The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley Read Free Book Online

lost a couple of times. Finally, I find a bakery, the sign painted emerald green with gold lettering— BOULANGERIE —and a striped awning. Inside the walls and the floor are decorated with patterned tiles and it smells like burnt sugar and
     melted butter. The place is packed: a long queue doubles back on itself. I wait, getting hungrier and hungrier, staring at
     the counter which is filled with all sorts of things that look too perfect to be eaten: tiny tarts with glazed raspberries,
     eclairs with violet icing, little chocolate cakes with a thousand very fine layers and a touch of what looks like actual gold
     on top. People in front of me are putting in serious orders: three loaves of bread, six croissants, an apple tart. My mouth
     waters. I feel the rustle of the notes I nicked from Ben’s wallet in my pocket.
    The woman in front of me has hair so perfect it doesn’t look real: a black, shining bob, not a strand out of place. A silk
     scarf tied around her neck, some kind of camel-colored coat and a black leather handbag over her arm. She looks rich. Not
     flashy rich. The French equivalent of posh. You don’t have hair that perfect unless you spend your days doing basically nothing.
    I look down and see a skinny, silver-colored dog on a pale blue leather lead. It looks up at me with suspicious dark eyes.
    The woman behind the counter hands her a pastel-colored box tied with a ribbon: “ Voilà, Madame Meunier .”
    â€œ Merci. ”
    She turns and I see that she’s wearing red lipstick, so perfectly applied it might be tattooed on. At a guess she’s about
     fifty—but a very well-preserved fifty. She’s putting her card back into her wallet. As she does something flutters to the
     ground—a piece of paper. A banknote?
    I bend down to pick it up. Take a closer look. Not a banknote, which is a shame. Someone like her probably wouldn’t miss the
     odd ten euros. It’s a handwritten note, scribbled in big block capitals. I read: double la prochaine fois, salope .
    â€œ Donne-moi ça! ”
    I look up. The woman is glaring at me, her hand outstretched. I think I know what she’s asking but she did it so rudely, so
     like a queen commanding a peasant, that I pretend not to understand.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    She switches to English. “Give that to me.” And then finally, as an afterthought, “please.”
    Taking my time about it, I hold out the note. She snatches it from my hand so roughly that I feel one of her long fingernails
     scrape at my skin. Without a thank you, she marches out through the door.
    â€œ Excusez-moi? Madame? ”the womanbehind the counter asks, ready to take my order.
    â€œA croissant, please.” Everything else is probably going to be too expensive. My stomach rumbles as I watch her drop it into
     the little paper bag. “Two, actually.”
    On the walk back to the apartment through the cold gray morning streets I eat the first one in big ravenous bites and then the second slower, tasting the salt of the butter, enjoying thecrunch of the pastry and the softness inside. It’s so good that I could cry and not much makes me cry.
    Back at the apartment building I let myself in through the gate with the code I learned yesterday. As I cross the courtyard
     I catch the scent of fresh cigarette smoke. I glance up, following the smell. There’s a girl sitting there, up on the fourth-floor
     balcony, cigarette in her hand. A pale face, choppy dark hair, dressed in head-to-toe black from her turtleneck to the Docs
     on her feet. I can see from here that she’s young, maybe nineteen, twenty. She catches sight of me looking back at her, I
     can see it in the way her whole body freezes. That’s the only way I can describe it.
    You. You know something, I think, staring back. And I’m going to get you to tell me.

Mimi
    Fourth floor
    She’s seen me. The woman who arrived last night, who I watched