paris.
1927. PARIS.
The stairs to Enid’s attic creaked like they were confessing secrets, always in the same places — third from the landing, sixth near the turn. She had learned to step lightly, out of habit more than courtesy. No one cared if she came home drunk or barefoot or bleeding; her neighbors were artists, or drunks, or both, and generally too involved in their own dramas to notice someone else’s. That suited her just fine.
The room itself was the sort of place romanticized in films and forgotten in real life: sloped ceiling, cracked window panes, and floors that bore the stains of a dozen past tenants. Paint — hers, mostly — smudged into the corners like old bruises. An easel tilted sideways near the radiator that never quite worked. A chipped enamel sink. The mattress on the floor was more stuffing than spring, and the blanket had once been white, but no longer remembered that.
From the window, if she leaned far enough out to risk falling, she could glimpse the top edge of the Eiffel Tower. That was enough. You didn’t need the whole monument, just a reminder it existed.
Enid rubbed at the charcoal smudge on her wrist with a rag, succeeding only in spreading it further. Her gloves were drying on the radiator — lace, cream, fraying at the edges — still damp from the rain. She’d been sketching tourists near the Seine, swapping quick portraits for francs and bits of conversation. A woman had cried at the sight of her own face rendered in five strokes. Enid didn’t know what to make of that.
She had a few coins in her pocket, enough for bread tomorrow and maybe wine if she skipped lunch. That would do. It always did.
Paris in February was gray without being somber. The city wore its dampness like an overcoat, never apologizing for it. Rooftops glinted with slate, and chimneys coughed out tired smoke. Down on the streets, the cafés would be filling — men in fedoras shouting at each other over the news, women blotting lipstick into napkins, the scent of bitter coffee. Somewhere, someone was playing a violin. Somewhere else, a dog was barking like it had forgotten why.
Enid didn’t mind the noise. It made her feel anonymous. It let her believe, for a few moments at a time, that she had always belonged here.
She pulled her coat tighter, fingers stinging where the fabric grazed a healing scrape. The fight had been brief — two boys, both taller than her, both drunk enough to think they could shove a girl down an alley and come out heroic. She’d left one with a split lip and the other holding his side like something inside had cracked. Then she’d run. The gloves covered the worst of it. No one asked questions in Montmartre, least of all when you dressed like you painted portraits for food.
She’d heard of the cabaret from a girl she’d kissed once, in the back of a wine shop. The girl had said it like a secret, lips brushing Enid’s neck as she whispered the address. The name hadn’t stuck — something violet, maybe — but the street had. Rue de l’Épine. Past the church, down the alley with the crumbling well. A red door without a sign.
Enid hadn’t gone yet. It had lived at the back of her mind for weeks, waiting.
But tonight, she had pulled on the gloves still damp with radiator heat, found her coin purse and her notebook and a pencil so short it left graphite on her palm. Her easel was left leaning, the mattress rumpled, and the window ajar.
She didn’t lock the door.
Let someone take it all. None of it mattered. Not the chipped bowl in the sink, not the jar of brushes going stiff in the corner, not the scarf looped over the bedpost. Let the ghosts of the attic argue over the rest.
She had absinthe money and lace gloves and the name of a street half-remembered.
Rue de l’Épine wasn’t marked on most maps. You had to know what you were looking for, and even then, the city seemed to fold itself in strange ways once you left the main roads. Enid wandered past the shuttered bakery with the faded sign, past the old man who fed pigeons from a paper bag without looking at them. A left turn that felt wrong, then a right she nearly missed, and there it was — the alley. Narrow, uneven, lined with buildings that leaned like old drunks helping each other home. One had ivy climbing its brick in crooked lines, seemingly indecisive of whether it wanted to live or die.
The red door stood where the girl had said it would. No number. No knocker. Just worn paint and a brass handle dulled by time. A curl of music seeped from somewhere inside — low, crackling like a record played too many times. Enid hesitated, not because she was afraid, but because she wasn’t. She wasn’t anything just then. Just cold, and curious, and not ready to go home.
Inside, the hallway was too narrow for comfort. Wallpaper peeled like sunburn, and the floor groaned under her boots. A man with half-moon glasses sat behind a podium near the end, smoking something that smelled floral and faintly illegal. He didn’t ask her name. Just nodded once and pushed open the curtain behind him.
The room beyond didn’t announce itself. It emerged slowly. Dim and low-ceilinged, with smoke curling from a dozen scattered cigarettes and glasses sweating on every table. The walls were painted the color of drying roses. No stage, not really — just a raised platform shoved into a corner where a man in a tweed jacket was tuning a trumpet. Laughter came in waves, muffled and unhurried. Someone was reading aloud from a tattered book at a table near the bar, words drifting like leaves down a river. French. Maybe. Or not. Enid didn’t speak much of it. Didn’t need to. No one here seemed interested in making sense.
She slipped into a seat at the back, where the table wobbled and the candle had burned down to a puddle of wax. A woman in a felt hat came by with a tray and a look that asked nothing. Enid handed over two coins. The glass arrived soon after — pale green, sweating, trembling slightly as the floor vibrated under someone’s stomp.
She let herself sink into the cigarette haze. Her gloves itched. She didn’t take them off.
The first performer was a singer, a boy no older than nineteen with a voice like bruised silk and a nosebleed waiting to happen. He sang about trains and missing people who never wrote back. The audience didn’t clap so much as exhale. Enid sipped her drink and felt her jaw unclench.
Then a figure stepped onto the platform without introduction, without a microphone, without even looking at the room.
Black coat. Straight collar. Hair pinned back in braids so neat they looked like they might bite if touched. She carried a small book in one hand and a cigarette in the other, though it never touched her lips. Just let it smolder as she spoke. English, but not quite. The vowels had a foreignness that slipped and slid, never landing anywhere permanent. Her voice didn’t rise or fall, just pushed forward like a tide — measured, relentless, unbothered by reaction.
The story she read wasn’t about love or war or longing. It was about a boy who turned into a tree, slowly, from the inside out. His mother fed him sugar cubes and kept pretending she didn’t notice the bark under his skin. No one in the story survived. Not even the tree.
Enid didn’t move the whole time.
When the woman finished, she didn’t bow. Just stepped off the platform, walked past the bar, and disappeared behind a curtain Enid hadn’t noticed until then.
She sat frozen long enough for her drink to drip onto her gloves. Then, without deciding to, she stood. Left a coin on the table. Walked toward the curtain as though someone had called her name.
No one stopped her.
The curtain was heavier than it looked, worn velvet that caught against the lace at her wrist as she slipped through. On the other side: silence, almost total, except for the distant clatter of a glass behind the bar and the faint creak of old floorboards adjusting to the cold. The hallway opened into what might’ve once been a storage room, long since repurposed. One dim lamp buzzed from a crooked wall sconce, flickering in and out. Stacked crates lined the far wall, stamped with names of liquor brands she couldn’t pronounce and probably couldn’t afford.
She stood there longer than she meant to. Not knocking. Not calling out. Just standing, like maybe she’d misunderstood the invitation — if it had even been that. Then she heard it. A chair shifting. The soft scrape of a page turned.
“You followed me,” came the voice. Not quite a question. Not quite surprised either.
Enid blinked, letting her eyes adjust. There she was. The woman from the platform. The black coat was folded over the back of a mismatched armchair, revealing a narrow frame in a high-collared blouse, sleeves rolled to the elbow. She sat at a small table littered with torn paper scraps, most covered in handwriting so cramped it looked like the words were trying to escape each other. The cigarette still burned between her fingers, untouched. She hadn’t poured a drink. She didn’t seem to need one.
Enid found her voice, but it arrived too late to be useful. “I liked your story.”
The woman looked up. Her expression didn’t change.
“It wasn’t meant to be liked.”
Enid stepped further into the room, unsure if she was being invited or tolerated. Her eyes caught on the pages. Some had been rewritten, others crossed out entirely, ink slashed through like old debts. “Do you live here?”
“No,” the woman said. “But sometimes I don’t leave.” A pause. Then, more gently, “You’re American.”
It wasn’t an accusation. Not quite curiosity either. Just a fact stated to fill the space.
“So are you,” Enid said, before realizing she wasn’t sure that was true.
One eyebrow lifted, as if mildly amused. “Am I?”
Enid shrugged. “You sound like you’ve forgotten how to speak like one.”
That earned something small — maybe the beginning of a smile, or maybe just a twitch in the cheek that suggested she was still alive under all that control. She gestured to the other chair. “You can sit, unless you plan to keep standing there like a stray looking for a window left open.”
Enid sat. The chair creaked, but held. She noticed her gloves were still on. It felt too late to take them off now.
“I’m Enid,” she offered, too quickly.
“I don’t need your name.”
That should have stung. It didn’t.
She glanced at the pages again. “You write all that?”
“No,” the woman said flatly, reaching for the ashtray. “The rats do it while I’m asleep. I edit.”
Enid huffed something that might’ve been a laugh. “Do they always turn boys into trees?”
“Only the deserving ones.”
Another long pause.
The woman reached for one of the pages, tapped a corner against the table. Her nails were blunt, ink-stained, not polished. She smoked like someone who didn’t enjoy it, just needed it for the silence it gave her. Enid watched her and realized she didn’t know what she was doing here. Only that the room felt steadier than anything outside of it. Like it didn’t belong to the city.
“I’m Wednesday,” the woman said finally, gaze fixed on a spot somewhere to Enid’s left. “Since you’re insisting on names.”
Enid nodded, though she already knew. Of course her name was Wednesday. No one else could’ve worn it.
They sat there a while longer. No one came in. No one left. Eventually, Wednesday reached across the table and flicked a match to light a second cigarette. She held it out.
Enid didn’t smoke, but she leaned forward anyway.
The flame caught, and for a second the space between them felt crowded by something unsaid. Not tension. Not heat. Just the knowledge of something that hadn’t happened yet, but would. The cigarette glowed faintly as she brought it to her lips, eyes still on Wednesday, who hadn’t looked away since offering the match. Enid inhaled and coughed, and Wednesday didn’t laugh, but something in her posture shifted, like she’d been waiting to see if Enid would flinch.
Neither of them said much after that. They didn’t need to. The room was quiet, soft around the edges, fraying like a well-worn book left in the sun too long. When Wednesday stood, Enid followed. When she reached for her coat, Enid didn’t ask where they were going. It didn’t feel like leaving — it felt like continuing something they’d both stepped into without realizing.
Outside, the city had gone vague. Damp, metallic, muffled by fog or smoke or sleep. The kind of night that left few witnesses. They walked without touching, without talking, past alleys that gleamed faintly with puddled lamplight, past doorways leaking jazz and perfume and the last threads of drunken arguments. Enid didn’t ask how far. Wednesday didn’t offer an answer.
Her flat was smaller than Enid expected. Barely more than a room and a bathroom, with a kitchenette in between that looked untouched. A single bookshelf sagged under books that had lost their jackets, corners worn down. An oil lamp flickered near the bed, which wasn’t much better than Enid’s own — mattress on the floor, sheets a bit askew. The only neat thing in the room was the small table by the window, where a row of sharpened pencils stood in a cracked porcelain cup, arranged like soldiers. Enid took it in with a glance and then stopped noticing any of it.
The kiss wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t soft, either. It just happened, like opening a door you thought was locked.
Enid tasted ash and cheap lipstick and something unnameable, something like metal or memory. She was still wearing her gloves when they stumbled backward onto the mattress, and she only realized it when Wednesday tugged them off with slow fingers and dropped them to the floor like they’d been waiting to be discarded. Neither said a word. There wasn’t room for speaking. Just breath, and skin, and the clumsy unfolding of two people who had lived entire lives inside their heads and suddenly found another body willing to let them out.
It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t planned. But it was real enough to make the city disappear.
── ⟢ ・⸝⸝
Morning found them unevenly. Light leaked through the curtain in faint lines, catching on dust and the bare wood floor. Somewhere in the building, a door slammed. Pipes groaned awake. Enid stirred at the noise, blinking through the fuzz of a headache that wasn’t quite a hangover, but close.
She didn’t move at first. The blanket was pulled low across her hips, and her hair — still damp from the rain last night — had dried into knots. Her clothes were folded in a pile near the foot of the bed. That detail struck her, mostly because she didn’t remember folding them.
Wednesday sat on the edge of the bed with her back to her, twisting a braid tight between her fingers. She wore a men’s dress shirt that probably belonged to her, buttoned halfway. Her legs were bare. The quiet wasn’t awkward. It just was.
Enid propped herself on one elbow, studying her. “Do you always wake up before your guests?”
Wednesday didn’t turn. “You’re not a guest.”
Enid wasn’t sure what that meant, and she didn’t ask. There was a small burn mark on the floor near the desk — maybe from a candle that tipped over, maybe from something else. A dried teabag sat on a saucer. Nothing in the room looked new. Nothing tried to be.
“You can stay,” Wednesday said, as if reading a question that hadn’t been asked yet.
Enid’s mouth felt dry. “For how long?”
Wednesday paused, still holding the braid. “Until you decide to be someone else again.”
Enid lay back and stared at the ceiling. She didn’t know what that meant either. But it felt like something she could live inside for a while.
Not forever — Enid didn’t think in forevers. But long enough to forget whatever day of the week it was. Long enough to stop counting the number of letters from home she hadn’t opened. Long enough for her to stop flinching when the church bell rang too suddenly, or when her reflection looked more tired than she remembered being.
She stayed that morning. Not because Wednesday asked her to, or because she felt wanted in any definable way, but because no one asked her to leave. It was the kind of permission that didn’t need granting. Wednesday brewed something dark and bitter in a dented stovetop pot and handed it to her without sugar, without ceremony. Enid drank it anyway. They didn’t speak much. The silence wasn’t polite — it was shared. Used. A small, worn-out kind of intimacy.
At some point, Wednesday pulled on a pair of black trousers and a buttoned waistcoat and disappeared into the other room, leaving Enid in the too-large shirt that smelled faintly of paper and smoke and whatever perfume Wednesday used that Enid couldn’t quite place — something dry and sharp and not floral. She sat on the windowsill and watched the building across the alley, where a boy in a striped undershirt practiced scales on a clarinet with the desperate focus of someone trying to impress a ghost. Laundry flapped from a line above his head. A pigeon landed, blinked once, and flew off like it had changed its mind.
There was no clock in the room, but time moved anyway. They finished dressing eventually. Enid didn’t mention the bruises on her wrist when she slid her gloves back on, and Wednesday didn’t ask why she looked at the door like it might not open again. They left the flat and drifted into the day without deciding to. Neither of them had anywhere else to be, which was a kind of luxury they didn’t talk about out loud.
They walked. Not far. Down streets that still smelled faintly of rain, through the marché where fruit sellers shouted with a kind of rehearsed irritation, and old women bargained like it was a blood sport. Wednesday bought a bruised pear and didn’t eat it. Enid sketched a dog tied to a lamppost while they waited for a man to finish tuning his guitar before playing a single note. The city felt stretched thin, like everything had slowed just enough for them to slip between its cracks unnoticed.
By the second night, Enid had stopped going back to the attic.
She didn’t move in. She just kept not leaving. Her things stayed in her satchel. Her sketchbook lived on the windowsill. Her toothbrush sat in a chipped mug beside Wednesday’s razor, and neither of them mentioned it. The arrangement wasn’t stable — it wasn’t anything, really — but it didn’t need naming to be real.
They lived like tourists in someone else’s life. They ate whatever was cheapest from the late carts. They made up stories about strangers at the cafés — lovers pretending to be enemies, spies pretending to be lovers, brothers pretending not to notice they were broke. Enid liked the pretending. It made the past feel further away. It made her mother’s clipped vowels and her brother’s name feel like someone else’s vocabulary.
At night, they read to each other — not always aloud, and not always books. Sometimes just scraps Wednesday found in the backs of magazines or the margins of old plays. They slept tangled, always too warm, always on top of the covers. Enid never asked questions. Wednesday never gave answers. There was a comfort in that: knowing the story could change without notice.
One night, Enid woke to find Wednesday sitting on the floor by the window, scribbling something into a notebook lit only by a guttering candle. Her braids were loose, the ink smudged along her wrist where she’d pushed up her sleeves again. She looked more like a myth than a person just then, and Enid didn’t interrupt. Just lay still and watched her work, heart strangely steady.
She didn’t know how long it would last. Maybe the city would chew them up. Maybe morning would come and one of them wouldn’t be there. But for now, there was this.
A flat above a bakery that always burned its bread. A girl who read stories like confessions. And a city wide enough for forgetting.
But it wasn’t always warm. It wasn’t always kind. Sometimes Paris bit back.
It was after midnight when Enid stepped off the last tram, the metal still humming under her boots. The streets were quieter than usual, quieter than she liked. Fog gathered low and clung to the gutters, blurring the lines between cobblestones and curb. Her satchel was slung across one shoulder, heavier than it should’ve been — filled with paper, pencils, and the small box of pastels she’d traded a commission for at the afternoon market. She’d stayed out longer than planned, sketching couples on café napkins for coins, and then drinking away the coins in a wine bar that smelled like vinegar and regret.
Now the bottle of wine rattled in her bag, unopened. A gift, maybe. An apology. She wasn’t sure yet.
She passed a shuttered bookstall and paused. The metal grate had been pulled down halfway, and behind it a collection of rain-warped poetry books leaned against each other like tired men. Someone had scribbled a number on the side of the stand in red pencil. Below it, the word mensonge was barely visible — lie. Enid stared at it for a moment, then kept walking. Her gloves were stuffed in her coat pocket. The bruise on her left knuckle — barely healed — ached in the cold.
She should’ve taken the long way. She should’ve doubled back near the old cinema, or cut through the flower market where the scent still lingered even at night. But she didn’t. She took Rue Traversière, the shortcut. She’d done it before. Twice, maybe three times. It was narrow and dim, but it spat her out only a block from Wednesday’s flat. She could already see it in her mind — the crooked railing on the stairwell, the half-burned candle on the windowsill, the quiet shape of Wednesday’s braids draped over the pillow.
A voice stopped her before the corner.
“Hey, mademoiselle. You’ve got something for us, don’t you?”
It wasn’t the words so much as the tone. Casual. Performed. Like a line they’d practiced for the next American woman they’d meet. There were three of them. Young, probably. Maybe not. It was hard to tell in this kind of light. They stepped out from the doorway of an abandoned florist, all charm and teeth. Not drunk. Worse. They weren’t stumbling. They were waiting.
Enid didn’t answer. She kept her eyes forward and her pace steady, like she hadn’t heard. She’d done this before, too — ignore, deflect, disappear. Most of the time it worked.
“You deaf, ma chérie?”
A hand caught her arm.
She turned fast, sharper than they expected, shoving the heel of her palm toward the nearest throat. It connected. The boy staggered, coughed. The other two moved faster.
She fought harder than she should have. Hard enough that it became clear she wasn’t scared, which was the wrong kind of message to send. She landed one good punch —maybe two — before her head snapped back and the world tilted. The second hit was slower. Wet. Her knee buckled.
The pastel box in her bag cracked open, dusting everything with pale blue chalk.
By the time it ended, her lip was split and one eye swelling shut. One glove was missing, her coat torn open at the seam. The bottle of wine had shattered, staining her sketchbook and the hem of her shirt with something that looked darker than it should have.
They didn’t take her money. Just the bag. They didn’t run.
She stayed curled on her side until she could breathe without gagging. The stones were slick beneath her cheek, and she could taste iron. Her hands shook when she pushed herself up.
It wasn’t far now. One street. Maybe two.
She pulled herself to her feet and limped forward, slower than before, leaving small red handprints along the alley wall. The city didn’t notice. It had better things to do.
Somewhere nearby, a jazz record was still playing. Scratchy. Off-key.
She didn’t cry. She just kept walking.
By the time she reached the door, her fingers barely worked. The key scraped against the lock twice before finding its place. The chipped metal bit into her palm as she turned it. The door creaked open and closed behind her with a soft click, swallowing the night. She didn’t call out. Didn’t have the breath for it. She wasn’t even sure what version of herself she was bringing back. Just that she had made it here, and that was supposed to mean something.
Inside, the room was low-lit, warm in the way a place becomes when someone waits inside it. A single candle flickered in the saucer on the desk, its wax melted into pale ridges. The window was cracked just enough for the sound of distant traffic to murmur up from the street. Enid stood in the entryway for a beat too long, trying to remember if she could still feel her toes.
From the far side of the room, Wednesday looked up.
She was curled into the armchair, legs drawn beneath her, sleeves rolled back, braids undone and falling in sweeps over her shoulders. The book in her lap had slipped slightly open against her thigh, forgotten. Her eyes met Enid’s, and her entire expression changed — not dramatically, not with anything sudden — but like a string inside her had pulled taut.
“Are you okay?”
It was the first thing out of her mouth. Immediate. Instinctive. She hadn’t seen the bruises yet. She hadn’t seen the blood. The question came from someplace deeper than that. A reflex born not from panic but from something slower, more familiar. Worry that had been sitting in her throat since Enid left hours ago and hadn’t returned when she said she would.
Then her eyes adjusted.
The cut above Enid’s brow. The limp in her step. The way she was holding her ribs as if something inside had cracked and hadn’t quite put itself back together. Her coat was torn, the lining soaked through, and one glove was missing. She was smeared with blue chalk and wine, and something darker pooled along her sleeve. A slow inhale left Wednesday’s lips, but she didn’t ask again. She was already moving.
Enid opened her mouth to say something — she didn’t know what — but her jaw stuttered, catching on the stiffness in her cheek. Her lip had split again. She stood dumbly in the center of the room until Wednesday reached her.
Wednesday’s hands didn’t hover. They were careful, but not hesitant. She helped ease the coat from Enid’s shoulders and draped it across the back of the nearest chair. Then, wordlessly, she guided her down onto the bed, not with urgency, but with the calm assurance of someone who had already decided this mattered.
Enid winced as she sat. Her side protested, and she pressed a hand there reflexively, trying to make her body smaller. Wednesday crouched beside the bed and looked at her face in the candlelight, studying her the way she might study a difficult passage — slow, precise, quiet. She ran her thumb along Enid’s jaw, brushing away dried blood with the edge of her sleeve. Her thumb lingered there for a moment longer than it needed to. When she spoke, her voice had softened — not in tone, but in texture.
“You should’ve called for me.”
“I didn’t think,” Enid murmured. Her voice caught. “I just— I didn’t think they’d—”
“I know,” Wednesday said. And she did. Though she didn’t ask what happened.
Then, she stood, moving to the desk. She poured water into the chipped bowl, found the cleanest cloth she could, and returned to the bed. The cloth was warm when she pressed it to Enid’s temple, wiping gently where blood had clotted in a line near her hairline. She worked in silence, but it wasn’t cold. It was steady, slow, oddly tender. Her fingers were sure, brushing Enid’s hair back behind her ear as she cleaned around the swelling.
Enid watched her through the unbruised eye, breathing shallowly. She wanted to say thank you, or sorry, or something in between, but none of those words fit right. Instead, she reached out — clumsy and sore — and curled her hand around Wednesday’s wrist.
Wednesday didn’t flinch. She set the cloth down and sat beside her, curling one leg onto the bed, letting Enid lean against her without having to ask. The contact wasn’t urgent. It wasn’t rushed. It was quiet and full, a stillness that pressed in around them.
“I brought you a bottle of wine,” Enid mumbled, her head tucked just beneath Wednesday’s chin. “It broke.”
Wednesday tilted her head to rest lightly against Enid’s. “That’s unfortunate,” she said. “I was beginning to tolerate your taste.”
That pulled a breath of a laugh from Enid. It hurt to smile, but she did anyway. A little.
They stayed like that a long time, Wednesday's arm curled protectively around Enid’s back, her other hand cradling the wrist that had reached for her. The candle on the desk burned low, wax puddling toward the edges. Neither of them moved to blow it out.
When Enid finally spoke again, it was so quiet, it might’ve been meant only for the dark. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
Wednesday didn’t answer at first. She just held her closer.
“This is the only place you ever needed to.”
Wednesday said it like it was nothing. Like it hadn’t just opened up something warm and strange in Enid’s chest that felt dangerously close to belief. She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t need to. Her fingers stayed curled at Wednesday’s wrist long after the cloth had gone cold.
The weeks that followed moved slowly, and then all at once. The city bloomed early that year, buds pushing through wrought-iron balconies and market stalls spilling over with lilacs and bruised apricots. Enid’s eye began to heal. The split in her lip scabbed and softened. The aches in her ribs stopped catching her breath in the mornings, though some nights she still woke up without knowing why. Wednesday never asked. She simply turned in the bed, eyes half-closed, and made space for her.
On a Thursday in late April, they crossed the Pont des Arts just before sundown. The water was low, the river flat and stubborn, carrying a few torn flower petals and the husk of a newspaper headline from four days ago. They had shared a stolen pastry from the bakery downstairs — blackberry, slightly overcooked, still warm at the edges. Wednesday had smeared ink across the back of her hand and Enid had licked sugar from the corner of her mouth before either of them realized what that meant.
They didn't talk about that, either.
The bridge was mostly empty. Enid leaned her forearms against the rail and watched a boat pass beneath them, its single lantern glowing faintly against the stone underbelly of the span. Below, a couple walked hand in hand along the quay, too far away to recognize but close enough to invent stories about.
Wednesday stood beside her, shoulders squared, hands folded behind her back in a posture she never seemed to realize was formal. She watched the horizon like it owed her something. A question, maybe. An apology. Her coat was slightly too big, and the collar had been turned up against a wind that had since died.
Enid glanced sideways. “Did you ever think about going back?”
Wednesday didn’t answer for a while. She rolled the ring on her index finger, the simple band with the faint etching no one else ever seemed to notice. The one she never removed, not even in sleep.
“No,” she said. “That place is full of people who think silence is a virtue. I prefer Paris. Here, at least, they lie to your face.”
Enid smiled, then sobered. “But someone must be looking for you.”
“They were,” Wednesday said, and didn’t elaborate.
The wind picked up again, briefly, tugging at the frayed ends of Enid’s scarf. A small group passed behind them, chattering in Dutch, and a man with a cigarette tucked behind his ear offered them a lighter neither of them needed. They declined in unison. He left without pressing.
They walked the long way back, past shuttered cafés and the old theater with a sign advertising Napoléon in crooked lettering. Outside the florist’s shop, Wednesday paused. There were gardenias in the window, white and unnatural, as if they didn’t understand the city they were in. She stared at them until Enid gently took her hand.
“I’ve never been given flowers,” Enid said. “Not real ones.”
Wednesday blinked and turned her face just slightly, enough to hide whatever lived behind her expression in that moment. “I don’t like flowers,” she replied. “They die too easily.”
But when they arrived back at the flat, there was a single violet wrapped in newsprint waiting on the windowsill. No note. No name. Just pressed there beneath the latch as if someone had stopped by and changed their mind at the last second.
Wednesday picked it up, thumb brushing the edge of the paper.
Enid watched her. “Yours?”
“No,” she said. Then, after a pause, “Maybe.”
She turned it once in her hand, examining it like a clue. Enid sat on the edge of the bed and watched the light catch in her profile, in the dip of her collarbone and the fine strands of loose hair that had escaped her braids. She wasn’t trying to look beautiful. She just was.
“Did you write about me?” Enid asked. She meant it casually, but the question came out smaller, close to shy.
Wednesday didn’t look away from the flower. “I’m trying not to.”
That was the closest thing to a confession either of them had said aloud.
They slept close that night. Not tangled, not urgent. Just two people shaped by the same quiet city, breathing in time with the sound of trams and pigeons and someone’s radio two floors below playing a song neither of them knew the name of.
In the morning, the flower was gone.
The violet, carefully balanced the night before against the windowsill, had vanished by the time Wednesday got up. She stood by the open pane with her braids still loose, sleeves rolled, the newspaper wrapping left behind like a ghost of something not quite said. The corner of it had been torn, perhaps by the wind, perhaps by someone’s hand. Enid stirred behind her, still half-asleep, limbs sprawled across the mattress in a way that made the bed look even smaller than it was.
“Did you move it?” Wednesday asked.
Enid blinked blearily, rubbing at one eye. “Move what?”
Wednesday didn’t reply. She lifted the paper scrap and turned it over. There was writing on the back. Not a full note — just a name.
E. Sinclair.
The ink had bled slightly in the night, but the scrawl was unmistakable. Sharp, practiced, written with a hand trained in ledgers or letters or some version of officialdom. Not one of Enid’s clients, then. Not one of Wednesday’s readers.
Enid sat up straighter. She took the paper from Wednesday’s hand and stared at it, as if waiting for it to say something else.
“My brother’s handwriting,” she said finally. Her voice was flat, almost surprised. “That’s Elijah.”
Wednesday looked at her, searching for something in the line of her jaw, the tremor in her fingers. “I thought you said he didn’t know where you were.”
“I didn’t think he did.” Enid folded the paper in half, then into quarters. “I sent one letter. From the café near Sacré-Cœur. I didn’t sign it. I didn’t think he’d follow it.”
She said it like someone explaining the rules of a game they hadn’t expected to lose.
By midday, the city felt off-balance — too bright, too loud. The bouquinistes along the Seine were arguing again, voices sharp against the clang of a streetcar that passed too close to the curb. Enid kept her hands shoved deep into her coat pockets, the note folded small in her palm. Wednesday walked beside her, not touching, but closer than usual. They passed a woman selling carnations in white enamel buckets, and Enid didn’t look at them.
At lunch, Wednesday picked at her food and didn’t say much. She had a newspaper folded on the table beside her plate — Le Figaro, borrowed from a table near the door — but hadn’t turned the page once. She watched people come and go like they were part of a play she’d already memorized. When the waiter came to clear the dishes, he paused beside Wednesday’s chair and slipped her something under the saucer of her espresso. A note. Cream paper, folded clean. No envelope.
Wednesday didn’t open it until they were outside again, walking past the Musée d’Orsay, where the statues always looked vaguely disappointed in everyone. She read it in silence, then passed it to Enid.
It wasn’t long.
You’re not the only one who knows how to disappear.
E.
Enid let out a breath, more frustration than fear, though both lived in the same part of her. “He’s always had a flair for the dramatic.”
Wednesday looked at the street ahead. “He’s been watching.”
“He doesn’t scare me.”
“He should,” Wednesday said, and her tone had no sharpness in it, only a quiet precision that made it harder to ignore. “You once mentioned your family wants you married.”
Enid didn’t answer. She was too busy watching a man across the street with a hat pulled too low over his eyes. He didn’t follow them. Not visibly. But when they turned the corner, she didn’t check to see if he’d moved.
That night, she didn’t draw. She didn’t sleep. She lay curled on her side while Wednesday sat by the desk, scribbling in her notebook with a candle guttering low beside her. Paris hummed faintly beneath them — the shuffle of footsteps, the distant echo of glass being cleared, a tram grinding its way across the far bridge.
Wednesday paused, set her pen down.
“Do you want to leave?” she asked without turning.
Enid didn’t answer right away. The blanket twisted around her ankles. The mattress dipped where she’d curled into herself. “Would you come with me?”
Wednesday didn’t look up. “Yes.”
A silence settled between them — not because they had nothing to say, but because for once, they both knew exactly what they meant.
Later, Enid pretended to sleep. Wednesday knew she was pretending. The rise of her chest wasn’t quite even, the way her fingers twitched against the edge of the blanket too restless for dreaming. But she let her have it — the illusion, the small refuge of it. The room was quiet, except for the scratch of Wednesday’s pen. She had resumed writing, the notebook balanced across her lap as she sat on the windowsill, one leg tucked beneath her.
She didn’t usually write here. Most of her stories lived on scraps, stolen café napkins, bits of paper saved from packaging, pages torn from cheap notebooks bought in threes. But this one — the one she didn’t admit to writing — had stayed whole. Bound. The black cover worn soft at the corners, a crease down the middle where she’d opened it too often.
She hadn’t meant to write about Enid. Not at first. But the girl kept bleeding into the margins. In the shape of someone hiding bruises in borrowed gloves. In the echo of footsteps that arrived just before sunrise. In the way a laugh could be sharpened into defense, or how someone could look entirely at home in a place they swore was only temporary.
She hadn’t named her. But the story knew.
Wednesday flipped back to the beginning. The first entry was barely a paragraph. A girl in Montmartre with knuckles like cracked porcelain and a voice like a skipped record. She hadn’t known what she was writing then. She only knew it had to be written.
Behind her, the bed shifted. A sigh. Fabric catching on fabric.
“I know you’re not asleep,” she said without turning.
Enid didn’t answer for a long moment. Then, softly, “You were writing about me.”
It wasn’t a question. She sounded tired, but not surprised.
Wednesday closed the notebook without marking the page. “Yes.”
Enid sat up slowly, blanket pulled to her chest like it might protect her from anything still left unsaid. Her hair was a mess, flattened on one side, and her knees drawn up beneath the hem of Wednesday’s old shirt. She looked young, and older than she ever had, all at once.
“Do I die in the end?”
Wednesday turned her head just enough for their eyes to meet. “You leave.”
“That’s close.” There was something bitter-soft in her smile. Not unkind. Just used up.
Wednesday stood and crossed to the desk, sliding the notebook into the drawer that stuck slightly at the corner. She left it half-open. She wasn’t hiding it anymore.
“Will he find you?” she asked. She didn’t say Elijah’s name. It didn’t feel necessary.
Enid shrugged, arms around her knees now. “If he hasn’t already, he will.”
“And when he does?”
Enid looked down. Picked at a loose thread in the blanket. “Then we go.”
They didn’t speak again for a while. The city was starting to wake — the slow metallic drag of a trash cart, the rattle of early deliveries along Rue Durantin. Somewhere, someone was already boiling water for café au lait, and the scent of yeast and woodsmoke threaded up through the windows.
“I keep dreaming about trains,” Enid said suddenly. “Not stations, not maps. Just the feeling of them. Moving.”
Wednesday sat on the edge of the bed. “Where do they go?”
“Nowhere, mostly. But they don’t stop.”
She reached for Wednesday’s hand, threading their fingers together without looking. Wednesday let it happen. Her thumb moved once, barely there, along Enid’s knuckles — just a gesture, but not a small one.
“We could go south,” Enid said. “Nice, maybe. Or Marseille.”
“You hate heat.”
“I hate being found more.”
Wednesday looked at her then, really looked — at the raw skin below her eye that hadn’t yet faded, at the faint scar across her palm, at the way she always sat like she was waiting to run and always stayed anyway.
There were things Wednesday could say. That she had spent two years in cities like Nice, writing under names that weren’t hers. That her mother still sent letters to a house in Vienna she hadn’t lived in since the war. That her father had been buried in silence, and no one had taught her how to grieve.
But instead she said, “Okay.”
And Enid nodded, as if they’d just agreed to something simple. Like leaving. Like disappearing. Like reinventing.
Outside, a bird landed on the windowsill and stayed longer than it should have.
The next morning passed without saying so.
They didn’t pack. They didn’t trace the route. There was no whispered plan tucked between tea and toast. Instead, the flat took on the quiet hush of things ending. Not urgently. Not in panic. But with the hush of knowing, of inevitability settling into the corners like dust.
Wednesday wrote a final line in the notebook and closed it. This time she didn’t leave it half-open. She placed it in the drawer, then locked it, sliding the key into the pocket of her coat. Her gloves were beside it, fingers curled in like resting hands. The violet from before, the first one, had been pressed flat between two pages of an old almanac. She didn’t bring it with her. She didn’t need to.
Enid stood in the bathroom with the window cracked open and sunlight pouring over the cracked tile. She was washing ochre from her fingers, not rushing, just methodical. The pigment clung to the skin around her nails, a stubborn residue of a portrait she’d finished the night before — Wednesday’s shoulder and jawline, almost profile, done entirely from memory. She hadn’t shown it to her yet. Maybe she wouldn’t.
She dried her hands on a linen cloth, then reached for her coat. It was still torn at the seam from the fight months ago. She hadn’t stitched it, and now she wouldn’t. It would come with her like that, imperfect, lived-in. She slipped a folded train schedule into the inner pocket without reading it again. She’d memorized it days ago.
There were no goodbyes to say. None that mattered. The boulanger downstairs would notice when they stopped coming for stale apricot tarts. The boy with the clarinet would wonder, briefly, where the girl with the sketchbook had gone. Someone might even take the flat next. They’d find candle stubs and mismatched cups and a sheet of paper tucked behind the radiator with a few lines of English scrawled in pencil:
There is nothing more dangerous than a girl with an exit plan.
Wednesday stood by the door, hat in hand, the tilt of her head unreadable. Her coat was buttoned to the throat, dark wool against the early warmth. Her boots were polished. She looked the way she always did before moving through a new place, before becoming someone else.
Enid was by the window, eyes on the city stretched out before her in early spring light. If she leaned far enough, she could see the Eiffel Tower — not the whole thing, just the top edge, its iron bones rising above rooftops like a distant idea. She didn’t lean. She just watched it. Still, unblinking.
There was a smudge of ochre on her thumb she hadn’t noticed.
She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to.
She reached for her coat and shrugged it on, the torn seam catching on her elbow. Her bag was slung across the chair. She took it. She didn’t ask if Wednesday was ready. That wasn’t how they worked.
Behind her, Wednesday waited. Not impatient. Just certain.
And when Enid turned — when she finally crossed the room, walking past the desk, the bed, the window where they had stood so many times inventing lives that weren’t real but felt true enough — she paused just before the door.
The bird from the day before had returned. It perched on the ledge again, head tilted, watching.
Enid glanced at it. Then at Wednesday. “Let’s not go somewhere better,” she said. “Just somewhere else.”
Wednesday nodded.
Then they left.
The city didn’t notice. The trams still ran. The bakers still burned their crusts. Somewhere near the Seine, a jazz band was starting up early, reeds squealing against tuning strings. But if you passed the flat above the bakery now, you might think something was missing. Something faint but noticeable, like a book pulled from a shelf that left a dust outline behind.
And if you looked hard enough, you might find a page torn from a notebook caught in the railing of the fire escape. Just one phrase scrawled at the top.
It was built like a lie. But it held like the truth.