Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know - Samira Ahmed Page 0,80

Alexandre can be businesslike, I can, too. “Here’s the deal. We put things behind us and pretend we’re normal people trying to solve a centuries-old literary mystery, okay?”

I need to leave the near past in the past, so we can spend today searching for the long-ago past. Compartmentalize. Save my messy feelings for another day. It doesn’t feel logical, but somehow it makes sense to me.

Alexandre grins, and the smile reaches his tired eyes. “Yes. D’accord. We are one-hundred-percent normal people. Okay, tell me why we’re here again?”

I let out a breath. This is okay. This is going to work. I have to imagine that my ex-boyfriend isn’t wandering around Paris right now after what might have been our last goodbye. I have to pretend that the cryptic puzzle I’m trying to solve to find a missing nineteenth-century woman isn’t leading me on a treasure hunt with a descendant of Alexandre Dumas who Insta-stalked me and who I like making out with. Sure. No problem. People undersell the importance of denial as a coping mechanism.

“Byron sailed from Lisbon to Constantinople on his Grand Tour—basically a gap year for rich British men in the nineteenth century,” I explain. “That’s when he could’ve met Leila. Byron was also a letter-writing fiend, and I’m betting he wrote to Leila. If she inspired two of his poems, she must have been important to him. Harvard published some volumes of his letters—he wrote over three thousand. They’re not digitized, but there’s a set of the books here.” I point to the doors.

The American Library in Paris is exactly like any library in the States—except that it’s two blocks from the Eiffel Tower and a boulangerie with heavenly pain au chocolat. Everything is in English, and the furniture is utilitarian library chic. Even the air-conditioning is set at the normal American level of near-frigid—I feel like I’ve stepped through a portal and am suddenly back home, and that sensation is oddly comforting.

I copied the call number from the website last night, so I head straight to the lower level. Alexandre follows.

“It looks like you know your way around this place. You’ve been here before?” Alexandre asks as I search for the right shelf.

“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that an American in Paris in possession of mediocre French reading skills must be in want of English books to read on vacation.”

Alexandre wrinkles his forehead.

“Oh, sorry. It’s a reference to Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice?”

“Ahh, oui. A wildly popular book about repressed feelings. How British.”

I laugh out loud, and it warrants a couple turned heads from studious library patrons. Maybe this denial thing can work. Sadly, it’s all too familiar. We slip between the stacks, and I run my finger across the spines, looking for Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, 1788–1824. I’m focused, but not so determined that I don’t feel the nearness of Alexandre as he follows closely behind me. I can’t completely deny his existence. Or my attraction to him.

Found it. I pull a worn blue book from the shelf. Its cover is encased in plastic, and it has that faint stale library smell. Judging from the creaseless spine, barely anyone has cracked it open.

We find an empty table tucked into a corner in the back of the room. I open the book and flip to the index. All the letters are listed by name of recipient. I run my finger down each column—twenty pages, two columns on each page. No mention of a Leila. “Dammit. I thought there would be something.” I slam the cover shut. Dead end. Without a connection between Leila and Byron—a real, provable one, I have nothing but another hollow theory.

“Let’s not give up yet. Weren’t you the one wearing a Nevertheless, She Persisted T-shirt the other day? Maybe we can still find a glimpse of Leila in some other letter,” Alexandre says as he gently takes the book from my hands.

He’s right. I can’t give up yet. Maybe I’m down, way down, but I’m not out. Besides, Leila is counting on me.

Alexandre reopens the book to the title page. “1788 to 1824. He didn’t live long, did he?” he asks before turning to the index.