A Perfect Paris Christmas - Mandy Baggot Page 0,97

wants me to exist at all.’ She gave a piece of brioche to Bo-Bo. ‘People turn away from people like me. They think if they cannot see me then I do not exist. Not all of them are bad people. They just do not want people like me on their conscience.’

Her words rained down on him. He had thought the same thing over and over so many times before. His heart ached for her but it also ached for himself too. He had been so lucky. He’d had Ferne back then. Her kindness, their friendship, the bond they shared that never seem to acknowledge their difference in class. It had been everything.

‘Listen to me, Jeanne,’ Ethan said, putting his hands on her shoulders. ‘Never apologise for being here, understand?’

‘Did you?’ Jeanne asked him, swallowing her mouthful of food.

‘Did I what?’ Ethan breathed.

‘Ever apologise for being here.’

Sucked back into a reverie he would rather forget, Ethan recalled the mantra he and the other children had been made to chant at the orphanage. Be seen not heard. Speak only when spoken to. Respect elders. Think not of yourself. It had been drummed into every child until it was the very first thing Ethan thought about on waking and the last thing that drifted through his mind as he prepared to go to sleep. It had broken him. Eventually, he had decided to leave the roof over his head for a life on the street where nothing was guaranteed, not even his next meal… It had scarred him, there was no doubt about that. But he had moved beyond it. With help from Ferne. One person’s belief in him had made all the difference.

‘I know you are like me,’ Jeanne continued as Bo-Bo began to sniff around a stall offering crafts made from old off-cuts of wood. ‘Or you were like me, in some way.’ She bit into more brioche. ‘People like us know each other. You watched me in the hotel, trying to get the chocolates from the Christmas tree. Perhaps I was not subtle enough, but really I think you noticed me because you had been in the same situation yourself once.’

He put an arm around Jeanne’s shoulder, steering her out of the path of a man on a bicycle. Bo-Bo popped his snout out from under the stall. ‘I was like you,’ Ethan admitted as they continued to walk. ‘I never knew who my parents were. I was left outside an orphanage when I was a baby.’ He sucked in a breath. ‘I was there for ten years until I could not stand it anymore.’

‘Where did you go?’ Jeanne asked.

‘Well,’ Ethan began, moving towards a glazed ‘shopfront’ with armchairs, dining chairs and all manner of seating outside it. Some of the chairs would not have looked out of place in a banquet hall, others seemed like they once belonged in a school. ‘When I was eight, I snuck out of the orphanage one day and I met a girl…’

‘Oh, please,’ Jeanne stated. ‘Not a romantic story. I cannot stand it. It is enough with the making love hearts with your eyes at Keeley.’

‘No,’ Ethan said. ‘It is not a romantic tale. It is a tale of friendship and… family.’ He thought about Ferne, but also he thought about Silvie and Pierre and… Louis. They had been the only family he had known and despite still feeling he was a little bit of a cuckoo, they had been there for him. ‘I had two years of visiting a very nice home in the suburbs and being taken on outings you could only dream of.’ He smiled at Jeanne. ‘With food you definitely dream of.’ He plumped down into one of the armchairs and spread his fingers over the fabric on the arms. It was rich, sumptuous green velvet but with small threadbare patches that seemed only to enhance its appeal. ‘But after each visit, I would go back to that freezing, soulless place where the people who were supposed to care and look after made it clear I was no better than something that was stuck to the sole of their shoe, and I would long to be anywhere but there.’

‘You lived on the street?’ Jeanne asked, sitting down in the chair opposite, Bo-Bo deftly leaping up onto her lap.

‘I lived on the street,’ Ethan answered with a nod. ‘I spent weekends with the family that took me out for visits, but I never moved in under their roof.’ Perhaps by