what it is.”
Christian held the door open. “Last time I was in Paris, all I saw was the inside of the bank.”
The package would have to wait.
It was probably nothing at all.
Although the Lemon Tree was full, the elegant restaurant didn’t feel hectic at all. Cat chatted with Tash, Alicia, and Morgan, all of whom were married to Christian’s oldest friends. The idea of being a permanent part of this close-knit circle was more appealing than Cat would admit to anyone who cared to ask—it was precisely what she had always wanted but had never had. Even after two years with Christian, she still had a sense of being a little on the outside. After all, Tash and Scott were married with two toddlers, Michael and Alicia had three children and a weekend house, and Morgan and Adam had been together for a decade. They had been planning their wedding since Cat first met them. Christian had been friends with Michael, Scott, and Adam since they were in grade school.
Conversations ranged from the jaw-dropping process of applying for prep schools in Manhattan and the desperate need for the children to speak several languages before they were five to the considerable stresses of shopping on Net-A-Porter and the fact that there was never time for any of it, anyway. It was delicious and a little irreverent, and Cat knew that she was beguiled by them all.
Christian caught Cat’s eye and winked, and she smiled right back at him. This had become a little ritual between them whenever they were out. He would check to see that she was happy; she would reassure him that she most definitely was.
“I mean to say”—Alicia placed her wine glass on the table as if she were about to make a grand announcement—“it makes no difference for Annabelle that I’m an alumni. There should be limits to how egalitarian they can be. How far does it go?”
“We should start a campaign,” Tash said.
“And you can coordinate it, Alicia.” Adam laughed. “You’d be brilliant.”
Cat caught Christian’s eye again. He raised one of his blond brows.
“Cat,” Tash said, “tell me, where did you go to school?”
“Yes, Cat, tell us, where did you go to school? Will the little Carters be following in their mother’s footsteps?”
Cat felt a flush rise through her cheeks at the question—and the assumption that her children would be Christian’s. “Oh, Mumbai High.”
There was a silence, until Christian chuckled and everyone else followed suit. Cat sat back in her own seat and took a gulp of wine. Laughter, the ability to shake things off—it was one of the things she adored about Christian. He had been the only person to come to her rescue the first time she met him. He and several colleagues from the bank had come to have group portraits taken at the photography studio where Cat worked. When Cat’s camera had refused to play ball, Christian had hopped out of position, helped her retrieve new equipment, and then, afterward, insisted on carrying it all back to her boss’s rooms. The fact that he had asked her out for a drink that very evening had seemed like a foregone conclusion after half an hour spent flirting among the tripods. His green eyes and blond hair were a tantalizing mix, and he seemed confident, so very confident, as well as kind. Now, it was as if they were a pair of birds building a nest, already assuming they would spend their lives together even though they had never formally discussed it.
Now, Cat pushed familiar and intrusive thoughts of her father—and what he would no doubt have had to say about Christian and his successful “bourgeois” friends—out of her head. There was no point in worrying about Howard Jordan now.
“You seemed distracted for a while there tonight,” Christian said as they left the restaurant together.
Cat leaned into the familiar comfort of his arm around her shoulders while they waited for a cab. “Did I?”
“Did you have a good time, honey?”
“Of course.”
Outside the fog-smeared car window, the city lights sparkled. Back in Brooklyn, the cab came to a stop in front of her building.
“Do you want to come up?”
“I’d love to, but I have to get off to an early start tomorrow.”
Cat leaned over and kissed him.
“You know”—he glanced out the car window at her Vespa, which was parked in its usual spot—“you should part with the scooter.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Cat laughed. It had been her very first purchase when she got her first job.
“It’s too dangerous. If I had my way, it’d be gone tomorrow.”
As soon as she’d closed her door behind her, Cat went straight to the package from Paris. She had only visited France once, during a whirlwind trip right after college. Her time in Paris had been brief, but she had taken more than a thousand photographs during her stay. Upon her return to New York, she had started her job as a photographer at a studio, the same one where she still worked now. She had nearly left countless times, but she knew she was fortunate to have a job during a recession. Besides, every time she had tried to quit, her boss had reeled her back in with pleas so convincing that she had resigned herself to staying a little longer.
The way the bow was tied on this package brought back memories of the sort of elegance that had enchanted Cat when she was in Paris. She slipped her scissors back in the drawer and began to ease the pale ribbon out of its elaborate knot with the tips of her fingers; it seemed a shame to wreck the beautiful silk.
The loft had turned colder during the evening, but her fingers, despite being cold, were deft with some strange energy tonight. She finished untying the ribbon and slid her fingertips under the brown tape that bound the package together. A small cardboard box lay inside the paper wrapping.
A gust of wind caused the windows to shake. Cat shuddered. A mug of hot chocolate was in order. Cat slipped across the kitchen and poured milk into a saucepan. Stirring the warm milk in the pot soothed her. She broke up two thick slabs of dark chocolate and watched them melt into the liquid, then poured the hot drink into a blue and white china mug that had belonged to her mother. Her sweet, innocent mother.
Cat was determined to live the happy life that her mother must have dreamed about. One thing was certain: Cat’s mother would have been far happier with a kind man like Christian than with Cat’s opinionated and domineering father. Her mother had, it seemed, loved desperately when she was young, only to spend the rest of her life regretting her horrible mistake.
Difficult relationships were something Cat was determined to avoid.
She took a sip of the heavenly chocolate, put the mug down, and lifted the lid from the cardboard box. There were two things nestled inside: a typed letter and an old brass key.
Cat moved across the living room to sit on her sofa, scanned the letter once, and then reread it a second time. It had been typed on a typewriter. It made no sense at all.
Cat’s full name was at the top of the page: Catherine Laura Jordan. Below this, in capital letters, was the name around which the letter appeared to revolve—the name of a woman of whom Cat’s father had disapproved so deeply that he turned puce whenever it was mentioned—Virginia Brooke, Cat’s utterly unacceptable maternal grandmother.
The letter was formal and brief. Monsieur Lapointe, a lawyer based in Paris, wrote that Virginia Brooke had been the sole inheritor of the estate of the recently deceased Isabelle de Florian. After the passing of Virginia Brooke in 1978 and the subsequent passing of Virginia’s daughter, Cat’s mother Bonnie, in 2003, the estate was now left entirely to Cat.
Cat knew that her grandmother Virginia had traveled solo in Europe for six years just before the Second World War, only returning to America when her family insisted that Europe was unsafe. Virginia had remained single for a long time. She had gotten a lowly job in New York’s garment district, despite her middle-class family’s protests, and had apparently enjoyed the company of several lovers. She had been married late, to a far older man: Cat’s grandfather, a Harvard professor whom Virginia, by all accounts, had adored. She hadn’t given birth to Bonnie until she was well into her forties.
Bonnie had been wonderfully neglected as a child, left to ramble around the family’s old farmhouse and its wild gardens alone while Cat’s grandfather and Virginia went about their lives doing exactly as they wished.
As a result, Bonnie had cultivated not only a deep imagination but also an appealing yearning for romance that had captivated Howard Jordan, a former student of her father’s. Howard went on to become a public servant with strident political and moral convictions. His primary passion in life was apparently to shape both Bonnie and Cat into something prosaic and suited to his own needs, which revolved around order, efficiency, and the unyielding belief that his opinions were always correct.
It wasn’t until Cat was in her late teens that she learned to respect her mother’s stoicism, her determination to make something of the situation in which she had placed herself. By the time Cat was twenty, Bonnie confessed that she had been a young romantic and had allowed herself to be swept away by the idea of love rather than really considering Howard as a person. Bonnie’s decision to stay with Howard was, Cat knew, for Cat’s own sake, and there was definitely something to admire in that.
Bonnie had told her whispered stories about Virginia frequenting Parisian cabarets and bars during the Jazz Age. She had been a regular at society events, openings, exhibitions, the theater. So where did Isabelle de Florian come into this? Amid all of Bonnie’s stories, there had never been a mention of an Isabelle. Cat was sure of it.
Cat had half expected—and hoped with all her heart—that her own trip to Paris might hold a hint of that bygone era’s cachet, too. Instead, her own European tour had seen her careering around several countries on a crowded bus along with forty inebriated students. By the end of it, Cat had decided that romance was best left in the past.
She had returned to New York and started working in the photographer’s studio, and now, with Christian, she was happier than she had ever been in her life.
Paris was six hours ahead of New York. In a few hours, this mysterious Monsieur Lapointe’s office should be open for business.
Cat would be businesslike herself. She would give this Monsieur Lapointe a call, even if she had to stay up all night to catch him first thing, and she would sort the situation out. Fast.
Cat picked up the phone and dialed Monsieur Lapointe’s office just after nine o’clock in the morning, Paris time.
The receptionist was firm. “Monsieur Lapointe does not begin for one more hour. I will give him your message, mademoiselle.”
Cat slumped back down on her bed. It was Christian’s parents’ wedding anniversary today, and she had promised him that she would celebrate with his family this evening. But now she was exhausted.
At 4 a.m. New York time, Monsieur Lapointe still had not called back. Cat held her hand over the phone. It would not do to appear desperate, but she would just have to call again.
This time, the woman on the end of the phone put her straight through to Monsieur Lapointe.
“Mademoiselle Jordan?” he asked, placing a strong emphasis on the last syllable of her name.
“Oh, bonjour, monsieur.”
“I am afraid that I am going to be abrupt. There is no other way around this. Mademoiselle Jordan, you must come to Paris.”
Cat drew in a breath. “Well, would it be possible for us to discuss this over the phone?”
“It would be best for us to speak in person, mademoiselle.”
There was a silence.
“I really can’t get to Paris. My work…” Her work? Taking portraits of well-to-do New Yorkers, businesspeople—and often their equally well-to-do babies and pets—could hardly be called crucial work. But there was no question of her going to Paris.
“Mademoiselle. Please.”
“But, the fares, monsieur.” Although… she could probably afford a cheap flight to France. She had some savings built up.
“I cannot come to you.”
“No.” He had a point.
Cat took a couple of laps around the living room. “So you’re saying you cannot do this over the phone or in writing?”
“You could put it this way indeed. The circumstances of this will are… not ordinary… you will have to come to Paris to sort it out. And, mademoiselle, I would prefer to meet you before we go ahead with the reading of the will. There are formalities, many formalities. These are very important, you will see.”
Cat sat down where she was. “I… assume you’d want me there as soon as possible?” Now she sounded like she wanted to go. She cleared her throat. “I mean, I would have to work it out with my boss, you know. I can’t just drop everything.” What was she saying? She had months of vacation time accumulated. She never went anywhere.
“I will be here when you come.” Monsieur Lapointe gave her precise directions to his office. “And do not forget the key, Mademoiselle Jordan.”
“Of course.” Cat took a breath. “Look, can you at least tell me what this Isabelle de Florian had to do with my grandmother?”
“Please make the appointment with my personal assistant. Au revoir, mademoiselle.”
Four hours later, after trying and failing to fall asleep, Cat emailed her boss requesting some time off. When she received a reluctant yet positive reply from his phone while he was apparently out on his morning jog, she booked herself a flight to Paris the following day. With the help of Monsieur Lapointe’s assistant, she found a small hotel near the Palais Garnier opera house, right around the corner from the legal office.
Only when Cat hung up the phone for the last time and the first signs of light appeared through the gap in the curtains did the full impact of the entire situation hit her. Her grandmother had been a wild card. Cat was nothing like her. Why on earth had she allowed herself to be persuaded to fly to France the very next day?
The small family anniversary dinner for Christian’s parents turned out to be a party for fifty. Even if Cat had wanted to discuss her ridiculous grandmother’s situation with Christian, it was clear from the moment she stepped out of the elevator into his parents’ crowded apartment that there was not going to be a chance to be alone with him all night.
And anyway, what Christian or anyone in his family would begin to think about Cat’s crazy family story was anybody’s guess. The chic people at this party wouldn’t give a damn about Virginia Brooke.
By the time Christian had introduced her to enough charming people to fill a ballroom, in addition to his endless cousins down from Boston, it was almost impossible for Cat to remember why her little trip to Paris with a rusty key and a letter was of any importance at all.
There had been only a handful of occasions when Cat had mingled with Christian’s wider family, and having everyone here at once was like being an outsider at a party for Vogue. Thankfully, many of Christian’s relatives found Cat’s vintage 1940s tea dress “interesting” or “quite charming, my dear,” and what might have caused her to feel out of place had become an attribute that seemed to endear her to his endless aunts swathed in pearls and Chanel.
Had there been a chance to think about the utter contrast between all this elegance and Cat’s own childhood in Durham, Connecticut—her parents had hardly ever had company—Cat would have had to pinch herself to believe she was here. But there was no chance for thinking. That was all part of being in Christian’s world. It was all about being in the right place with the right people at the very right time. She gave herself over willingly to the seductive appeal of it all.
After a couple of hours, Cat had convinced herself that even if she had found the chance to discuss the matter of the estate with Christian, she wouldn’t have bothered. He wasn’t into travel and wouldn’t understand why she hadn’t insisted that the lawyer just send her an email with all the particulars. Christian often said that everything you could ever want was in New York and you could use a laptop to experience the rest. His grandparents had a comfortable house in the Hamptons for holidays. Why would anyone bother going anywhere else? So. She would simply tell them she was going to Paris. They would accept this and would not require a reason.
“It’s a little early for the shows, dear,” Christian’s aunt pointed out.
“I’m going for work, actually.” Cat had to stop herself from chewing at her lip.
“Would you like me to book you on a nice flight?” Christian asked.
“I had the most divine caviar in first the other week. They are improving. Finally.” Christian’s uncle on his father’s side had a mustache and a permanent pleasant expression on his face.
“Caviar and champagne for Cat. Sounds like a plan,” Christian said.
“No, no. I’ve got it all arranged,” Cat said and smiled.
Honestly, she didn’t care about first-class this and luxury that. She hadn’t known about Christian’s family’s wealth when they had first started dating. It was the little things he did that mattered, like the fact that from the very first time they went out for a drink, he had called her most days, just to see how she was, just to find out her day was going.
“Surely not coach?”
“No?”
“No.”
“I’ve booked it. Business class, so it’s fine.” It was only a small white lie, but the thought of telling Christian that she had grabbed a last-minute deal on a budget airline that left at nobody’s business of an ungodly hour would, no doubt, send him into a spin.
“The firm’s paying,” Cat went on. “They insisted.” The firm? What firm? But Christian had trouble seeing beyond his own world.
“Call me the instant you land, honey.”
Cat slipped into the elevator. When Christian was out of sight, she pulled off her high-heeled 1940s pumps and let her sore feet absorb the cool of the patterned marble floor.
A few hours later, Cat found herself in the middle row on a budget flight to Paris—about as far from patterned marble floors as she could fathom. She had spent most of the flight with a three-year-old on her lap, attempting to dodge fountains of vomit and chocolate milk while protecting her ears from repeated assaults by sibling squ. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
