Page 28 of Past Lives
“Daddy, will we fall?” Flora asks. Her voice is low, but not frightened so much as scientifically curious, like a child requesting the physical limits of Ferris wheels.
“No one ever falls from here,” I say, and squeeze her hand. “This is the safest place you can be in Paris.”
Maya, beside me, mouths, That’s a damned lie, and I have to bite back a grin.
We surface at the top. The wind is a living, clever thing, whipping Fiona’s hair into a soft furor and plucking at Flora’s scarf. The city unfolds beneath us like a living map—centuries of slate rooftops and copper domes stretch to the horizon. Streets cut geometric patterns through neighborhoods. The Seine curves through it all, silver and ancient, binding Paris like a ribbon on a gift.
Fiona turns her head, eyes shut against the wind, and asks, “Why did you bring us here, Daddy?”
I rest my chin on her small shoulder and watch the old city pulse under us. “Because the first time I came to Paris, I didn’t believe in anything. Not love, not fate, not all those stories people try to sell you. But then I met your mother, and the city made more sense, like the puzzle pieces fit.” I look at Maya, who is pretending an interest in the railing's geometry, her lips curled to keep a smile from breaking through.
“What does that mean?” Flora says, incredulously.
Maya laughs, then softens, kneeling to their level. “He brought you because he wanted you to see the Tower for the first time with a man who loves you forever. Not just today. Always.”
The girls giggle, embarrassed and delighted, and Fiona says, “Ew, Daddy!”
Maya slips an arm around me, and I am certain the five of us—Maya, the twins, the city, and me—are welded together, a thing both delicate and indestructible.
The cold finally wins its battle against our resolve. Fiona tugs at my sleeve, her lips blue-tinged, and I feel the guilt of a father who's pushed wonder past comfort. We descend in the elevator. The journey is briefer than our ascent, as if Paris is eager to reclaim us from the sky. Back on solid ground, the twins spot a café with steaming cups in the window. Even Maya, who normally enforces a strict no-sugar policy after mid-afternoon, nods her surrender when Flora points hopefully at the menu's promise of café crème.
We walk with the girls. They narrate their impressions of the Tower in a blur of superlatives and mispronounced French. Flora’s accent is a war crime, but she wields it with toddler confidence. She orders, “une pain su la choclat avec le muuuuuuch sucre, s’il vous plaît,”from the bemused vendor, who gives them each two.
We eat at a bench under the trees, and Fiona falls asleep against Maya’s shoulder, a smear of cocoa on her lips. Flora builds a sticky figure out of discarded pastry flakes and napkins, and proclaims it her "petite Tour Eiffel." Maya photographs it for posterity, which is her method of winning every argument about sentimental clutter.
After, we stroll back to our hotel—the Grand Palais, a Belle Époque masterpiece overlooking the Champs-Élysées. Inside, crystal chandeliers drip from coffered ceilings. Staff in tailored uniforms materialize at a glance. The twins, revived by sugar, race across the lobby's Persian carpets, their giggles echoing against marble columns. As I scoop Fiona up before she collides with a Japanese businessman, she wraps her arms around my neck and whispers, "Will we live here now?"
“No. This is just for the next few days.” I set her gently on the floor, and she races Flora down the corridor, squealing.
In our suite, Maya shepherds the girls into pajamas and brushes their teeth with the brisk authority of a woman who has written itineraries for Mongolian yurts and volcanic islands. Flora’s toothbrush is pink, Fiona’s blue, in a color divide that Maya pretends to despise but makes peace with for the sake of expedience.
When the twins are finally down—two limp bundles in adjacent single beds, their faces identical in sleep—I step onto the balcony with Maya, who is already pouring the wine.
The cold blankets Paris, but we’re dressed for it. The balcony gives us a distant view of the Tower. Maya’s beauty has deepened over six years; every story behind every scar, I know and love them all.
Beyond us, the Tower erupts in an hourly explosion of light, the kind that makes children gasp and grown men reconsider their faith in the ordinary, as if even the mundane world is capable of magic when illuminated like this. Maya clinks her glass against mine and says, “To us.”
“To us.”
I watch the Tower's lights shimmer across centuries of rooftops and find myself asking, “Do you think we finally got it right?"
Maya takes a long sip of wine, and I see her mouth working around an answer. She glances inside, at the girls, curled together like two halves of a secret. “I think we were supposed to end up together. Even if it took a long time. Even if it hurt.”
I rest my hand over hers, twining our fingers together. “I want to spend every lifetime like this,” I say. I have never been poetic, but this, like the city, seduces me into trying.
She laughs, but not unkindly. “You say that now, but wait until they’re teenagers. You’ll be begging for a new incarnation.”
I kiss her, long and slow. She tastes of wine and memory. The Tower glitters behind us, its golden lights in her hair and eyes. The girls sleep; the city is ours—distant traffic and café chatter rising from below our balcony.
In the morning, the twins will wake at an ungodly hour, their matching bedheads and sleep-creased cheeks demanding morepain au chocolat, more carousel rides, more stories about gargoyles, more Paris. Maya and I will give them all of it, as much as our hearts and wallets can endure, watching their small fingers point at everything new.
But tonight, there is only us.
Chapter 19
Somewhere in time: the Future
The terminal stretches outlike a vast, gleaming cavern—half-empty in that peculiar limbo between dawn and mid-morning. Time seems to hover, suspended between tearful goodbyes and anxious hellos. Mira Bond perches on the edge of a navy-blue seat at Gate 27, her cardigan draped over her knees, a quiet restlessness tightening her posture, betraying the tension just beneath the surface. The rim of her untouched coffee leaves a perfect brown circle on the napkin beside her. Her slender fingers move across the cream-colored page of her leather-bound sketchbook, movements deliberate yet distracted, as if sketching offers only momentary escape from her thoughts. Strangers’ faces emerge, like old photographs found in an inherited attic box, her eyes lingering on each as a flicker of longing and uncertainty passes over her features.
