About the Author Credits Copyright About the Publisher Prologue
THE FIRST TIME I HAD SEEN THE STATUE IN THE fountain, I had no idea what Vincent was. Now, when I looked at the ethereal beauty of the two connected figures--the handsome angel, with his hard, darkened features focused on the woman cradled in his outstretched arms, who was all softness and light--I couldn't miss the symbolism. The angel's expression seemed desperate. Obsessed, even. But also tender. As if he was looking to her to save him, and not vice versa. And all of a sudden, Vincent's name for me popped into my mind: mon ange. My angel. I shivered, but not from the cold.
Jeanne had said that meeting me had transformed Vincent. I had given him "new life." But was he expecting me to save his soul? Chapter One
MOST SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS I KNOW WOULD DREAM of living in a foreign city. But moving from Brooklyn to Paris after my parents' death was anything but a dream come true. It was more like a nightmare.
I could have been anywhere, really, and it wouldn't have mattered--I was blind to my surroundings. I lived in the past, desperately clinging to every scrap of memory from my former life. It was a life I had taken for granted, thinking it would last forever.
My parents had died in a car accident just ten days after I got my driver's license. A week later, on Christmas Day, my sister, Georgia, decided that the two of us would leave America to live with our father's parents in France. I was still too shell-shocked to put up a fight.
We moved in January. No one expected us to go back to school right away. So we just passed the days trying to cope in our own desperate ways. My sister frantically blocked her sorrow by going out every night with the friends she had made during our summer visits. I turned into an agoraphobic mess.
Some days I would get as far as walking out of the apartment and down the street. Then I found myself sprinting back to the protection of our home and out of the oppressive outdoors, where it felt like the sky was closing in on me. Other days I would wake up with barely enough energy to walk to the breakfast table and then back to my bed, where I would spend the rest of the day in a stupor of grief.
Finally our grandparents decided we should spend a few months in their country house. "For a change of air," Mamie said, which made me point out that no difference in air quality could be as dramatic as that between New York and Paris.
But as usual, Mamie was right. Spending the springtime outdoors did us a world of good, and by the end of June we were, if only mere reflections of our previous selves, functional enough to return to Paris and "real life." That is, if life could ever be called "real" again. At least I was starting over in a place that I love.
There's nowhere I'd rather be than Paris in June. Even though I've spent every summer there since I was a baby, I never fail to get that "Paris buzz" as I walk down its summer streets. The light is different from anywhere else. As if pulled straight out of a fairy tale, the wand-waving brilliance makes you feel like absolutely anything could happen to you at any moment and you wouldn't even be surprised.
But this time was different. Paris was the same as it had always been, but I had changed. Even the city's sparkling, glowing air couldn't penetrate the shroud of darkness that felt superglued to my skin. Paris is called the City of Light. Well, for me it had become the City of Night.