But how far was she willing to go to prove the point and demonstrate that to him? What if he lost her for years? And it wasn’t fair of Natalie to expect him to take that risk when Heloise was living three thousand miles away and he only saw her for a few days. He told himself that Natalie didn’t understand, she didn’t have kids. But somewhere in his heart of hearts he knew how unfair he was being to her and hated himself for it. And for now, it looked like Natalie hated him too. She had shut off all communication with him and didn’t even answer his texts of abject apology and undying love for her. As long as he kept her a secret, she no longer believed a word he said or wanted anything to do with him for now. He hoped that she’d calm down by the time he got back.
He tried to have a good time with Heloise in Paris anyway, but the time was short and stressed. She was trying to organize the tiny apartment they had found, and he helped her furnish it at IKEA in a day. She and Francois were nervous about their internships, so they were tense and argued constantly. And there was a general transport strike halfway through his trip, which meant no buses, no subways, no taxis, no trains, and the airport was closed. The city was a tangled nightmare of private cars and bicycles so people could get to work.
In spite of that, the Ritz was as pleasant as ever, and he took the kids out for several meals, when they weren’t squabbling with each other. But he got very little time alone with his daughter, and his worries about Natalie weighed heavily on him during the entire trip. And once again, this would have been totally the wrong time to tell Heloise about her. Heloise was much too nervous about her job at the George V and would have reacted badly. It was almost a relief to leave the day before she was to report for work. She promised to call him and let him know how it was going, and he wished both of them good luck.
It was strange leaving her with Francois. Heloise was moving on to her own life, but she hadn’t released her father to have one of his own. He thought both of the women in his life were unreasonable, and he was exhausted when he got back on the plane to New York. The transport strike had ended the day before. And his plane was crowded to the gills with people whose flights had been canceled during the strike. And the final blow was that his luggage never made the flight.
The car picked him up, and he rode to the hotel, happy to be back. It hadn’t been an easy trip. He tried calling Natalie from the car on the way in. Just as he had for the past week, he got her voice mail and nothing else. He called her office, and they said that she was out. She was nowhere. And wherever she was, she still wasn’t talking to him. And when he got to his office, he discovered why. Jennifer handed him a letter that she said that Natalie had dropped off for him earlier in the week. It was marked personal so she hadn’t opened it, and the envelope was thick. He strode into his office and closed the door behind him so he could read it in peace. He had hardly said a word to Jennifer when he walked in except that he had lost his bags. He had asked the concierge to call the airline to try and find them.
The letter told him everything he didn’t want to hear. That she loved him passionately, with her entire being, and would have been happy to spend the rest of her life with him, but she was an honest woman, not a dirty little secret to be hidden from a nineteen-year-old. If he didn’t love her enough to tell his daughter about her, after seven months, then there was clearly no place in his life for her. She was not going to allow him to humiliate her any longer by hiding her existence and denying his relationship with her. She said she sympathized with his problem and his fears about his daughter, but if the sixteen years he had devoted to her exclusively were worth anything at all, then his daughter would forgive him damn near anything, surely the fact that he was in love with a woman who loved him and who would have been kind to his daughter too. At the end of the letter, Natalie said she wished him well, told him it was over, and asked him not to call her again. She signed it simply, “I love you. Natalie.” And that was it. Over and out.
