ESCAPE TO PARIS

Chapter Two

Reya groaned in frustration, tempted to slam her fists on the glass partition of the info kiosk at the train station.

She'd explained her predicament to the bored male attendant, first in French--owing to her high school years in French class when she'd always paid attention—and now in English, after he'd pretended he couldn't understand her since she didn't have the proper accent.

"My suitcase is literally on the train that left here fifteen minutes ago," she said exasperated. "And each train has a number right? And I'm telling you it was the middle car. So if you could call someone before it gets to the next station and just have them take it out...I could go pick it up. Okay?"

"But that is not how the procedure functions," he said, his voice devoid of any passion for his job. He handed her a pamphlet. "See here? On the back? That is our website. Go online and fill out the information to make a claim; maybe then you can retrieve your luggage."

Her eyes practically popped out of her head in rage. "Why would I fill out the form when I CAN GIVE YOU MY INFORMATION RIGHT HERE?"

"Because that is the procedure," he said, completely unfazed by her meltdown.

She snatched the pamphlet out of his hand and sighed, leaning against the glass partition in defeat.

Strangely the attendant followed her sigh with his own. "Fill out the online form as instructed, but in the meantime...write down your name and phone number, and we will call you when we have an update."

In the grey terminal that blocked out all natural light, Reya somehow felt all the sunshine on the earth washing over her. "Thank you! Thank you!"

She scribbled down her info and grinned at the attendant.

"You may go now," he said stone-faced.

And go she did, skipping up the escalator and into the daylight of Paris...

***

Despite the wonder of online maps, Reya had gotten lost at least three times on her way to her apartment, but it wasn't her fault; some of these intersections were weirdly diagonal with different directions spidering out. The plus side to this jumbled city planning was that everything around her was gorgeous, at least in her surrounding area. She knew this because she'd done her research, and had learned that Paris itself wasn't the guarantee of gorgeous. There were neighbourhoods with charmless residential buildings...neighbourhoods far too crowded and bustling to ever feel truly comfortable...and neighbourhoods that simply weren't safe for a woman on her own. She'd circumvented them all, and now found herself turning left on a cobblestoned side-street in the 2nd arrondissement. The street possessed a pleasing calm, but she was close enough to walk to the river in twenty minutes, the Louvre museum in fifteen, and even close enough to walk to the hills of the artist's square in Paris, near the stunning white-domed Sacre Coeur basilica in Montmartre. Her location had been planned with purpose, and as the warm breeze moved through leafy trees that surrounded a charming nineteenth-century building, she knew she was home.

She entered the code she'd been given and stepped inside the dark lobby. A carpeted set of winding stairs awaited, and as she made her way up the uneven staircase that somehow got smaller and smaller, she definitely believed she'd stepped back in time to a century before her own.

She arrived on the fourth floor slightly out of breath, and found that her apartment door was already open, with a lanky middle-aged man standing in the doorway.

"Greetings!" he exclaimed in his French accent.

Reya stepped back. "My apartment host is Louise. You don't look like a Louise."