Page 137 of The Pairing

Theo laughs.

When we finish the whiskey, I take my unsent letter and roll it up as tightly as I can, then push it through the bottle’s opening and screw on the cap.

Theo hooks their chin over my shoulder, pressing their cheek against the side of my neck. I imagine us in five, fifteen, thirty years. Best friends an ocean apart, reappearing once every couple of years to burn the bedroom down, then slipping back to our own lives. Always orbiting each other, never fully out of reach.

I could love that ongoing, extant Theo again. There’s so much romance in that, so much beauty in learning how much my heartcan endure. Sometimes I think the only way to keep something forever is to lose it and let it haunt you.

I reel my arm back, ready to throw our letter in a bottle to sea, but at the last moment, Theo stops me.

“I want to keep it,” they say. “Maybe I’ll want to read it, one day when I love you less.”

It feels like there must be such a tremendous distance between Palermo and home, between where Theo is and where Theo isn’t, but the flight only takes two and a half hours. I close my eyes to Ravel in my headphones, and when I open them, I’m once again arriving in Paris alone. This time, I’m here because we chose it. That has to count for something.

At home, everything is how I left it. The embroidered pillows on the sofa, the shelves of my and Thierry’s books. Maxine has washed and changed the bedsheets, even spritzed them with the lavender oil I keep beside the bed. The plants in the windows are happy and verdant, their leaves plump and shiny in the early afternoon light. The detailed list of plant care instructions I left on the chalkboard by the kitchen has been erased and replaced with a stick-figure drawing of Maxine and me riding a giant strawberry.

The first thing I do, once I’ve unpacked and showered and applied all the nice skincare products I couldn’t pack, is go to the market. I pick up the basics to ready my kitchen for everyday use again—eggs, butter, milk, ripe tomatoes on the vine, a fresh loaf of peasant bread, paper cartons of berries, lemons, heavy cream—and then carefully select the ingredients for a tarte tatin. Summer will end soon, and in a few months autumn will bring quinces; today, I choose peaches.

I haven’t made a tarte tatin since pâtisserie school, and it turns out I’ve forgotten how tricky they can be. A quarter of the peaches stick to the pan. Not my best work, but if I’m beinghonest, Guillaume isn’t the best fuck. Both will do in a pinch.

It’s a twelve-minute bike ride from my apartment to Guillaume’s, and I spend it reflecting on what exactly I’ve been doing with him. I like him, but I like a lot of people. He’s sweet, and he manages the best café in Bastille, and last month he physically mailed me a poem, which means he’s probably at least a little in love with me. I never asked him to be, and I’ve never suggested it would be a good idea. But Idobring him a tart every so often, which Maxine says is “evil, misleading boyfriend behavior.” I haven’t been trying to mislead him. It’s just that the way he smiles every time is so lovely.

He gives me that smile when he answers the door to me and my tart, which makes me feel even guiltier that I’m here to break things off.

I know, the same as I’ve known since I was nine years old in the desert, that I’ll always love Theo. But I can’t keep doing what I’ve been doing with that love. It doesn’t feel fair to go on burying it in other people, showing them all the flowers Theo has frescoed over my heart without telling them I’ve already put someone else’s statue in the fountain at its center. Guillaume is the first on the list. Tomorrow I’ll call Delphine, and Luis, and Eva, and Antoine, and—maybe I should write this down later.

Guillaume takes it reasonably well, but he lets me know in no uncertain terms that I willnotbe getting my plate back. Fair.

When I get home, I do the next thing on my housekeeping list: I call my dad. He answers as if we last spoke a few days ago, which doesn’t surprise me. He’s not in Rome, but he is currently writing in residence at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan, even though his apartment is only six blocks over. He’s been translating a German vampire novel for fun in his spare time. I tell him about the tour, about the food and the paintings and the sea, but not about Theo. The closest we get to addressing our last conversation is a vague mention he makes of wanting to visit Paris and “leave work at home this time.”

“I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be living here,” I tell him. “I’ve been thinking about making some changes.”

On the other end of the line, he’s quiet for long enough that I think he must not have been paying attention. My suspicions seem confirmed when he says, “Did I mention my editor is leaving? I had dinner with him last week.”

“Oh?” I begin trimming the basil plant in my kitchen window, ready to ease myself out of the conversation.

“I was telling him how happy Violette would be to know you’d wound up back in France.”

My scissors still.

“You were?”

“He’s moving abroad for his wife’s job, and they have two sons. Sixteen and eleven. He asked me how the three of you adjusted when we moved from France. I said, well, Ollie was old enough to be excited about it, and Cora was too young to remember much. But our Kit—he was the one Violette worried most about. Our sensitive one. He’s the most like his mother, and her heart belonged in France.”

My throat tightens. He doesn’t like to talk about my mother, especially not with my siblings and me. I think it hurts too much to draw attention to all the pieces of her in us, like how I spoke only French the first few months after losing Theo so I wouldn’t have to hear the English phrases and inflections I’d adopted from them. This is the first time in years he’s said something like this to me. It’s the closest he’s ever come to saying he regrets taking her away from France for the last six years of her life.

I glance at the watercolor paintings that hang on the kitchen wall exactly as they have since Thierry hung them years and years ago. The centermost one is a garden scene, all green except for the brown shape of a little fox curled up in the roots of an orange tree.

“Do you think I should stay, then?” I ask.

“I think,” he says, “that I’m thankful you have my spirit, but her heart.”

That night, I scroll job listings in bed, half-heartedly searching for something that might make me happier than my current one does. There are plenty of openings for part-time bread makers and sous chefs and cake decorators, but the more I try to imagine myself doing any of them, the harder it gets to ignore what I don’t feel: the startling rush of possibility I felt when Paloma told me about the pâtisserie in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

I type out a text to Paloma:can i call you tomorrow?

When I’ve sent it, I swipe back into my messages, to my conversation with Theo. I haven’t heard from them all day, and I tell myself it’s nothing to be concerned about. They’ve probably been busy enjoying their time alone in Palermo, sunning themself on the beach and eating arancini. I’ll hear from them tomorrow. We promised.

I fall asleep thinking of them. The curve of their shoulder, the slant of their smile. Their hands covered in pizza grease, an apricot-flavored kiss. I miss them so badly already. But I’ve learned to love that ache.