SHE AND HIM - -
Paris, Tennessee, USA
She had twenty-two minutes to flee the property. She had twenty-two minutes to pack up her life and move on.
Isabelle ran through the house, up and down the creaky old stairs, from room to room, gathering clothes and loose change and everything necessary in between. She packed her guitar into its ancient case, pulled on both of her scuffed brown boots and trampled back downstairs to the kitchen. High above the stove in a broken cabinet was the Mason jar that had housed their savings for almost three long years. It wasn't much, but it was enough for a plane ticket out of nowhere's-ville.
She stuffed the rolled twenties into the back pocket of her jeans, grabbed the keys to the Ford from the rack near the front door and snuck out of the house for the last time. And where she felt sure there would be tears or sadness, there was only a spell binding laugh as she tossed her bags into the truck and hightailed it through town. She didn't know where she was going, except towards the first of many big decisions. All she had to do was get away, from this suffocating town, from the responsibility of being bored to tears, and from him.
She had to go somewhere that there was no Dirk, somewhere that there was no 'them'.
She had to escape and find herself for the first time in too long.
Paris, France
There was nothing left to discover anymore. There was nothing left of who they had once been.
So he left.
Luscany with Vianne had been a treat. It had been an experience and a passionate sort of dream to live for three years. Then he had run off to Italy, where Naples had become a semi-permanent home and hideaway. He had drifted in the aqua surf of the Italian coast, fishing and painting and making a small enough profit just to move on to the next place. Where upon he ended up back home in the Wicklow Harbor, drinking and carrying on with the old Celtic storytellers he called family. And it was there, that he'd found her. The girl, the one that he swore was 'the one', whatever that meant.
Roux sailed the English Channel to the mouth of the Seine River with one consistent thought on his mind, one human being in the whole of the world, his Lara. Her crimson curls and emerald eyes haunted him every second of every wave he tumbled over, every mile he gained closure, every step he came closer to Paris and further from her memory. He didn't even know what went wrong, if anything had gone wrong at all, except to say that he was unchallenged by her, marked and satisfied and jaded by the 'used to be' temptation of his Galway girl.
He was out to find something new, something rebellious and stimulating and uninhibited like he was again.
He was out to shadow the memories with someone he was sure Paris could better deliver him.