“I don't want to say anything till I have all the information,” he said, dodging the issue. Her eyes looked deep into his as she watched him.
“This must be quite a week for you, waiting to hear,” she said sympathetically, and only beginning to glimpse from the look in his eyes how important it was to him. “What did your wife say?” She said it, assuming that other people enjoyed a relationship she didn't. She had no way of knowing his particular problem of not being able to say anything to Katie without her telling her father.
But he stunned her again, this time even more so. “I didn't tell her,” he said softly, and Olivia looked at him in amazement.
“You didn't? Why not?” She could not imagine the reason.
“It's a long story.” He smiled sheepishly at Olivia and she wondered. There was something in his eyes that whispered to her of loneliness and disappointment. But it was so subtle, she wondered if he was even aware of it himself. “She's extremely close to her father,” he said slowly, thinking about what he was saying. “Her mother died when she was a child, and she grew up alone with him. There's absolutely nothing she doesn't tell him.” He looked up at Olivia again, and he could see that she understood him.
“Even things that you tell her in confidence?” Olivia looked outraged at the indiscretion.
“Even those,” he smiled. “Kate has no secrets from her father.” It tugged at his heart as he said it. He wasn't sure why, but it bothered him more than it had in years as he explained it.
“That must be uncomfortable for you,” Olivia said, searching his eyes, trying to see if he was unhappy, or even knew it. He seemed to be suggesting that Kate's loyalty to her father, even to that degree, was not only acceptable to him, but normal. And yet his eyes said something else. She wondered if that was what he had meant when he said everyone's shoes pinched sometimes. To Olivia, to whom privacy and discretion and loyalty meant almost everything, Peter's shoes would have given her bunions.
“It's just the way things are,” he said simply. “I accepted it a long time ago. I don't think they mean any harm by it. But it means that sometimes I just can't tell her things. They have a tremendous attachment to each other.” Olivia decided, for his sake, to stay off the subject. She had no intention of peeling away protective layering, or of hurting him by pointing out how unsuitable his wife's behavior was. After all, Olivia hardly knew him, and she had no right.
“It must have been lonely for you today, worrying about the outcome of those tests, and having no one to talk to.” She looked at him sympathetically. She had gone straight to the heart of it with the words she used. They exchanged a warm smile of understanding. They both had heavy burdens on their shoulders.
“I tried to keep busy, since I couldn't tell anyone,' he said quietly. “I went to the Bois de Boulogne, and watched the kids play. And then I went for a walk along the Seine, and to the Louvre, and eventually I went back to the hotel, and worked, and then the alarm went off.” He grinned. “And it's been a pretty good day ever since then.” And it was going to be a new day soon. It was almost five o'clock in the morning, and they both knew they had to go back to the hotel before too much longer. They went on talking for another half hour after that, and finally at five-thirty they reluctantly left the cafe, and went to find a taxi. They walked slowly along the streets of Montmartre, in her T-shirt and his shirtsleeves, hand in hand, like two young kids on a first date, and they looked incredibly comfortable with each other.
“It's odd how life is sometimes, isn't it?” she asked, looking up at him happily, thinking of Agatha Christie, and wondering if she had done something like this, or something even more daring, during her disappearance. Once she returned, the famous author had never explained. “You think you're all alone, and then someone comes out of the mists, completely unexpectedly, and you're not alone any longer,” Olivia said quietly. She had never, ever dreamt though that she would meet anyone like him. But he met a deep need for her. She was starving for friendship.
“It's a good thing to remember when things get rough, isn't it? You never know what's right around the corner,” Peter said, smiling at her.
“In my case, I fear what's right around the corner might be a presidential election. Or worse yet, another madman's bullet.” It was a hideous thought which brought back the ugly memories of her brother-in-law's assassination. It was clear she had loved Andy Thatcher deeply once upon a time, and it still saddened her that life had been so hard on them and thrown them so many terrible curveballs. In some ways, Peter felt sorry for both of them, but for the most part, it was Olivia he felt for. He had never seen anyone ignore another human being the way Andy Thatcher had ignored his wife, each time Peter saw them. There was a total indifference to her, as though she didn't exist at all, or he didn't even see her. And his lack of interest in her clearly extended to his advisors. Maybe she was right, maybe to them, she was simply a decoration. “What about you?” she asked Peter with renewed concern about him. “Will it be very bad for you if your product turns out to be a disaster when the tests come in? What will they do to you in New York?”
“Hang me up by my feet and flay me,” he said with a rueful grin, and then he grew serious again. “It won't be easy. My father-in-law was going to retire this year, I think partly as a vote of confidence in me, but I don't think he'll do that if we lose this product. I think it will be very rough, but I'll just have to stand by it.” But it wasn't just that for him. Putting Vicotec on the market was a way of saving people who had died like his mother and sister years before. And that meant the world to Peter. More even than profit or Frank Donovan's reaction. And now they might lose the whole product. It almost killed him to think that.
“I wish I had your courage,” she said sadly, and the look in her eyes was the one he had seen the first time he met her, the look of sorrow that knew no limit.
“You can't run away from things, Olivia.” But she knew that already. Her two-year-old son had died in her arms. What more courage was there in life than that? He didn't need to lecture her about courage.
“What if your survival depends on running away?” she asked with a serious look at him, and he put an arm around her shoulders.
“You have to be very sure before you do that,” he said, looking at her seriously, wishing he could help her. She was a woman who needed a friend desperately, and he would have loved to be that person, for more than just a few hours. But he also knew that once he left her at the hotel, he'd never be able to call her and talk to her, let alone see her.
“I think I'm getting very sure,” she said softly. “But I'm not there yet.” It was a painfully honest statement. As desperately unhappy as she was, she still needed to make the decision.
“And where would you run to?” he asked as they finally found a cab, and asked for the rue Castiglione. He didn't want to drive her right to the hotel, and they didn't know yet if everyone had been able to go back inside, or if they were still gathered in the square, waiting.
But for Olivia, Peter's last question was easy. She had been there before, and had known even then that it would always be her safe haven. “There's a place I used to go a long time ago, when I came here to study for a year in college. It's a little fishing village in the south of France. I found it when I first came, and I used to go there for weekends. It's not chic, or fashionable, it's very simple, but it was the one place I could always go to think when I needed to find myself again. I went there for a week after Alex died, but I was afraid the press would find me eventually, so I left before they did. I would hate to lose it. I'd love to go back there again one day, and stay for a while, maybe even finally write the book I keep thinking I have in my head, to see if I can do it. It's a magical place, Peter. I wish I could show it to you.”