Hidden in Paris Read Online Free

and brought all this plus half a baguette and a serrated knife to the kitchen table.
    “Am I really hearing my godson beg me for advice on matters of the heart?”
    “Oh please.”
    “May I at least, feed you breakfast then?”
    Jared accepted, wondering again why Lucas, a man so unlike him, so unlike anyone in his life, still persisted in not giving up on him.

    Annie sat at the ten-foot-long table in the center of her Parisian kitchen feeling sick to her stomach at the thought of what she was about to do. She had been sitting like this the entire morning while the kids were in school, and now it was time to pick them up for lunch, only she had not prepared lunch. The cold soup on the stove had undoubtedly become a giant Petri dish by now and the baked sea bass was no more than a faint idea from a distant past. The decision was made and that was that. She felt the nausea of someone about to plunge into the void.
    She got up and turned on the heat under the soup pot. She’d boil it; hopefully bacteria would get the message. She desperately needed to ingest something liquid, thick, warm and salty like amniotic fluid before she could give birth to her action. Her subconscious must have known she should prepare chicken soup for her future nauseated self.
    She loved her kitchen most. It was built some two hundred years ago, when aristocrats seldom ventured into the servants’ quarters. For this reason, it didn’t have the formality of the rest of the house. A glass door opened to a small garden with a beautiful stone fountain in the center, and remained open all through spring and summer, making the garden a natural extension of the kitchen. In the warm season, Annie grew every type of herb and the best tomatoes this side of the Seine River. Raspberries climbed wildly along the south-facing wall and an ancient apple tree trained as an espalier produced the sweetest apples of a variety not found in markets. She needed only to step outside her kitchen to help herself. Her own private Garden of Eden. Even now in January, when the plants were dormant and the door to the garden was closed, light flooded in through the glass panes making the kitchen the brightest and most inviting room in the house.
    This decision was so unlike her. Or was it? The thing was, there was a before and there was an after to who she was, and she did not know in which category to fit this decision. The person she had been before Johnny’s death might have been capable of handling such a decision, but what about the new self, the one that had settled in lately, the one she did not like very much? What was the new self capable of? But really, wasn’t the new self, the darker, angrier, more mistrusting self more real, more true to who or what she really was?
    She had made terrifying decisions before. The last twelve years of her life, for example, had been the consequence of a single word uttered at the end of a single meal. She had been twenty-three then, and Johnny twenty-eight. He was about to finish grad school and she had three years to go. They were having dinner in a rather seedy Italian restaurant near the campus. Her foot gently rubbed his crotch under the red-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloth. He looked more than ever like Redford in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. Gorgeous and mischievous. Impossible and irresistible. Outside, the Indian summer was ablaze. They had met at a party. She had made him laugh. Her old self had been silly and free. There had been several months of wild lovemaking and very little studying. They were as physically compatible as two people could be. Two days into what was not yet a relationship, she had known that she was helplessly in love with Johnny, but boy had she worked valiantly not to show it. She was no nitwit; Johnny was an academic star, captain of the Lacrosse team, and voted most likely to weaken ladies’ knees. She was wise enough to know he was only hers temporarily. They had been dating for six