She was no classic beauty, with her rough dark features and her hair concealed by a rust-colored headscarf. Perhaps it was her eyes – deep-set and velvety, like the nighttime sea.
Whatever it was, Wilson was watching when the guard openly sneered at her and her dirty Arabicized French, watching as she stood there and took it, stock-still except for her tightening lips and rippling eyes.
He'd followed her, and with his rough Quebec inflections had managed to console her over a cup of sludgy French coffee, and then they were off to the dingy motel room he was renting on his barely-out-of-med-school salary. There they'd made frantic love, on top of each other at all times due to the bed's smallness, her silken hair spilling out of the hejab and her grateful downy voice in his ear murmuring James—
He didn't, actually. It was one of James Wilson's lifelong regrets that his wife had chosen that moment to coo over a Rodin statue, and that when he'd turned back the woman was gone, having vanished namelessly into the Parisian crowds.
C'est la vie.