“I’ll see you again in five years.”
For a while, Laetitia didn’t think about those words. She had plenty to worry about, after all: long nights studying at the Boston University library, papers that took weeks to write and edit, summers at archaeological digs, the constant push to live up to her grandfather’s name – both of their names, really.
As graduation approached, however, the promise – if it was indeed a promise – haunted her. Would she see a man in a red jacket at the ceremony? After all, he’d seen her off on this journey, why shouldn’t he be there at its culmination?
She completely missed all the speeches and barely heard her own name announced, too busy scanning the crowd for that jacket, but the only reds she spotted were ladies’ dresses.
No Lupin. No Jigen or Fujiko or Goemon, either.
Laetitia managed to hide her disappointment from her friends as they celebrated; they didn’t know she’d been waiting for Lupin, anyway. For some reason, the adventure she’d had with the thief and his friends felt precious, something to be kept to herself and not blabbed around campus, so she’d held her tongue, not even telling her best friends of the amazing things she’d experienced.
Well, mostly. Every now and again, she’d let something slip, usually when someone got her drunk at a dance club: a word about micro black holes or a joke about falling from a plane without a parachute or musings on the feeling of floating through the sky on the Eclipse. Nobody seemed to completely believe her, which suited her just fine.
Laetitia frequented those same clubs her last few weeks in Boston; she’d been invited to work on the Ali Kosh site in Iran and knew it was remote enough that clubs would not be part of her off time. She wasn’t too much of a dancer, but the atmosphere reminded her of places she’d frequented in Paris, when she hadn’t been working for her grandf– for Lambert.
It was one of those clubs she found herself in on a Friday night. The club was busy, full of Boston University students ready to party the weekend away. Laetitia was alone, having successfully fended off the attentions of a few college boys, nursing a drink at the bar, when the seat next to her was taken.
She braced herself for some sort of pick-up line, but what she heard instead made her heart stop.
It wasn’t so much the words, in French – “That Gardner Museum is tempting, you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” – as the voice.
Laetitia turned her stool, stunned. “Lupin?”
The thief looked exactly as she remembered him, from the tiny patch of hair on his chin to his tailored red jacket. A wide grin spread across his face, lip curling up at the edges, eyes lit with mischief. “Laetitia,” he said, waving the bartender down. “Or do you go by Miss Bresson these days?”
Trying to stay composed, Laetitia sipped at her drink while Lupin ordered. “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said. It wasn’t quite a lie; she’d quit believing he’d show up when he didn’t come to graduation.
“Told you I would, didn’t I?” he said.
