Chapter 2 - Crossing the Atlantic
The red-eye flight to Paris was a blur of exhaustion and adrenaline. By the time we touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport, the morning sun was casting a pale, golden light over the French capital. Talia slept for most of the flight, her head resting heavily on my shoulder, her fingers occasionally twitching as if she were still sketching the botanical glasshouse arrangements in her sleep.
When we arrived at our small, boutique hotel near the Seine, the clerk greeted us with warm smiles and a complimentary upgrade to a suite overlooking the river. I collapsed onto the plush bed, my bones aching from the sheer weight of the emotional fallout I had left behind in Illinois.
Talia stood by the French balcony, pulling the sheer curtains back to watch the boats drift down the gray-green water.
“Mom?” she asked, her voice hushed. “Are they still calling you?”
I pulled my phone out of my bag and turned it on for thirty seconds. The screen instantly flooded with seventy-three missed calls and fifty-four text messages. Corrine was in full-blown panic mode. The Glass House venue management, it turned out, did not operate on family loyalty; they operated on legally binding contracts and valid credit card authorizations. When my card had been frozen and the $15,200 charge declined, Bree had given my mother an ultimatum: pay the balance with another card immediately, or the venue reservation would be canceled entirely.
And because Corrine didn’t actually have $15,200 of disposable cash—she preferred spending *my* money while hoarding her own retirement funds—the grand VIP gala was on the verge of collapsing.
*“Clara, you are destroying your sister’s life!”* Corrine’s latest voicemail screamed, her voice cracking with theatrical hysteria. *“The caterers are here! The ice sculpture is melting! How could you humiliate our family like this over a teenager’s birthday party?”*
I stared at the phone, felt a cold, calm wave of detachment wash over me, and turned the device off completely. I slid it into the hotel room safe, locked it, and put the key in the zipper pocket of my suitcase.
“No one is calling us anymore, sweetie,” I said, walking over to the balcony and wrapping my arms around my daughter’s shoulders. “We are entirely unreachable.”
Talia looked up at me, a tentative, fragile smile touching the corners of her lips. “Can we go get croissants?”
“We can get as many croissants as humanly possible,” I replied.
For the next four days, we lived inside a protective bubble of foreign streets, art museums, and bakeries that smelled of butter and burnt sugar. We walked along the Seine until our feet blistered. We sat in the Luxembourg Gardens watching children sail wooden boats in the grand basin. Talia pulled out her sketchbook and finally began to draw again—not the emerald dress or the botanical glasshouse, but the soaring arches of Notre-Dame and the strange, beautiful architecture of the Pompidou Centre.
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She wasn't talking about the party. The betrayal still lingered in the air between us, a ghost of family dysfunction we had crossed an ocean to escape, but here, under the autumn skies of Paris, it felt distant, small, and utterly irrelevant.
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