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or whatever.”
    I didn’t reply as I contemplated this. It
sounded neat. It also sounded completely farfetched.
    “You mentioned Danièle’s your in-law?” I
said. “What, sister-in-law?”
    “Yup. Dev and Danny Laurent. The Double
Ds.”
    “Why don’t you guys get along?”
    “Me and Danny? You mean ’cause of the French
jabs?” He shrugged. “It began with me and the wife. Dev makes fun
of me all the time because I’m French Canadian. Calls me Queeb,
Beaver Beater, Poutine. She’s actually the one who started the
whole frog thing, calling me Frozen Frog. I call her shit back.
That’s just us, our relationship. I found it funny how insulted
Danny always got when she was around, so I started calling her
Frenchy shit too. I don’t think she cares as much as she lets on.
What about you?”
    “What about me?”
    “You and Danny. What’s your deal?”
    I glanced ahead at Danièle. She was speaking
with Pascal, her voice flat and muted. Sound didn’t carry well down
here. The soft silence was like being in an old library or root
cellar or attic.
    “We’re just friends,” I said.
    “Come on, bro. She invited you to the catas.
It’s always just her and Rascal. She even put up a stink about me coming tonight, and I’m fucking family. So what’s the
word? You shagging her?”
    The question caught me off guard, and
invoked memories of Saturday morning. Waking in Danièle’s
poverty-posh bedroom to the half-light creeping beneath the fuchsia
blinds, the smell of the Kashmir Rose incense she’d burned the
night before, the sensuous curve of her spine, from the nape of her
neck to where her tailbone disappeared beneath the sheets…
    Rob, I realized, was watching me
closely.
    He snorted. “Just friends, my ass.”
     

Chapter 12
ROB
    So they really were fucking, Rob thought.
Couldn’t say he was surprised. Like he’d told Will, Danny didn’t
invite just anyone to the catas. Not only that, Danny’s been all
over him since he arrived at the pub.
    Once again Rob felt bad for Pascal. He could
tell her flirting was eating the sad fuck up inside. At the same
time, however, he was happy for Danny. After that prick Marcel, she
deserved to be happy again.
    Marcel.
    His name alone pissed the fuck out of Rob.
It wasn’t just his cheating. That was almost the norm over here.
Men cheated. Women cheated. A coworker of Rob’s thought her
long-term boyfriend was cheating on her, or at least thinking about
doing it, so she cheated first, to beat him to the punch. And look
at the guy running the country. He began an affair with a woman
twenty years his junior during the presidential race. A few weeks
after the story broke, he divorced his wife, the First Lady, and
carried on with the sex kitten. You ask the average Parisian what
they thought about it, you’ll probably get a shrug and a “ C’est
la vie .”
    So it wasn’t the cheating. It was the way
Marcel had treated Danny, bossing her around, keeping tabs on
everything she did. Often when she went out he’d call her every ten
minutes demanding to know what she was doing. But when he went out,
he’d be off the radar until he returned at two or three in the
morning. Danny would call Dev on these nights, balling her eyes
out. Rob would usually be nearby with the girls, listening to Dev’s
end of the conversation. He couldn’t get his head around why Danny
stuck with the fucker. She was usually so strong, so independent.
It was like she became a different person when she was around him.
Yet no matter what Dev told Danny, she wouldn’t ditch him.
    Then, a few months ago, Dev ran into Danny
at Les Quatre Temps, a shopping mall at La Defense metro station.
Danny had a dark bruise along the left side of her face. The makeup
job would have fooled a stranger, but not Dev, and Dev got the
entire lowdown from her.
    Marcel did it. They got in a fight while she
was cooking dinner the evening before. She didn’t want him to go
out. He punched her and went anyway. And this