I barely slept—whether from anxiety or excitement, I couldn’t tell. Probably the two. Papy and Bran both dozed off as soon as we were in the air. Jules talked quietly to Vincent in the back of the plane and, after a while, settled in with a book. A driver was waiting for us at arrivals with a handwritten sign that read “Grimod.” Piling our luggage onto a cart, he ushered us to a waiting limo outside. Snow lay inches thick on the ground, and an icy wind made me pull my coat tighter as I dodged ice patches on the sidewalk. We were silent on the ride into Manhattan. I felt a strange numbness as I watched the twinkling city lights grow closer through the limo window. And it wasn’t only from the lack of sleep and jet lag. It was because I was back. Back to where I had grown up. Back to where I had lived for sixteen years—my entire life—with my mother and father, gone to school, learned to drive, kissed my first boy. This place was fact and Paris was fiction. So why did everything feel so surreal?
