Page 2 of Gravity of Love
“Isn’t that crazy?Paris! The city oflove. I didn’t even know he was going to be there. He was there at a conference. And do you know what’s evencrazier?”
Unfortunately, unlike most people, Cora Costas did not ask rhetorical questions in conversations. So, although Frankie would like nothing more than to phone—forgive the pun—this conversation in, she was forced to be an active participant.
“What?”
“Eddie said he almost didn’t recognize me!” She could hear her mom’s smile.
Why would he? Her mom had always just been ‘the help’ to him. She was sure that if Eddie passed Peter, his landscaper/gardener, or Julio, his handyman/mechanic—both of whom had worked full-time for the Sterlings for over twenty years—on the street in another country, they would be just as invisible. Which was why Frankie could not, in a thousand years, wrap her head around this turn of events. It was like finding out her cat had become a motivational speaker or that the Statue of Liberty had decided to take up pole dancing. It was categorically impossible.
“Isn’t thatsofunny?”
“Yeah,” Frankie agreed, trying to keep her voice light.
“So, anyway, he said he was running late for a panel he was speaking on, and he asked what my plans for dinner were. I told him I was going to Bouillon Pigalle and he said,nothat wouldn’t do. He said to meet him at Le Cinq at nine. He didn’t ask, he just told me. Well, youknowI’ve doneso muchresearch for my trip, so I knew that it wasreallyfancy, and I don’t have anything to wear, so I told him no.” She chuckled. “You should haveseenhis face. I’m not sureanyoneever tells him no.”
Edward Tristan Sterling III was a world-renowned surgeon with a God-complex who came from old money, so yeah, he probably doesn’t hear no often…or ever.
“I started to walk away, and he called out after me, but I was so embarrassed I just kept walking. I tried to put it out of my mind and finished my afternoon sightseeing to get ready for my dinner alone at Bouillon Pigalle. When I called to make a reservation weeks before my trip they said their policy only allowed reservations for parties of two or more. So my plan was to get there by seven and hope I got a table. Well, when I got back to my hotel, the staff were acting funny. They had these strange expressions and as soon as I walked in they rushed up to me to let me know there’d been a change to my room. I asked why, and they said it was taken care of and they’d moved my things.”
Oh boy. Frankie could see where this was going.
“You are not going to believe this!”
Yeah, she probably was. Eddie was a millionaire. Upgrading a room was not a big deal to him.
“The porter showed me to my new room, and it was the presidential suite! And you’ll never guess what wasinmy room when I walked inside?”
“What?” Frankie played along despite the pit in her stomach.
“Two dozen roses, a gown, I don’t even know how he knew my size! Oh, and a handwritten card asking me topleasemeet him at Le Cinq at nine p.m. Sooooo, guess what?”
“You went,” Frankie stated the obvious.
“I went!” Her mom confirmed ecstatically. “Eddie called around to every hotel to find out which one I was staying at! Can you believe that?!”
No. No, she couldn’t. She would bet her life—her literal life—thatEddiehad not called. Eddie had someone else who worked for him make the calls.
“That was the fourth day of my vacation, and we haven’t been apart since.”
“Wow.”
“We wanted to tell you and Tristan together. That’s why we stopped over in New York on our way to the Caribbean.” She gasped. “Oh, I didn’t tell you! We’re going to the Caribbean! But when we got here, we found out you’re not in New York. Tristan said you’re out of town.”
Frankiewasout of town. She’d gotten on the first plane out of JFK after discovering an X-rated home video compliments of a shared iCloud account starring Tristan and his client, who also happened to be international supermodel Emmanuelle. Not “Emmanuelle Last Name.” Just “Emmanuelle.”
Why was it that any model who was only known by one name was somehow hotter?
Frankie had seen the video by accident—or, rather, by the unfathomable, algorithmic cruelty of Apple’s “Memories” feature, which had ambushed her in the middle of a client meeting at Tristan’s firm with an unwelcome push notification and pixelated image of Tristan’s very recognizable back tattoo in between Emmanuelle’s thighs.
She’d booked a flight to California that same hour, shown up at her Yaya’s doorstep unannounced, and had since spent three weeks fixing things around her one-hundred-year-old house, drinking copious amounts of wine, binge-watching TV,and, when necessary, replying to her mother’s daily texts with a strategic mix of emojis and plausible lies.
Why hadn’t she come clean to her mom and told her that she and Tristan broke up? Because her NSFW discovery occurred the day after her mom left for vacation. Not just any vacation, a six-week European vacation her mom had been planning and saving for her entire life. But one she would have abandoned if she’d learned Frankie and Tristan had broken up. There would not have been anything Frankie could have done or said to prevent her mom from getting right back on a plane and returning to the States.
She wasn’t exaggerating about it being her mom’s lifelong goal. Cora Costas, born Coraline Caputo, had a tough—that was putting it mildly—homelife. She started working at twelve, babysitting for extra cash while cleaning houses after school and offices at night with her mom, who owned her own cleaning service with two employees, herself and her daughter, but Frankie’s grandma never paid her mom.
When her mom was fifteen, she got a “real job” at a grocery store, kept babysitting, and got another part-time job at a tanning salon. She worked all four part-time jobs, only getting paid for three, to save up for her overseas adventure and was on track to go when she graduated from high school, but fate, true love, or serendipity intervened.
Cora’s parents split up, and she moved with her mom to Hope Falls the summer before her senior year of high school. The first day she was in town, she walked into Sue Ann’s Café to apply for a job at the exact same moment Frankie’s dad, Frankie (who she was named after), was walking out. They ran into each other…literally. They collided. Her dad always maintained that when he heard the bell that rang above his head, he thought it was from heaven because he was looking at an angel.
