Page 26 of Wait for Me

“Of course.” Marie reached for his hand.

Jonas jumped up and down.

“Go to the spa or something,” Marie told Mrs. Ping. “We’ll see you at dinner.”

“But I’m paid to do this.”

Even as the nanny protested, Marie could tell that she would welcome extra time off.

“Don’t worry. When I go home to France, you’ll have your hands full twenty-four seven. Enjoy your rare days off, yes?”

Nodding, Mrs. Ping started tidying up the stateroom.

“They have stewards for that,” Marie told her.

“I know.”

“Don’t clean the bathrooms while you’re trying to get something done. Go to the spa. I’ll pay for it.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Marie.”

And then mother and son skipped happily out of the stateroom, toward the elevator.

Holding hands with an exuberant and chatty child was something Marie had missed for several years. The last time she had spent any time alone with her son, he had been in diapers.

Chatty, he had not been.

She wondered if Jonas had taken after Logan more.

As for Marie, she had always been the quiet, observant one. Preferring to listen rather than talk, her own personality had served her well in her profession.

The one Logan doesn’t know about.

Chapter Fourteen

Sitting at the Lego table with Jonas, across from the hijab-wearing woman—who had introduced herself through her assistant as simply Aliyah with no last name—Marie was certain that the Middle Eastern mother had more to say to her, but either her English was not so good or she wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers.

“Do you speak French?” Marie asked, trying to build some sort of bridge.

Aliyah shook her head.

That told Marie that Aliyah understood her question in English.

She glanced at the assistant sitting next to Aliyah. It was the same woman who had accompanied her and the two kids. Their facial features were alike, and Marie had almost mistaken them to be related.

Aliyah had called the woman herassistant, but left it at that. Marie wanted to ask what kind of assistant she was, but she did not want to raise any suspicion about her own curiosity.

For all she knew, there was nothing going on beneath the surface, although in Marie’s mind, Aliyah’s assistant behaved more like a handler who had censored Aliyah’s words and phrases when she translated on the fly from Arabic to English. Perhaps to protect her? Or was it something else?

It was a not a good thing for the two ladies that Marie could understand Arabic.

Aliyah’s two boys and Jonas decided to leave the Lego table to build a megastructure on a giant round rug mere feet away from them, where several other kids were playing. They didn’t have the same language barriers as the adults. They spoke Lego, and they spoke playtime.

Marie could now cast her vote for their country of residency. It could be the United Kingdom, but it could also be any of the European countries, whose citizens spoke English more British than American. One thing she was quite sure of: the boy did not speak Australian English.

“I left my camera in my room. Could you get it for me?” Aliyah asked her assistant in Arabic. “I want to take photos of Abdul to send to his father.”

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