Free The Expats by Chris Pavone Page B

roaming around the streets of the central arrondisements .
    “Bonjour, madame.”
    Kate can feel the young woman assessing, evaluating Kate’s shoes and handbag and jewelry and haircut, sizing up the whole package in a glance. If there’s one thing these Parisian shopgirls know how to do, it’s to quickly figure out who’s a legitimate customer versus who’s just browsing, or at best walking out with the cheapest thing in the joint. Kate knows she passes the test.
    Kate looks around the large-format prints in the front room, semi-abstract landscapes: rigid rows of agricultural fields, repetitive facades of modernist office buildings, undulating ripples in bodies of water. They could be anywhere in the world, these landscapes.
    She dutifully looks at each photo for a few seconds before moving on, into the next room, this one filled with beaches. There’s a young couple in here, talking at full volume in Spanish, with a Madrid accent.
    Kate takes out her phone.
    She had managed to pretend that she’d never see this woman again. But Kate was never really convinced. In fact, she has always known, in the back of her mind, the opposite: she’d see this woman again, exactly like she just did.
    Is this Dexter’s past, catching up with him?
    She hits a speed-dial button.
    Or her own?

7
    Kate spent her Paris liberty in the Marais. Dexter agreed that she was entitled to see some of the cities on her own. Travel wasn’t fun if you didn’t get to see or do what you wanted; it was merely a different type of work, in a different place.
    In Copenhagen two weekends ago, Kate had spent her allotted hours wandering through downtown boutiques. Now in the Village St-Paul she bought a set of old tea towels, an engraved silver ice bucket, and an enameled saltbox; housewifely, antique-y French things. She also purchased a pair of sturdy rubber-soled canvas shoes, to pad her soles against the stone streets of Luxembourg, of Paris. Of cobblestony old Europe.
    The sky was bright blue overlaid with tall puffy clouds, Indian summer, seventy degrees. Or twenty-one degrees, is how she should be thinking of it.
    Kate was still getting used to the idea of strolling around a foreign city with absolutely no concern that someone might, for any of a variety of reasons, want to kill her.
    She zigzagged back toward the river, to rendezvous with her husband, her children, on the Ile St-Louis. After four hours without them, she missed them; she couldn’t stop picturing their faces, their smiling eyes, their wiry little arms. She spent so much of her new life wanting to get a break from the kids, then the rest of her time impatient to get back to them.
    She arrived at the brasserie, ducked inside, didn’t see her family. She took a seat outside, squinted into the sun. She saw them coming over from the Ile de la Cité, with Notre Dame towering behind, gargoyles and flying buttresses, the boys running on the pedestrian-only bridge thatseparated one island from the other, weaving in and out of people and bicycles and leash-free Jack Russell terriers.
    Kate stood, called out, waved. They ran to meet her, hug her, kiss her.
    “Mommy, look!” Jake thrust out an action figure, a black-clad plastic Batman.
    “Yah!” Ben yelled, too excited to contain himself. “Look!” He had a Spider-Man.
    “We found a comics store,” Dexter admitted. “We couldn’t resist.” He sounded apologetic, ashamed to have bought the children crappy plastic products licensed from American corporations and manufactured in Southeast Asia.
    Kate shrugged; she was past criticizing how anyone got through a day with children.
    “But we also went to a bookstore, right, boys?”
    “Yeah,” Jake agreed. “Daddy got us The Small Prince .”
    “Little.”
    “Right. It’s quite a little book, Mommy.” Quite the little authority.
    “No. The book is called The Little Prince . At Shakespeare and Company.”
    “Yeah,” Jake agreed, again. He was agreeable. “When can we read it?