The American Natural in Paris: Escape Hatch Series, #3

By K. A. Keener

In the third installment in the Escape Hatch Series, Thalia finds herself unexpectedly in France. On an adventure that takes her through the Alps and the streets of Paris, she finds love. 
But is she ready for this new love? Will she and her new lover be able to overcome his family's disapproval? And can she overcome her own fear of asking for too much? 
Join Thalia as she travels mountain ranges and Parisian sights to discover where she belongs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: K. A. Keener
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201667092

Book preview

Check out Thalia’s other adventures as part of the Escape Hatch Series in the Canary Islands, Thailand and New York City.

Follow along on Instagram @nomadThalia and at www.EscapeHatchSeries.com.

Copyright © 2022 K. A. Keener

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: www.escapehatchseries.com

Chapter One

It wasn’t until Thalia exited the overnight train in Briançon, with its adorable French medieval stone streets and Alpine postcard backdrop, that she began to understand the difference between being a tourist and being a digital nomad. This isn’t to say that she was no longer a tourist in any way. She still did completely touristy things. She took pictures of the most mundane of food—most recently croissants—because of the novel view behind it. She regularly had difficulty recognizing the coins of a place and gave too much money to cashiers, who, with smug smiles, always placed two or three of the metal discs back into her palm. As a digital nomad, she would not be mistaken for a local by anyone, even by other travelers. But still, she was different from an ordinary tourist.

Tourists had consumptive habits that could not be maintained past three or four days in a place. They were like people who came to the party after hearing about it from others, but spent their time at the snack table, gobbling up all of the sights, grazing over everything of cultural and historical significance, ticking off the area’s delicacies from a carefully made list, until they felt they’d seen what they came to see, had packaged the place into a story to tell at home, and could leave without remorse and without feeling an obligation to say goodbye to anyone specifically.

Digital nomads were blundering fools, to be sure, but their slower pace allowed them to be recognized at the farmer’s market by the man who sold the goat cheese so fresh you could taste the green grazing of his animals as you cut through the shingled collapse of the pungent white log.

But they weren’t quite locals, either. They hadn’t become numb to a place the way a local could. They still took pictures of places where they saw beauty that had long since become invisible to the locals—mountain views at the edge of parking lots, newly budding flowers. They were sustained by an ability to savor the setting that’s only possible in the in-between—not settled in a place, nor rushing through it to the next.

For years, Thalia, as a travel agent in New York, had built itineraries for tourists, designed backdrops for her clients’ stories that they would tell once they returned home. And she, of course, had thought at the time that this was mainly what was on offer to traveling interlopers.

But now, getting off the night train from Paris, she understood the advantages of being a digital nomad. She had not researched the top things to do or eat; she had no list. She only saw the jagged mountain range, the gray stone fortresses overlooking the valley and the sunburned, practical faces of the townsfolk gathering their supplies from the hardware store or the bakery. She knew the place would unfold itself (though not completely) to her over the months she planned to work there. She took in the frantic pace of others leaving the train, pulling out their phones to find a map of the town, their own blue dot of GPS pulsing comfortingly. She decided to find some coffee.

As she sat and judged the cranky, driven tourists tugging their kids or their bags or both along the main street, she nestled into the comfort of her assumed superiority. There was a totem pole of status in a tourist town; at the top were the locals who succeeded by prying the euros from tourists’ pockets; at the bottom, the tourists themselves, who fueled the whole system. Thalia, as a digital nomad, figured she was slightly higher in status than those bottom feeders. Quickly, she would learn to move around the town without a map, or she might practice her fledging French at the patisserie. She clung to this mildly elevated view of herself and disparaged the tourists’ fumbles even more strongly than the locals might.

Even as she judged the tourists, she knew there were far fewer of them to judge than there would have been before the pandemic. A few days before, she hadn’t even planned on traveling to the Alps, nor could she have predicted that she’d be gazing out at the sparkle of snow along the mountain ranges beyond her cafe table.

❖

Just one week earlier, she’d been in a tropical climate, watching, from the balcony of her beach bungalow, fishermen flinging sparkling nets out into the Gulf of Thailand. But her visa had expired, and all chance of renewing it had diminished as the pandemic raged on, fueled by a more contagious variant. She’d bought a flight to New York with a one-day layover in Paris. She’d never been there and spent the day wandering the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, buying overpriced espresso and taking pictures of clumps of young people in long scarves and trench coats outside the Sorbonne. When she returned to the airport, she saw her flight had been delayed and then cancelled. The news said half of Paris had become infected with the new variant; every industry was short on workers, including the airlines. An email informed her that she would be rebooked, but it didn’t say when.

On the moving sidewalk to the central hub of the terminal, without a destination, she walked with artificial speed beneath her. The tread that caught under each step felt destabilizing. She’d become a person merely reacting, trying to trust her decisions as the path before her continued to fork, leading to unknown places. Though now, as she reached the end of the moving sidewalk and returned to her own propulsion, she felt tired. A bartender behind a long bar at the end of the hub stared at her and smiled as he wiped the interior of a pint glass. It was enough. She wheeled her carry-on over to the bar and ordered a Manhattan.

A couple sat two seats over, a perfect distance for eavesdropping.

Let’s flip a coin, the man said to his companion.

You can’t be serious, the woman replied in a tone that both accused and flirted.

"I am … what else are we to do? Let’s just ski our way through this wave. The air there is the cleanest I’ve ever breathed. They bring children there to recover from pulmonary conditions …. If a place could be the opposite of the pandemic, it is this one."

The woman seemed to pause and consider this. When’s the last time you were there?

I don’t know … maybe five years ago, but a mountain doesn’t change in five years.

How far away is it?

It’s a night train. We’ll book a sleeping compartment and be there in the morning. We could be slicing our way down the slopes right after breakfast.

The man was persuasive—he had a floppy haircut, his dark hair curtaining his insistent gaze. But she could tell he wasn’t making much headway with his intended audience.

Thalia drank her cocktail and considered how she might respond to someone encouraging her to ride out the pandemic in the mountains. The idea sounded nice, but she knew she also might say no, might also