Chateau of Secrets: A Novel (14 page)

She couldn’t comprehend why they would dismiss André because of the blood in his wife’s veins. How was his family supposed to survive without work? But the Germans had taken his job away and now they wanted to brand his family.

When Monsieur Cornett returned, he glanced back out the window. “Why is he still here?”

The boy looked away. “Perhaps he’s waiting for his parents.”

“They were probably arrested last night.”

A tremor of fear flared up her spine. “Why would they be arrested?”

“How would I know?” he replied. “They rounded up dozens of people around Saint-Lô.”

He handed her the bread and she tucked it under her arm. “Where did they take them?”

The baker shrugged.

She shivered. There had been rumors of the Germans rounding up Jews in Paris, and she’d been afraid they would begin to gather the Jews here as well. Had André and Nadine heard what happened? Probably not—they rarely left their home these days.

She had to warn them.

As she moved toward the door, she ripped a large piece of bread from her loaf and held it out to the boy on the street. The boy stared down at her offering. When his gaze bounced back up to her, she saw fear mirrored in his eyes. Purple remnants of a bruise circled his eye, and for a moment, she flashed back to that horrific night when she and Michel had found Papa’s body by the lake, his face battered by the Germans.

Had they beaten this boy as well?

Her heart felt as if it would rip into two pieces.

Instead of taking the piece of bread, the boy turned and ran. Stunned, she stood and watched him disappear into an alley.

Did he think she was trying to trick him?

Someone brushed up against her, an old woman wearing a brown-and-green scarf over her head. She kissed Gisèle on one cheek, and as she leaned to kiss her second cheek, she whispered, “He is afraid.”

Gisèle clung to the woman a moment longer. “But why?”

“Because they are watching him.”

The old woman continued her walk, swinging a basket in her arms. Gisèle looked up at the windows across the street and then
down the lane of shops. Two soldiers stood on the street corner, guns at their sides to maintain order.

Since the occupation, the German soldiers had stood alongside the Russians forced into servitude as guards or soldiers for the Wehrmacht. After two years of
captivité
, the unwelcome presence of both the Germans and the Russians seemed permanently etched into the streets.

Sirens blared around the corner and an ambulance rushed toward her, the lights flashing. She hopped back onto the sidewalk and watched it race up the hill, toward the hospital.

The baker’s words echoed in her mind. How many Jews had the Germans taken away last night? And where had they gone?

She prayed the Batiers, like the boy in Saint-Lô, hadn’t been among them. She had to check on André and Nadine, but yet . . .

Her gaze wandered back to the alley where the boy had run.

The soldiers were everywhere, and the familiar fears threatened her. But she could not succumb to the paralysis of fear, not if the Germans were planning to take this child too.

Setting the bread in her basket, she waited until the soldiers shuffled down the street, and then she pushed her bicycle into the alley. The boy cowered beside an empty trash can, his head tucked into his knees. As if he could shrink into the wall and she would never know he was there.

She sat down beside him and held out the bread again.

This time he took it.

“Where are your parents?” she asked.

He wiped his face on his sleeves. “They had to leave.”

“Are they coming back?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “They said they couldn’t take me with them.”

As loudly as her heart cried out for her to hurry to Nadine’s, she couldn’t leave this child here, alone and hungry.

“Outside of town,” she whispered. “There’s a home for children.”

He shook his head. “Not for children like me.”

She swallowed. It was a Catholic orphanage, but surely they would take in an abandoned child, no matter his religious background.

When he finished his piece of bread, she offered her hand. “I cannot leave you by yourself.”

He eyed her hand for a moment. “What if they don’t want me?”

A tear fell down her cheek. “Then I will find another safe place,” she promised.

He took her hand.

“P
retty Woman” blared on the cab’s radio as my driver navigated the streets of Paris. “
No anglais
,” he’d said when I climbed into the car at the airport, yet as he maneuvered through the morning traffic of Paris, he had no problem belting out the English lyrics to this song.

It seemed so surreal—cruising past the celebrated museums and architectural treasures of this great city as we listened to American pop songs.

From Gare Saint-Lazare, I would board a train to Carentan in Normandy, and Marguerite, the woman hired to care for the château, was supposed to pick me up at the train station. Riley Holtz would arrive tomorrow afternoon to begin filming.

Between my confrontation with Austin and my lack of sleep, my head felt like it had been crushed. My mind raged with anger, but my heart wouldn’t cooperate. It just felt shattered.

My phone lit up again, and I glanced down at Austin’s number. I’d lost track of the times he’d called and texted since I left the hotel last night. Or was that two nights ago? I’d lost track of time altogether.

I declined his call.

As the cab crawled through a narrow street, I rolled down my
window, and the aroma of warm pastries and strong espresso wafted into the cab. Morning had dawned in France.

I was supposed to be calling Austin, telling him I’d arrived, telling him how much I missed him. Instead he was texting me, in the middle of the night from New York, begging me to forgive him.

The memory of him kissing the lips of Starla Dedrick in the elevator looped through my mind. Was she sleeping beside him now as he texted me? Or had he snuck away while she slept?

The moment I saw Austin with Starla at the Plaza, my perfectly structured future had crumbled. I didn’t know when I would speak to him again—if I would speak to him again—but there was so much more I wanted to say, conversations I’d rehashed over and over during my excruciatingly long flight across the Atlantic. None of it would change the fact that our engagement was over. There would be no wedding now. No marriage. Austin might become Virginia’s governor, but I would not be the governor’s wife. In hindsight, I knew I should have seen this coming, but I had thought his indifference to me in the past months was due to the busyness of his campaign. Apparently he had plenty of time for recreation. It just didn’t involve me.

How could I have been so stupid?

I closed my eyes, imagining for a moment how he would position this new wrench in his campaign. Olivia would have a cow, no doubt. He’d probably make her handle the announcement of our breakup to the media and his staff. Still, the media would have questions that only he could answer.

Somehow Olivia and Austin would spin this in a positive light, probably making me look like a fool in the process. I shouldn’t have cared, but I did.

How long had he been sleeping with Starla? For all I knew, they’d never even broken up after college. Perhaps Olivia had been covering for him all along.

All it would take was a call from me to one of the morning shows to set a scandal in motion. Or I could sell the gritty details to a tabloid. I had contemplated that very thing on the plane, the sweetness of letting the world know that Austin was scum.

But what woman really wanted to let the world know her fiancé had rejected her? It would be bad enough to tell my parents what happened. I didn’t want to be part of the world’s analysis of why my fiancé had cheated on me. The sweet taste of my revenge would sour quickly and somehow Olivia would position me as the villain instead of the victim.

Is she walking back to me? Yeah, she’s walking back to me.

The driver grinned as he sang the final lyrics to “Pretty Woman,” and when I glanced up at the rearview mirror, he winked at me. Cringing, I leaned my head back on the seat and gazed out the window at the crowds of Parisians emerging for work. Thanks to my grandmother and my college professors, I spoke fluent French, but I didn’t want this man to know I could speak his language.

I wouldn’t be walking back to Austin, nor did I have a job to return to in the fall. At some point I’d have to call Marissa and my other bridesmaids to let them off the hook in August, but I would start with my parents.

Still, how did you tell your family that the man you planned to marry was sleeping with another woman? That he had probably loved her all along?

The driver pointed up and I saw the golden Flame of Liberty before we descended into the infamous Pont de l’Alma tunnel where Princess Diana’s car crashed when I was in elementary
school. In that moment, my heart empathized with the princess—a young woman chosen to marry the future king of England, a devoted wife and mother who played her part well for fifteen years, smiling for the cameras even as her marriage was disintegrating.

Had the prince swept Diana off her feet even as his heart belonged to another woman—a woman the Crown wouldn’t permit him to marry?

The next time my phone rang, my mom’s picture flashed up on the screen. Either she was worried about me or she knew something—it was two in the morning there and my mom rarely stayed up past eleven.

With a cleansing breath to calm myself, I answered her call.

“Austin was just here, looking like heck,” she said. “What happened?”

It took a lot of gall for him to petition my parents. “You don’t want to know.”

“I do want to know,” she replied. “He said you’d fought . . .”

“Did he happen to say about what?”

“It doesn’t matter, Chloe. Everyone fights before their wedding. That’s why they call it jitters.” A woman rode up next to the cab on a bicycle, a girl strapped in a seat behind her. The child’s hands were stretched out to reach around her mother’s back. “Austin said he’s still planning to marry you.”

I groaned. “That’s awfully kind of him.”

“He thought your dad and I might be able to convince you to reconcile.”

The driver watched me in the mirror, and I highly doubted his insistence that he didn’t speak any English. “We’re not reconciling.”

“He said there was a misunderstanding. Surely it can be resolved—”

I stopped her. “I don’t think so, Mom. I found him in New York with an old girlfriend.”

Silence reigned on the other end of the line before she spoke again. “Having dinner together?”

“They weren’t dining when I found them.”

“Oh my—”

“And he didn’t seem the least bit remorseful about their pillow talk at the Plaza.”

“I’m—I’m so sorry, honey.”

“Me too.”

The shock in my mother’s voice turned to anger. “If he can’t be faithful now, he never will be.”

I knew I’d made the right choice, but why did my heart still ache?

When we ended the call, the taxi driver glanced in the mirror. “Do you want to get a drink?” he asked in French.

I continued pretending not to understand him, like he pretended not to understand English.

“Thriller” started playing on the radio, and his attention was diverted to the song. As he drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel, my phone flashed again.

We need to talk
, Austin wrote.

I powered off my phone and stuffed it deep into my handbag. Part of me wanted to speak to him again, to say everything I’d forgotten to say at the Plaza, but the thought of talking to him made my stomach churn.

In France, I would have to forget about Austin.

In France, perhaps I would find a little bit of myself.

And for Mémé’s sake, I hoped I would find out what happened to the girl she’d lost.

Chapter 19

T
he boy clung to Gisèle’s hand in the alley as she smoothed back his messy hair. Then she removed the identity document, stamped with an incriminating
J
, from around his neck and ripped it into tiny pieces.