There, in person, she would tell Peter the truth.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The plane hummed to a crescendo and air began to close on Kelsey’s ears. She watched the cement meadow of Kansas City International speed past her, and wiggled her toes in her boots. They were cleared for takeoff. As the ground fell, her stomach dropped with it. She clutched the armrests tight and let her neck unhook, her head lolling on the hard cushion, hoping to sleep. She wanted time to pass quickly.

“Are you going all the way to Paris, or will you stop in Toronto?” the man next to her asked.

He had a French accent behind the veil of his breath. Kelsey had forgotten the way air could get trapped in airplanes. She hadn’t been on a flight since the Maxfield family trip to Costa Rica. Michelle had hated flying, and she hated sitting next to Kelsey. Every word out of her chatty mouth, her sister told her as she had put enormous headphones over her ears, was a new blanket of carbon.

“Paris,” she answered the man politely, and turned back to the shrinking scenery, grateful that Peter had booked her a window seat.

Now that they were gaining altitude, the pilot’s voice came on the speaker.

“Anywhere else in France?” the man asked, over the announcement, and she turned again. His eyelids drooped over black eyes and, below those, dark crescents in his skin. He had been handsome once.

“No,” she said, short.

“Why do you come to Paris?”

“To visit,” she replied.

“A boyfriend?”

Kelsey smiled, closemouthed, and said nothing. She tried to hide her face.

“It is a boyfriend, I can tell.”

“’Allo, passengers, this is your captain speaking. My name is Rhett du Pont, and your cocaptain is Nisse Greenberg. Sunny skies over the Midwest. We are expecting a clear flight all the way from Kansas City to Toronto, and from there we should land in Paris on schedule.”

As the pilot went on, the woman in the aisle seat leaned over and gave Kelsey a wry smile, her face framed in auburn waves.

“He gets loopy on Dramamine,” she said. “But he can’t fly without it.”

“My dad has to take that, too,” Kelsey said, thinking of her giant father splayed into the aisle, fast asleep, while Kelsey, Michelle, and her mother giggled at his snoring.

“But I am right,” the man said, waving his hand. “She is thinking of a young man when she looks out the window.”

“Sorry,” the woman muttered again. “He’s not usually like this. He typically just mutters to himself about the crossword puzzle.”

“Of course I don’t do this often! This is a special case. You must tell us about him.”

Kelsey picked at the magazines in front of her, wondering how she could ever explain. He isn’t my boyfriend, but I do care about him. She thought of how Peter had sent her a recording of himself saying something in French before she left, stumbling over the words as he read them from a dictionary, thinking she could understand them. But it hadn’t really been meant for her.

“There’s nothing to tell.” Kelsey shrugged.

The man stage-whispered as he gestured toward the auburn-haired woman. “My wife claims she is not romantic. She pretends she is just a practical Midwestern American woman like you. But she knows, too.”

The woman rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

“Knows what?” Kelsey said, glancing at both of them.

“You’re in love.”

“No.” She snorted. “No. I’m just…” She felt her eyes drift. In love. She tried to shrug it off, but for some reason, all she could think of was Peter on-screen, strumming a chord. “I’m just seeing a friend.”

“You’ve got quite a smile on your face for someone who is just a friend.”

“Leave her alone, sweetheart,” the woman said.

“It will happen in Paris,” she heard the man saying to his wife. “She will have to kiss her friend in Paris, yes?” Kelsey closed her eyes, pretending not to hear.

“She’s trying to rest,” the woman said lightly. “Let her be.”

When Kelsey awoke, the couple was fast asleep. She will have to kiss her friend in Paris! She ran her finger over her mouth, and tried to picture Peter’s against it. It could happen, couldn’t it? They would probably be quite bad at it, considering they had never kissed before. Considering Peter was expecting someone who wasn’t her.

She wouldn’t let him, of course. She would pull him aside and do what she had set out to do. But as she put a movie on the in-flight screen to pass the time, Kelsey noticed, for some reason, she had goose bumps.

Kelsey wandered in a daze through customs at Charles de Gaulle, her mind still at rest, replaying snatches of dialogue from one of the movies she slept to as she crossed the Atlantic. You are, and always have been, my dream.

Soon she was rolling her suitcase through a linoleum tunnel, a new stamp on Michelle’s passport, to the smell of bleach and the buzz of overhead lights.

The tunnel opened into the international arrival gates, and Kelsey gasped. The giant, endless archway looked like the main hall of a castle, each groove composed of infinite windows, dropping fifty feet from ceiling to floor into miles of red carpet. Thousands of people pulling suitcases streamed backward and forward, passing shops she knew but now seemed different, as she caught French and Italian and German requests for Starbucks and sandwiches.

“Michelle!” she heard a man’s voice cry out, and Kelsey closed her eyes tight. This was Paris. There could be many Michelles here.

“Michelle!” she heard again, close, and she turned around.

Peter, taller than she remembered, jogged from the center of it all. He wore a tan army-issued T-shirt and fatigue pants. Before she could get out the calm, honest “hello” that she had practiced, he was hugging her so tight her feet left the ground, and he spun her around, her face in the clean scent of the crook of his shoulder, and then, without ceremony, he set her down and kissed her.

He tasted like salt and then nothing; there was only the feeling of his lips on hers. Kelsey couldn’t help but start to smile. When he let go, she was speechless, too aware of everything around her to say anything, let alone a rehearsed speech.

“It’s so good to see you,” Peter said, his blue eyes now hitting her harder than they ever could through a screen.

“You, too,” Kelsey replied.

“What is ‘welcome’ in French?” Peter asked her.

“It’s—” Kelsey started, breathless, pretending to fiddle with her suitcase as they walked. “Bienvenue,” she said, grateful that she had remembered the pilot’s words.

“Bienvenue,” he said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kelsey should have pulled away, but now it was too late. And she was in shock, listening to him talk about their plans for the evening as they strolled through the busy airport. She tried to remove the taste of him from her lips by licking them, but, of course, it just intensified.

Her body seemed to be vibrating with every beat of her heart.

Two more men in fatigues, canvas bags on their backs, greeted them at the entrance to the train into the city. She would have to break the news later, at the hotel. Now wasn’t the time.

“You found her, I see,” the shorter redhead said, and held out his hand. “Remember me?”