Free Confessions: The Paris Mysteries by James Patterson Page B

huge gut punch, one that just about laid me out. I swallowed a few times, took in a lot of air and let it out, and then said, “Better than hearing from James, C.P. I
saw
him.”
    There was more shrieking in my right ear, and this time, I held the phone away. Truth is, I didn’t want to have to talk about James, and that was why I hadn’t called her right away.
    “You really saw him?” C.P. asked. “Oh my God. Tell me everything.”
    I was evasive at first, edging around the corners of the thing. Then I started talking for real, telling her almost everything—and couldn’t stop until the end of the entire sick story when I found James’s note on the floor of his room.
    “Tell me word for word what he wrote,” C.P. said, “and don’t tell me you don’t remember. You have a photographic memory. We both know that.”
    So I swallowed and then quoted the letter, including the last line James had written:
    “Don’t ever doubt that I love you. And always will.”
    Those last words were like shards of glass in my throat. I started crying, and C.P. was snuffling, too, and I’d like to say that by the time I hung up the phone, I felt better.
    I could
say
that.
    But it would be a damned lie.

I know it’s hard to believe,
but I loved my parents. Because even though they did heinous things to us, I’m pretty sure—no, I’m
absolutely
sure—that despite their craziness, they wanted us to become extraordinary.
    They just didn’t realize they were also turning us into freaks. Or maybe they believed the end justified the means.
    The pills they gave me were supposed to hone and heighten my analytical mind, and at the same time, they were designed to quash pesky, distracting, irrelevant emotions.
    I didn’t feel much—anger, sadness, joy—and I didn’t know what I was missing.
    When I met James, our love pushed through what years ofexperimental drugs had blocked. No wonder I was thunderstruck. To the core. This was first love of the epic kind.
    Meanwhile, my mother convinced her biggest client—Royal Rampling—to invest heavily in Angel Pharmaceuticals, which was going bankrupt. It was as though a ginormous sinkhole had opened up and the family business fell through.
    Mr. Rampling lost fifty million dollars because of my parents, and he had sued the Angels for every nickel.
    After I’d said good-bye to C.P. on the phone, while I was washing my face and putting my clothes away, I thought about my reunion with James in Paris, the absolute best and worst twenty-four hours of my life. I remembered how he had reeled me in—only to smash my heart into subatomic particles.
    I had always assumed that, like me, James was a victim of his terrible father.
    Was it possible that James was not a victim? Had he set me up to hurt me as payback for what my parents had done to his family? Had he snuck into my heart under the cover of love and purposely shattered it?
    Had James Rampling been my enemy all along?

After my hilarious but emotional conversation
with C.P., and my postconversation depression, the week whizzed by, drama free. No word from James. No fights at school. No trouble from Harry’s heart or Gram Hilda’s apparently merciful board of judgment. And no one died.
    Then we had a half-day school holiday—yay!
    While Harry went to a studio to practice piano and Monsieur Morel drove Jacob and Hugo to watch a soccer camp practice game, I made a call. Then I dressed in skinny pants and heels and a fierce narrow-waisted checked jacket, and I pulled my hair back in a braided band. I put on makeup, too, for the first time since the Sisters of Charity got hold of me.
    I caught a cab at the taxi stand down the street, and twenty minutes and eight kilometers later, my royal-blue Fiat taxi slowed to a crawl along a charming, narrow street in Le Marais.
    We stopped in front of a two-story powder-blue building with high, sparkling windows and gold letters on the awnings over the glass-and-brass front doors.
    We were at the