Chapter 9 - The Garden of the Luxembourg
The spring came to Paris that year not with a tentative thaw, but with an explosion of white chestnut blossoms and golden light washing over the Medici Fountain in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
I walked through the gravel paths on a Tuesday morning, wearing a cream trench coat from my own boutique, my dark hair falling loose around my shoulders in the gentle breeze. In my leather tote bag lay the keys to a four-room apartment on the Quai Voltaire, its tall French windows looking out over the Louvre, purchased three days earlier with the proceeds from the Rue de Grenelle leasehold.
Beside me walked Marcus.
He had left Delta in December. When I had finalized the acquisition of the commercial gallery space, I needed an operations manager who understood logistics, security, and the absolute, unshakeable importance of treating people with dignity.
I had called Marcus at his home in Jonesboro, Georgia, and offered him three times his airline salary to move to Paris and run the administrative office of The Concourse Group.
He carried a baguette wrapped in white butcher paper under his arm, his face tanned from three months of walking along the Seine, looking at the stone palace with the wide, uncomplicated joy of a man who had escaped the fluorescent purgatory of Gate T-4.
"You got a letter this morning, Valerie," Marcus said, pulling a folded envelope from his coat pocket. "From Alabama. FCI Aliceville."
I stopped beside the stone balustrade where the orange trees were set out in their wooden tubs for the season.
The envelope was white, thin, and bore the stamped red warning of the Federal Bureau of Prisons: INMATE CORRESPONDENCE - CENSORED.
The handwriting was Eleanor’s.
It had lost its grand, looping flourishes. The ink was thin, blue ballpoint, the letters cramped and trembling against the cheap lined paper.
I didn't open it.
I stood there in the warm spring sunlight, listening to the laughter of the French children sailing their small wooden boats across the octagonal pond, watching the sparrows bathe in the spray of the fountain, feeling the crisp stone of the balustrade beneath my palms.
I knew what was inside that envelope.
It would contain fifteen pages of rehearsed, theological manipulation. It would speak of family duty, of Christian forgiveness, of the coldness of her cell, of her aching joints, of Danielle’s loneliness, of the tragedy of a family shattered by a "petty misunderstanding over an airline seat."
It would ask for money.
It would ask for an affidavit of mitigation for her parole hearing in nineteen months.
It would ask for me to return to the kitchen table, kneel on the floor, and allow them to place the yoke back across my shoulders.
I took the envelope between my thumbs and forefingers.
I didn't tear it with anger. I didn't rip it with spite.
I folded it once. Twice. Four times.
I walked over to the dark green municipal trash bin beside the gravel path, dropped the paper inside, and let the lid fall shut with a dull, hollow click.
May you like
"Valerie?" Marcus asked, watching me with his calm, steady eyes.
"The account is closed, Marcus," I said, smiling into the warm, fragrant wind that was blowing off the gardens. "There are no outstanding liabilities."
