Chapter 84 Overthinking

Chapter 84 Overthinking


Daniel goes quiet for a long moment.

The red light changes to green.

The car moves.

"What happened?." he asks quietly.
His voice is soft and nothing like the decisive sharp tone he usually sounded like.

"Nothing that concerns the competition." I shrug, curling even further against the car window.

"I am not asking about the competition." he says.

My nose twists up, “I don’t care.”

His lips draw into a thin line, "But I do care, so tell me."

I draw my lips into my lower teeth sucking in air as my teeth dragged in.

"I found out something today."

"I should probably have seen the signs earlier. I did not see because I was not looking properly.”

“No, that’s not it.” I sigh.
I unfurl my legs from underneath my butt, my face still turned to the window.

“I saw it but I thought that ---” I paused again.

“That what? It’s okay to take your time.” Daniel said.

I blinked, my head bopping up and down, “I started thinking that I was over thinking about everything. Something has happened to me before.”

“My eyes fall onto my hands in my thighs.

“So, then I started thinking about other things. I told myself that the signs were just me overthinking. Then the old things and the new thing got mixed up together and I got tired.”

“Very tired, It was just very tough. And I stopped paying attention to where I was going."

"Something about someone." Daniel raises an eyebrow.

"Yes." I say.

"Jean-Pierre Renaud." he says.

I go still against the window, turning sharply to him faster that his car was going right now.

"How did you ….?" I begin

“Know?” He completes.

"It is a large city. It is also, in the ways that matter, a small one. I have been here many times and I know people here. I hear things." He pauses.
"I do not need you to confirm or deny. I am just saying what I know."

I bite my lower lip and look through the windshield.

"Right." I say.

I chuckle, an embarrassing red coloring my cheeks.
“This is embarrassing.”

He glances at me, “That’s not worth wanting to die for.”
I say nothing.

“Jean-Pierre would be onto another lady by the end of the month. You weren’t just important to him as you thought you were.”

I feel a pit drop in the middle of my stomach.

I scoff, “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Daniel nods, a serious look on his face, “Jean-Pierre is the one with the commitment problem, not you. It doesn’t matter if it’s you or another lady, he’ll be off looking for another before the end of the month.”

“Hmm.”

I throw him a sideway glance, fighting the smile that was struggling to appear on my face.

The Daniel Ashford was comforting me?

Elise would keel over if she knew this.

"He is not worth half of a baguette." Daniel continues speaking.

I press my lips together, struggling to keep my sad and pained face on.

"I know that." I say.

"Do you though? Well, it’s all good." he says.

"I know it here." I say.
I press two fingers against my temple.
"Getting it from my brain to my heart is a different journey on its own.”

He says nothing for a moment, just curls his finger.

The car turns.

I recognise the street.

Hotel Beaumont is at the end of it.

"The personal matter." he says.

"Yes." I say.

"You said it was a personal matter." he says.

"It is." I say.

"And it is handled?." he asks.

I look at the hotel entrance coming toward us.

At the doorman who has learned my face.

At the revolving door and the lobby beyond it and the lift that goes to the fourth floor and the room with the white duvet and the ceiling I have been staring at for weeks.

Is Daniel Ashford taking an interest in my personal life?

Why?

But why?

Why would he?

"It is handled in the sense that it requires no further action from me today. Beyond going to my room."

"And tomorrow." he says.

"Tomorrow is Stage 5." I say.

"Tomorrow I focus on the work."

He nods.
The car slows down, pulling up in front of Hotel Beaumont.

The doorman steps forward.

I reach for the door handle.

"Sera." he says.

I stop my hand still on the handle.

My face still turned away.

"What?" I ask.

"These things that are mixing up." he clears his throat.

"The old ones and the new one. Do not let them become the same thing. They do not belong in the same room."

I look at the door.

At the handle in my hand.

At the doorman stepping aside to make space.

"Okay." I mutter under my breath.

"They are not the same thing." he says again.

Like he knows I said okay without hearing it.

"I hear you." I say.

"Good." he says.

I open the door.

\----------

I am out of the car before the door is fully open.

Not gracefully.

Not with any of the composure I have been assembling since the cobblestones.

I am out of the car the way you are out of a car when the car has stopped and your body has decided that the amount of time it has spent in an enclosed space with a specific person has reached its limit and the only available next action is to not be in that space anymore.

"Thank you." I say.

Over my shoulder without stopping or looking back.

The doorman says good afternoon.

I say good afternoon.

I go through the revolving door.

I cross the lobby.

I do not look at the reception desk.

I do not look at the seating area where three other competition candidates are having a conversation I am not part of and do not want to be part of.

I look at the lift.

I press the button.

The lift comes.

I get in.

The doors close.

I look at my reflection in the lift doors.

At the face that is in the state it is in.

At the woman looking back at me in the mirrored surface of a hotel lift in Paris on a Friday afternoon.

She looks tired.

Not sleepy tired.

The other kind.

The load-bearing kind.

"I know." I say.

To her.

To the reflection.

The lift reaches the fourth floor.

The doors open.

\---

The room receives me the way the room has been receiving me for weeks, with the white duvet and the desk and the notebook and the window that looks out onto the Paris street below, and I close the door behind me and I stand with my back against it for exactly three seconds before my legs make a decision and that decision is the bed.

I cross the room.

I fall.

Face first.

Into the pillow.

And I let it happen.

All of it.

Everything I have been holding since the gap between the café and the neighbouring building, since the same words in the same voice on a different woman, since the cobblestones and the Bugatti and the brown Italian leather shoes and be good I won't eat you and this is our thing, everything I breathed through in the car with my face turned away and my hand on the glass and my ghost reflection in the window, all of it comes out into the pillow in the specific loud hot ugly way of tears that have been waiting for a private space and have finally been given one.

I cry for Jean-Pierre.

Not for losing him.

For what choosing him said about me.

For the measuring I did, against the lowest available benchmark, and called it wisdom.

I cry for the small quiet thing I breathed through.

For the notebook entry I underlined.

For the eyes open I told myself I had.

I cry because I am in Paris competing in an international architecture competition on my own merit and I submitted a stage four concept that Roe said was extraordinary and I have a half demerit point and a stage five brief waiting in my notebook and a mother who answers on the first ring and a father who yells Sera-bear across oceans and I have all of that and I still managed to stand in a narrow quiet street on a Friday afternoon and ask myself if the problem is me.

I cry because the question arrived.

Not because I believe the answer is yes.

But because the question arrived.

After everything.

After the second chance and the smooth hands and the yellow duvet and the rebirth and the one year of rebuilding.

The question still arrived.

And I do not know what to do with a question that arrives after everything you have done to make it unnecessary.

I cry.

The pillow receives it.

The room does its quiet thing around me.

Outside the window Paris keeps being Paris.

And I lie on the bed in the white duvet room on the fourth floor of Hotel Beaumont and I cry until there is nothing left to cry and then I lie there in the after of it, that specific flat quiet that comes when the body has done what it needed to do and has nothing left to spend, and I stare at the fabric of the pillow two inches from my face and I breathe.

Just breathe.

In.

Out.

Not through anything.

Not past anything.

Just breathing.

Because breathing is what comes after.

Always.

Regardless of what preceded it.

Breathing is what comes after.

And that, I think, staring at the pillow fabric in the after-quiet of a hotel room in Paris, is not nothing.

That is, in fact, everything.