Chapter 38

Paris in February is exactly as cold as she said it would be.

You know this because you are wearing the coat.

The coat she got you — dark, long, beautifully made, the kind of coat that makes everything you wear underneath it look intentional — and you are standing outside Charles de Gaulle airport in it with your breath visible in the cold air and your bag on your shoulder and Paris happening all around you for the very first time and Alysa beside you watching your face with the expression of someone who has been looking forward to this moment for weeks.

“Well?” she says.

You look at the grey February sky.

At the signs in French.

At the taxi rank and the buses and the general extraordinary ordinariness of being somewhere completely new.

“It’s cold,” you say.

She laughs.

“It’s Paris,” she says, like that answers it, which maybe it does.

The hotel is Phillip’s choice — practical and good, close to the venue, the kind of place that has hosted enough competition trips to understand what athletes need. Clean and warm and efficient.

Except.

Alysa has done something to the room.

You don’t notice immediately — you come in and put your bag down and look around and it takes a moment before you see it. Small things. A bunch of flowers on the table by the window, pale and soft, the kind that look like they were chosen rather than grabbed. Two good chocolates on the pillows — not the hotel’s standard ones, something wrapped differently, something she brought. A card, propped against the lamp.

You pick it up.

Her handwriting.

First of many. Welcome to Paris, baby. — A

You hold the card and look at the flowers and feel something bloom in your chest that is so warm and so specific that you have to sit on the edge of the bed for a moment just to have somewhere to put it.

She’s in the bathroom doorway watching you.

“Alysa,” you say.

“It’s nothing,” she says.

“It’s not nothing.”

“It’s flowers and chocolate.”

“And a card.”

“Cards are nothing.”

“This card is not nothing,” you say, holding it up.

She looks at the ceiling briefly in the way of someone pretending not to be pleased. “Let’s go get food,” she says. “Phillip has a briefing at seven but we have two hours.”

She takes you to a small restaurant fifteen minutes from the hotel.

Not the kind of place you’d find in a guidebook — the kind of place you find because someone who loves a city told you about it, because it has been eaten in and returned to and recommended in the particular way of somewhere that has earned it. Small and warm and lit by candles even in the early evening, the smell of good food and wine and old wood, and a waiter who seats you at a corner table by the window that looks out onto a Paris side street going about its Paris business in the cold.

You sit across from her and look out the window and feel — something you don’t have the exact word for. Not just happy. Something larger than happy. Something that contains happy and also Paris and also her and also the coat and the card and the flowers and the fact that she has been planning this, quietly and carefully, in the margins of competition preparation, because that is simply how she loves.

“Thank you,” you say, across the table.

“For what?”

“For all of it,” you say. “The room. This place. The coat.” You pause. “For bringing me.”

She looks at you.

“I wanted you here,” she says simply. “That’s all.”

Phillip and Massimo are at breakfast the next morning.

Massimo is already talking when you arrive — something about the ice conditions at the venue and whether the resurfacing schedule is adequate — and Phillip is listening with his coffee and his clipboard and the expression of someone who has been having this conversation for twenty years and has made his peace with it.

They both look up when you appear.

Massimo’s face does the thing.

“Paris suits you,” he tells you, before you’ve sat down, with great conviction, like he’s been waiting to say it.

“Thank you Massimo,” you say.

“Doesn’t it, Phillip.”

Phillip looks at you over his coffee. “Yes,” he says simply.

Which from Phillip, in Paris, over competition breakfast, is practically a speech.

The morning is Alysa’s — practice at the venue, ice time, the serious focused work of a competitor preparing for something that matters. You go with them, sit in the stands with Massimo while Phillip works with her on the ice, and you watch her in a different way than you’ve ever watched her before.

Not across a rink.

Not from the third row of a competition.

From close up, from the stands of an international venue in Paris, watching her do the thing she has done her entire life with the full weight of who she is.

She runs the programme twice.

The second time she skates from the inside — you can tell, you always can — and Phillip stops her after and says something quiet and she listens and nods and there is something in the exchange that is so private and so theirs that you look away for a moment, not wanting to intrude on it.

Massimo, beside you, is watching with his chin in his hand.

“She’s ready,” he says quietly. Not to you specifically. Just — to the air.

“She is,” you agree.

He glances at you.

Smiles.

Says nothing else.

The afternoon is yours.

Phillip sends them both off — rest, eat, don’t think about the programme — with the authority of someone who has learned that rest is preparation and means it, and Alysa takes your hand outside the venue and looks at you with an expression that is competition-focused and also, underneath it, completely present with you.

“Where do you want to go?” she asks.

“Surprise me,” you say.

She does.

She takes you everywhere.

Not the obvious places — or not only those. A bookshop with a green front and English books in the window that she knows you’ll want to go in and does not rush you through even though you spend forty minutes in it. A bakery on a corner that has the best croissants she has ever had outside of the one place at home, which she makes you try and is right about, which you tell her and she accepts with great satisfaction. A bridge with a view of the river in the grey February light that is so quietly beautiful that you both just stand on it for a while without needing to say anything about it.

Small things.

Deliberate things.

The way she does everything.

The Eiffel Tower is her big gesture.

She pretends it isn’t — pretends you’ve just ended up there, pretends the timing of arriving at dusk when the lights are coming on is coincidental — and you let her pretend because it’s sweet and because the tower at dusk with the city going amber around it is one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen and you want to just be in it for a moment before you tease her about the pretending.

You stand beside her and look up.

The lights come on.

Paris does what Paris does in February at dusk, which is look like a painting that hasn’t been painted yet.

“Okay,” you say.

“Okay?” she says.

“Okay, this is the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.” You glance at her sideways. “I’m including the bench hearts.”

She looks extremely pleased and is trying not to show it.

“We just ended up here,” she says.

“You planned this.”

“The city is laid out in a certain way—”

“Alysa.”

“—and if you follow certain streets—”

“You planned the dusk,” you say.

A pause.

“I checked the sunset time,” she admits.

You laugh — properly, warmly — and she laughs too and then she reaches into her jacket pocket and takes out a small box and holds it out to you and the laughter settles into something quieter, something that looks at the box and understands immediately that this is different from the flowers and the card and the restaurant.

This is something else.

You take it.

Open it.

Two pieces.

A bracelet first — delicate gold chain, fine as anything, with a tiny charm on it that catches the last of the dusk light. You look closer at the charm and your breath does something — it’s a small figure skater, mid-spin, arms extended, no bigger than your thumbnail, and it is so specific and so chosen and so her in the giving of it that you feel your eyes warm immediately.

And beneath it, nestled in the box — a necklace. The same fine gold chain, longer, with a pendant that is a small crescent moon, simple and perfect and the kind of thing you would have chosen yourself if you’d known to look for it.

You look at them for a long moment.

The city going on around you. The tower lit behind you. The cold air and her breath beside you and these two small gold things in a box in your hands.

“Alysa,” you say.

Your voice comes out very soft.

“The bracelet is you,” she says quietly. “The spin. What you were doing when I knew.” She pauses. “And the moon because—” she stops. Finds it. “Because you’re always there. Even when I’m not paying attention. Like the moon. Just — always there.”

You close the box carefully.

Open your arms.

She steps into them and you hold her there on a bridge in Paris with the Eiffel Tower lit behind you both and the Seine going on below and the cold February air and the box in your hand and you think —

I’ll take all of it.

You said that on a Thursday evening on her sofa and you meant it and you mean it more now and you will mean it more still, you think, every Thursday and Wednesday and day that comes after this one.

All of it.

Every single bit.

She puts the bracelet on your wrist herself.

Standing on the bridge, the box open between you, her fingers careful with the clasp in the cold. The figure skater charm catches the tower lights when she’s done and you both look at it on your wrist for a moment.

Then she takes the necklace and you turn and she fastens it at the back of your neck, her fingers warm against your cold skin, and you look down at the crescent moon against your collarbone and feel it there, small and golden and permanent.

You turn back around.

She looks at you.

At the bracelet and the necklace and the coat and the city behind you.

“Hi,” she says softly.

“Hi,” you say back.

You kiss her on the bridge in Paris as the tower does what the tower does and the city goes on around you in its February way and it is cold and it is golden and it is everything and it is not even close to everything, it is just the beginning of everything, it is just Part One of a story that has so many parts still to go.

Later, at dinner — the four of them, because Phillip and Massimo materialise at the restaurant at seven with the energy of people who were always going to be here — Massimo notices the bracelet.

He grabs Phillip’s arm.

Phillip looks.

Looks at the bracelet.

Looks at Alysa.

Alysa is looking at the menu with complete serenity.

Massimo opens his mouth.

“Don’t,” Alysa says, without looking up.

He closes it.

Opens it again.

“It’s very—”

“Massimo.”

“I’m just saying it’s very—”

“Order your food.”

“Beautiful is what I’m saying—”

Phillip puts his hand over Massimo’s very gently and Massimo subsides and picks up his menu and the table settles and across it you catch Phillip’s eye and he looks at the bracelet and then at you and does the almost-smile and looks back at his menu.

Which from Phillip, in Paris, is everything.