He feels strangely confident that letting Noemie take them all to the catacombs is a good idea. Billie needs distracting, and Tom needs there to be as little dead time as he can engineer. He had thought that maybe when she was actually here, he would feel more able to talk about things. But still, talking feels impossible. He feels alternately like there is nothing to say, and that there is so much that he can't start, pin-balling between these positions, both of which leave him silent. He has been trying to identify when the last substantive conversation he had with his father was, and coming up dry. Years now of unreturned phone calls, avoided meetings, civil nods. One of the reliefs of living here has been that it puts his distance from his family into a context that makes sense. He is physically elsewhere.

Not that he knows what he is doing here. But not knowing what he is doing in Paris feels more productive than not knowing at home.