Free The Seven Turns of the Snail's Shell: A Novel by Mj Roë

him. Thus Charles-Christian had grown up to be a self-centered man, focused on his own world. A man with no personal life.
    He raked his slightly graying hair as he thought now about his life and the people he had known. He had always been serious, responsible, focused on his profession, but prone to quick decision (not always the right one, his inner voice now told him), and he had pushed people out of his life, shut them out, especially the one woman he had loved. His lips became tight, and his upper lip thinned. Anna. She too was gone from his life.
    As the helicopter put down on the helipad at Orly Airport, driving sleet hit the windshield. Charles-Christian wondered where he would go from here in his life. It was not even certain whether he still had a position at the hospital.
    “Watch yourself, Doc,” Geoffrey told him as they shook hands good-bye.
    Charles-Christian nodded and climbed out, wondering what the man had meant by that.
    He would soon find out.

CHAPTER 16
     
    T he pilot announced their descent into Strasbourg Airport.
    “ Mesdames et Messieurs. Nous commençons notre descente pour l’aéroport de Strasbourg.”
    Anna looked out the window. It was eight o’clock in the evening, dark. Light rain mixed with snow was pelting the outside pane. The plane bounced around in the turbulence caused by the Vosges mountains she knew they were flying over. Inside the dimly lit cabin, passengers shifted nervously in the narrow seats. A child across the aisle was crying, and his mother bounced him up and down, trying to get him to calm down. An elderly woman in the seat ahead tried to tell the mother that it was because the baby’s ears were closed in the descent, but the mother ignored her. A young man with a small dog stuffed in his backpack sat in the seat next to the elderly woman, and she would periodically lean over to pet the dog and coo, “Oooh, mon petit bebéee !”
    All of this irritated Anna. After so many hours traveling, the seat felt uncomfortable, and her head ached. The air was stuffy. All she wanted was a bed.
    Mark was asleep in the seat next to her. His long legs barely fit against the seat, and his blue jeans, navy blue CAL sweatshirt, and flashy Nike jogging shoes made him look more like a college kid than an attorney on his way to meetings at the seat of the European Union. For a man who selected his weekend wardrobe in Los Angeles as carefully as he selected his business attire, this look clearly was out of character. She smiled. He looked so sexy in his sleep. What did sexy mean, anyway? She had pondered that word in her writings, used it indiscriminately, too. She could never decide whether it was an individual interpretation or a cliché, but it was definitely a word that was overused in romantic fiction. Whatever, Mark looked sexy to her tonight. She had hardly seen him in the past couple of weeks. He had been on the East Coast for several days and had been working long hours since arriving home. They had hurriedly packed and headed to Los Angeles International for their direct flight to Paris via Air France.
    “I have some good news,” she had told him over champagne and dinner as the huge 747 soared over North America. “My agent, Harry, arranged for my last novel, An Unexpected Turn , to be translated into several languages. The French version is ready for distribution. I’ll finally be able to do a book signing in Paris, if he can schedule it while we’re over here. He’ll call me if he’s successful.”
    Harry had not been happy with the news of a delay in her latest book, Pas de Deux , when they met at Spago in L.A. for lunch on Friday two weeks before. A rotund man with a bulbous red nose, he had worn a pin-striped suit with a garish, bright green tie and looked more like he was a clown auditioning in Hollywood than a literary agent. He had the personality of a joker, too, but he was in reality a serious agent who was known in literary circles, and he had done well by her