Chapter 11: Les Douze

Nobody at the table said anything.

Somebody's fork touched a plate and the sound carried to the windows.

"Aimée," Preston said, in English. "Wait. Let me explain."

"In English?" I said, in French. "Why? We always speak French here."

He closed his mouth.

I ladled gumbo into a white bowl, with rice, and set it down in front of the banker beside Solène.

"Bon appétit," I said. "C'est un gumbo de mon pays. Ma mawmaw le faisait le dimanche."

It's a gumbo from my country. My mawmaw made it on Sundays.

The banker stared at the bowl and did not pick up his spoon.

A woman near the middle, one of the wives, went very white.

"She speaks," she whispered to her husband. "She speaks French."

"Évidemment que je parle français," I said.

Of course I speak French.

I picked up the next bowl.

"I grew up in a school in Louisiana where the teachers came from Paris," I said.

"A woman from Brussels rapped my knuckles when I put the verb in the wrong place."

I filled the bowl. I didn't spill a drop.

"So when you said, eight years ago, that I couldn't follow you, I was sitting right here."

Nobody looked at me. Everybody looked at me.

"I understood you on Wednesday," I said, and turned to Solène. "When you said I talk like a bayou waitress."

Solène's smile didn't move.

"Je n'ai jamais dit ça," she said.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Husband Told His Ex in French I'd Never Find Out from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.