things she ever told me, in Boulder, was that the day she was born was the worst day of your life. She told me you said that to her.”
“That’s not true.”
Was it possible that this was the stone in Claire’s shoe? That it wasn’t about Fiona’s affair, the divorce, at all? Her hand was throbbing, taking all the ache that should have been in her head, her gut.
“She grew up knowing she’d ruined your life,” Kurt said. “What do you think that does to a person?”
Fiona stood, too, and Jake took a step into the room, like he was getting ready to dive between them. “First of all, I never said that to her. It was something Damian told her, in the middle of the divorce, to poison her against me. Second, yes, that was one of the worst days of my life, although lord knows I’ve had lots of them, but it had nothing to do with Claire. This isn’t some huge secret. It was a terrible day, a shitshow. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want her, and it didn’t change the way I raised her.”
“Hey. I’m not saying—I remember that day too. I was—”
“You don’t think that’s more than a little fucked up, that you remember the day your girlfriend was born?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.” He held his hands up, an unattackable Buddha. “I’m trying to help you out here. You want to make things right with her, this is the swamp you have to wade through, okay? Claire is—she’s not a happy person. I don’t think she’d ever have been happy, no matter what you did. It’s like bad astrology or something. She’s just a fundamentally angry human. You weren’t a bad mother.”
But why did it hurt so much, if it wasn’t true?
“Listen, I need to ask you to get out of here before my wife gets home. She’s not a fan of the Claire drama.”
“Does she know Claire?” Fiona said.
Kurt opened his mouth but then stopped. He’d caught her trick.
She said, “Can you at least pass a message on?”
He shook his head slowly. She had fully expected him to say yes. “I’m barely in her good graces. I bring this to her, and maybe she takes it out on me. If she finds out I talked to you, let you in . . .”
Jake said, “What about an email address?” Fiona didn’t mind him talking; it was time to team up.
Kurt went to the door, opened it for them, though Fiona didn’t move. “Here’s what I can give you: Everyone’s okay, everyone’s safe. You want to leave me your number? I can promise I’d call you if anything bad ever happened.”
“You’ll tell me if she dies? How thoughtful.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Look, what about the little girl? Is she yours?”
Kurt put an enormous hand not on Fiona’s shoulder but on Jake’s, and steered him effortlessly through the doorway. Like guiding a toy boat. Fiona quickly fished a pen and her old boarding pass from her purse, wrote her number down.
She said, before she walked out the door, “You’re a father. Think about what this feels like. Use your imagination. I know you used to have one.”
* * *
—
Out on the street, Jake wrapped Fiona in a hug, pressed his beard and lips to her forehead. He said, “I can tell you’re a good mom.”
Fiona worried he would ask where she was going, ask if he could tag along, but she told him she needed to be alone—she was well practiced at shaking men—and she got in a cab and asked the driver to take her to Montparnasse. She didn’t want to go back to Richard’s, she knew that much, even though her hand felt like it was touching a live wire and she’d forgotten to bring the painkillers. “Promise me you’ll practice self-care,” her shrink had said to her before she left, and she didn’t imagine Elena had meant fucking vagrant former pilots. She could have a nice dinner; that was one thing she could do.
She wound up at La Rotonde, the place Aunt Nora used to talk about, the place, if Fiona remembered right, where Ranko Novak lost his mind. Or was it Modigliani? In any case, she sat inside where it was warm, and she ordered soupe à l’oignon gratinée and wished she weren’t surrounded by so many English-speakers. There were no scruffy, drunk artists, no absinthe-drinking models, no great expat poets.
Well, how would she know? Maybe that table in the corner was full of