Page 101 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

It all bodes ill.

“Then by all means,” he invites me. “Do that.”

I realize that I’m holding my breath. But I worry that if I try to do something about it, I’ll make it worse. I’ll start hyperventilating, maybe, and collapse on the floor, and that’s highly unlikely to help me out of this situation that shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

And in any case, it won’t solve this problem. Neither will working myself up into hysteria.

“Do you think that I won’t?” I ask, and try to inject a note ofbemused astonishmentinto my tone, as if I can’t believe that he would question such a thing. The way I would if he turned up pretending to be Tess.

He only stands there before me for a moment, as if deciding what to do next, and his head tilts slightly to one side.

I tell myself this would be easier if he didn’tlookthe way he does. If he didn’t make me think of fallen angels,Paradise Lost,and all kinds of epic poetry featuring demigods and legends. If the hint of those things didn’t seem to gather about him like a thunderstorm and infuse every part of him with that same brooding intensity.

I’m not a fan of how all that thunder and the flashes of lightning echo in me, either.

It shouldn’t be possible that any one man can have this effect on me. I detest it. I don’t understand it—and part of me doesn’t want to.

But he doesn’t seem inclined to leave.

And it occurs to me then that I don’t know how to make him without causing scenes and forcing questions I don’t want to answer.

Or worse yet, risking him telling the world that I’m a fraud.

“Perhaps it’s time that you and I come to terms, Annagret,” he says quietly.

I decide that another thing I really don’t like is my name in his mouth.

“What terms are there to come to?” I demand, but something is happening to me even as I try to pretend otherwise. My pulse is too strange. My blood in my veins feels fluttery and odd, and there’s a sort of quickening deep inside of me, seeming to heat me up from within. I am certain I don’t want to know whatthatis. “You seem to think you can walk in here and pretend to be a man who everybody already knows, and while I admire the audacity, you must have known it couldn’t work.”

I try to lookconcerned,like perhaps the reason he didn’t know is because he’s obviously delusional…but I’m too polite to say such a thing out loud.

He does not look appropriately chastised. “Here’s the interesting thing about Luc Garnier. Everyone knows who he is. And everyone can describe him when asked, and always in the most glowing terms.” I try not to react to that compliment—because that’s what it is. A compliment on my ability to sell a story and watch it take flight. But he’s not done. “Except it is never thepersonthey describe. It is never what the man himselflookslike. It is a list of accomplishments. A retelling of feats of detection and investigative prowess.”

There’s a hint of that brief smile, though I would not call it an expression of joy. Not on him. “I looked all over for a picture of this man. And if you can believe it, none exist.”

“Mr. Garnier is famously camera shy, the better to allow him to actually do his work,” I say with a slight frown, the way I always do. “It would be difficult to conductprivateinvestigations if he couldn’t actually be private, wouldn’t it?”

This usually gets people to back off, but this man does not look remotely mollified.

He shakes his head. “Not one picture, in all the world, of a man so famous that you need only say his name for people to respond as if he is Poirot. Sherlock Holmes. Remington Steele. Do you know what all of those famous sleuths have in common?”

I know what he’s getting at but I have no intention of admitting it.

“None of them do any real-world investigating,” I say with a nod as if I think that’s what he meant. “The very thing I would be doing right now if I weren’t busy trying to peaceably eject a con man from my boss’s office.”

“Perhaps you can solve this mystery for me,” he says as if I haven’t spoken. “Given that I have scoured the earth and can find no one who has actually seen the great man in person—”

“Aside from me,” I interject.

He inclines his head. “Is it any wonder, if you are the only witness to this man, that some have been forced to conclude that he, too, is a work of fiction?”

“When you’ve told me you are him?” I ask through my teeth. “This must be a new kind of fiction, with two men playing the same part. I’m not sure I’m familiar with the conventions of the genre, but I have to tell you, I’m not that interested in the premise.”

His eyes gleam at that. “Aren’t you lucky, Annagret, that despite all the confusion and these many years of remaining out of sight and thus creating comment, I, the great Luc Garnier himself, am not fictional at all?”

And he smiles at me again. Wider this time.

Fatuously, to my mind.

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