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CHAPTER 1

THE ALARM WENT OFF AT EIGHT ON THE DAY MY LIFE imploded.

The springs in Patrick's couch clanged as I reached for my cell phone to turn it off. Vonda stretched and groaned on her thin mattress on the floor, then lifted the edge of her sleep mask to squint at me.

"Too early." Her voice was morning rough.

"Come on — get up. It's our last day here, and we're not sleeping it away."

I slipped off the couch and went to the windows, opening them wide to fold back their wooden shutters.

"Tell me it's sunny," Vonda mumbled from under her pillow.

"It's sunny."

"Are you lying?"

"It's Paris in November, Vonda."

She groaned again and forced herself to sit up, patting down the hair she'd dyed jet-black before our trip to Europe. "Those sirens are weird," she said as a police car navigated the narrow street two stories down. But it wasn't just French sirens she considered "weird." The traffic, the stares from strangers, the potency of the coffee, and the overcrowded Métro cars — all weird to the girl from Santa Barbara whose most exotic world exposure had, until this trip, extended only as far as LA's Chinatown.

Back home in Denver, the three of us shared a townhouse — or we had until Patrick had headed to Europe for a semester of art classes at The American University of Paris. It came as no surprise to those who knew him that he'd decided to further his education at an age when most men were focusing on their children's academic ambitions. But we all knew that his studies, though earnest, were merely a pretext for living in a place where treasures hid in plain sight in attics, dumps, and flea markets.

Patrick's passion for picking was a galvanizing thing. It had led him to open Trésor three years ago, his eclectic store of vintage old world objects tucked away in a gentrifying neighborhood of Denver. The discovery of three rare, Napoleon-era coins in the lining of a corset he'd acquired from an online auction had financed the fulfillment of his lifelong dream to study abroad.

They called picking chiner in France. Patrick called it treasure hunting. And somehow — between his classes and homework — he'd found the time to travel the French countryside in his thirty-year-old Citroën 2CV, which the French lovingly called a deudeuche. The common knickknacks he'd bought for a song in roadside shops and village fairs would be worth many times more back in his Denver store.

"Grab a shovel and believe in gold!" he always declared as he entered promising places. Given the impressive number of antiques he'd collected since his arrival in France, I could only conclude that his imaginary shovel had served him well.

Patrick and I had been a bit surprised by Vonda's decision to come along on our French adventure. She was nearly ten years younger than we were, and her interests diverged from ours in almost every way, particularly when it came to "digging for gold." But as opinionated, outspoken, and utterly without caution as she was, a quirky sort of friendship had evolved in the ten months we'd lived in the same home.

So she'd cashed in her vacation days to fly with me to the City of Lights. And since I'd left one job and had a few weeks to spare before starting another, I'd emptied the "Paris or bust" savings account I'd started on impulse seven years before, never really believing such a trip would actually happen.

But it had. Every morning for nearly a week, with Patrick wrapping up classes at the university and Vonda sleeping in, I'd strolled to my favorite café in Montmartre and sipped an espresso while watching the panache of city life pass by. The Seine and its quais were no longer foreign to me. I knew the churn of its bâteaux mouches and the hum of traffic on the clogged streets above its shores. There was a spot on the tip of the Île de la Cité that I particularly loved, and though the temperatures were in keeping with France's winter season, I'd bundled up on one occasion to sit there with a book and feel utterly, as Patrick put it, "Ooh-là-là chérie" — whatever that meant.

I felt drawn to France in a powerful way. Its vibrancy and history livened my senses and captured my imagination. I sensed the vastness and depth of its survival — the brutality of its mutinies and the surety of its rightful place as one of the world's most hard-won democracies. There was a homeness to Paris that felt both stimulating and soothing, unique and universal.

Patrick was in his element here, an art aficionado and self-proclaimed "clipster" who brought his own brand of class to the hipster movement. His confident exuberance was a natural fit in the fast-paced, artistically inclined city. I was a bit envious of the easy rapport he'd established with neighbors and commerçants during his four months in Paris. His interactions were effortless and genuine. They greeted him like a friend as he engaged with them in French. The pace and drama of his speech sounded fluent to my ears, though he assured me he still had a long way to go. Perfecting a language he loved had been just one of his motivations for moving to the City of Lights.

Patrick and I had met only four years ago, when I rang the doorbell of his Denver townhouse in answer to the "roommate wanted" ad I'd found on an online bulletin board. I was convinced that securing stable lodging would allow me to relocate to the city more permanently from the small town of Lamar, where my dad owned a body shop, my mom managed a grocery store, and everybody knew both who and whose I was. I'd moved in and out of their home so many times in the twelve years since college that I hoped a more distant location would prevent yet another embarrassing return.

It had taken me a few false starts to find the kind of employment that would finance such autonomy. After earning a pre-dental degree from a low-cost community college, I'd decided that cleaning teeth wasn't really my thing. I worked as a receptionist for a medical office for a while. Then I tried my hand at being a barista, followed by stints as a teacher's aide and finally an insurance agent. The job wasn't inspiring, but it felt stable and grown-up enough for me to move to Denver.

I was nervous but determined the day I answered Patrick's ad. "I'm here about the room for rent," I said when he opened the door, bow-tied and smiling. "I called you earlier ...?"

He gave me a once-over, and his blue-green eyes seemed to linger on my scuffed, utilitarian shoes a bit longer than warranted. He cocked his head when he looked up. "No drugs, no drunken orgies, and no messes in the common areas. You cool with that?" The words were blunt, but his expression was friendly.

"Uh ... sure."

"I'll need one month's deposit, and payments are due on the first. We split utilities three ways, and each person has a shelf in the fridge. If that works for you, it works for me."

"I ... Don't you want to interview me or ... ask me questions or something?"

"I have radar for good people."

"Oh."

He raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms. "So — you want the room or not?"

I looked into his direct and honest gaze and couldn't think of a reason to hesitate. "Sure," I said.

He extended a hand. "Welcome home."

*
And here I was in France, just over four years later, embarking on yet another adventure with a man whose kindness and impulsivity had drawn me into a friendship as solid as it was unpredictable. There was a nobility to his eccentricity, a keen curiosity, and a humane generosity.

Patrick and I were polar opposites in many ways. I proceeded with caution where he leapt with abandon. I chose the outskirts of crowds while he shone in their center. I was happy with plain while he thrived on fancy. In our grooming alone, the differences were evident: my shoulder-length brown hair in need of a trim and the impeccable blond pompadour he retouched twice a day.

Patrick burst through the door of his Parisian studio holding a paper bag aloft. "I've got croissants!" he declared, his voice more conquering hero than early-morning shopper. By the looks of the butter stains seeping through the bag, I could tell he'd gone the extra mile and picked them up at Chez Paul, the bakery we'd elected Best in Paris within hours of our arrival.

Nothing motivated Vonda like the promise of decadent carbs. She was pulling a jar of Nutella from the kitchen cupboard before Patrick got there with his loot. "Kitchen" was a bit of an overstatement. There was a microwave, an electric burner, and practically no storage. The studio was small — too small for one person to inhabit comfortably, let alone three. And with Vonda's mattress bridging the space between Patrick's twin bed and my couch, the floor was all but invisible.

"Eat up," Patrick said after I'd pulled a plaid button-down on over my nightshirt and joined him.

"Way ahead of you," Vonda mumbled around the croissant already in her mouth.

I grabbed my own and reached for the Nutella jar while Patrick unloaded the plastic bags of groceries he'd carried up two flights of stairs. Sandwich fixings, fruit, pasta, canned goods. "You realize we're leaving tomorrow, right?" I asked.

"And all of this," he said, waving at the food like a game show hostess, "is going with us. The beauty of an Airbnb is that we can cook for ourselves."

Vonda rolled her eyes and gave me a long-suffering look. Then she turned back to Patrick. "But before we go off on your Dumpster-diving adventure," she said, a bit of derision in her voice, "you've promised me a day of touristy sightseeing. Right?"

"If we must," Patrick said. "But we're not climbing the Eiffel Tower, and we're certainly not posing for tacky charcoal portraits on the Place du Tertre."

Vonda smiled. "Got one yesterday."

"So what's on the tour?" I asked.

"We can hit the Musée d'Orsay this morning, then the Latin Quarter for lunch. And ..." He brightened a bit and made a production of pulling three tickets out of his breast pocket. "The opening of an art exhibit in the 14th arrondissement this evening!

"I'm not spending my last night in Paris at a stuffy art exhibit," Vonda said.

"Come on," Patrick reasoned. "What better way to finish our time in 'Paree' than standing around with a bunch of rich people, commenting on obscure art and drinking free champagne? It doesn't get much more ooh-là-là chérie than that."

"It doesn't get much more yawn than that," Vonda corrected him.

"My prof gave me his passes."

"So you're not wasting any money by doing something else."

"Patrick's let us crowd his space for a week," I said to Vonda, fearing the skirmish might escalate into a debate. "Maybe going to this exhibit can be our way of saying thanks?"

Vonda looked at Patrick. "She's in crisis-prevention mode again."

"And we haven't even started cussing at each other," he said, grinning.

"We'll go to the art show," I told him.

But I hadn't taken into account Vonda's inability to abide by an established plan.

*
"They're great — they're fun," she said later that afternoon, extolling the greatness of the "new friends" she'd made in a grunge-inspired clothing store while Patrick and I sat in Le Centre du Monde finishing up an order of crème brûlée. She looked from me to Patrick with expectation. "How often do you get offered free tickets to a concert?"

"A death metal concert, Vonda. Do I look like the type of person who'd enjoy that kind of thing?"

"All the more reason to try it," she insisted. "Come on — be daring! It's free. It's Paris! Ditch your paintings and live a little!"

Patrick gave her a look through the steam of his espresso. With a fancy art exhibit as an alternate option, his refusal was immediate and firm.

"Listen," she said, hands on hips and brown eyes firing. "I've let you drag me to every artsy-fartsy store and dusty flea market in Paris for days. I'm going to this concert, whether you two come with me or not."

"Vonda," I tried, "you've only known these people — what — ten minutes?"

She straightened to the full stature of her five feet eight inches, and I could tell by the way she tossed her hair over her shoulder and jutted out her chin that the outcome of the debate was a foregone conclusion.

So Patrick had gone off to his art gallery without us, and I'd reluctantly agreed to tag along with Vonda. Attending a concert populated by head-banging youth and jaded metalheads held absolutely no appeal to me, but her insistence that this would be "a side of Paris no one else sees" and a reticence to let my foolhardy friend venture out with virtual strangers had eroded my resistance.

Tomorrow we'd begin a road trip to Southern France in Patrick's dilapidated Citroën. We'd stop at every brocante we found along the way. We'd explore bustling cities and crisscross peaceful countrysides.

That's what I expected as we said good-bye to Patrick and made our way by Métro to the Bataclan concert hall on that mild November evening in the City of Lights. None of us could have imagined how the rest of the night would dismantle our lives.

CHAPTER 2

IMAGES FLASHED ACROSS MY MEMORY LIKE A GRUESOME montage, slamming me with the horror again and again. The gunfire following me to the bloody exit door. The bodies I jumped over as I fled into the alley. The woman screaming, hanging by her fingertips from a second-floor window ledge. Cell phones shining through closed windows, capturing my flight.

I remembered being dragged into an alcove. There were voices — urgent, whispering voices — but my mind lacked the focus to translate what they said. Someone putting pressure on the left side of my waist. Pain screaming through my synapses. Then the welcome darkness of unconsciousness.

Later I heard more voices, their sureness and calm somehow hopeful to my ears. Hands lifted me and laid me on a stretcher. Flashing lights. Sirens. A rough, swerving drive. Nausea. Pain.

Hallway lights flashed by. Words I couldn't fully understand. Medical words. The sound of curtains being pulled. Hurried activity swirling around me. Scissors tearing at my sweater. A woman's gentle voice. A hand on my arm. Kindness. It made the horror I'd survived that much more terrorizing.

I remembered asking for Vonda — begging for someone to find and tell Patrick. And my parents. I needed them to know I was all right — but I wasn't sure I'd actually spoken the thoughts.

There was the dim pain of IVs being placed — one in each arm. Beeping instruments. A raised voice barking orders.

Then I remembered a groggy swim toward consciousness. The shivering. The reassuring pats and whispered conversations just out of reach. The slow ebb of anesthesia. Auditory chaos that separated into recognizable sounds. A beeping monitor. A gurney rolling by. A male voice. "Jessica. Jessica." I recognized his accent. France. I was in France. I was at the concert when ...

As memories assaulted me, I willed my mind to sink back into insentience, to reverse its slow rise out of darkness. There was nothing in the brutal light of reality that wouldn't reverberate with the sound of gunfire bursts. Nothing that would shield me from a full remembering. From a full resuffering.

The world around me continued to come into focus, insisting on my consciousness. I commanded myself to resist, a plight as futile as fighting against gravity.

"Jessica, vous m'entendez?" The same male voice. My mind flashed to a sneering, menacing face, and my body convulsed — trying to escape. Trying to ...

The pain was brutal. It seared its way across my abdomen and down my spine. "Non. Non, non, non." His voice was gentle but urgent, his accent thick and comforting. "Don't move, okay? Don't move, Jessica. It will open your incision."

Incision. My eyelids felt leaden. I struggled against their weight. My mind was still locked on the massacre. Snapshots of the terror assailed me with every breath — with every heartbeat. I needed to open my eyes. I needed to ...

A face swam into focus. That accented voice again. "Hello, Jessica." I squinted to see more clearly. A middle-aged black man in scrubs smiled down on me. His wasn't one of the faces imprinted on my mind.

"My parents," I tried to say. What came out was more croak than whisper. I cleared my throat. "Has someone called my parents?"

He leaned close. "Please repeat." His concern seemed genuine.

I took a deeper breath and tried again. "Do my parents know I'm here?"

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Space Between Words"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Michèle Phoenix.
Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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