...of keeping one's word

Did you ask him what he was looking for on the square?
"No."
Why? You should have...
"I don't know... I didn't want to ruin our trip by confessing to lowly espionage."
I understood that. But still, to start off with silence!
"The following day was our last. He had insisted that we go to the movie theatre, which pleasantly surprised me, since he isn't much of an entertainment-seeker. I impudently cut the ticket line to spare him the wait. He seemed bothered. On the way out, I lose him in the crowd. He loses me, deliberately, in the crowd. I don't know what happened afterward. I don't know anything, other than he must have gone back to the area around Saint-Paul, and that perhaps he had a meeting with a shadow. I wanted to catch him by surprise there at midnight, but my watch had been set back an hour - by him, naturally - and so accurately that I arrived when the clock struck one in the morning, after having wandered and waited in two cafes, one after the other. I don't know what happened. All I know is Basile didn't come back to the hotel until the wee hours of the morning. He was as pale as a ghost. Then a smile came over him, a pretentious smile, but his was always that way. He told me that he loved me, and loved only me, and that never in his life would he hide a thing from me, except the reason that would prevent him from ever speaking a word again. I guess you could say that he... kept his word."
The end of Odile's story is clearly final. I respect it, even as I notice a look of worry in her eyes, one that has been with her since he stopped speaking. I wedge my raised knees against the seat in front of me, a good meditative position for a perplexed traveler. I abandon the inhabitants of the bus for a moment to float back into my bad memories once again. I think about my own Idol, the queen, my wife, who hasn't said a word to me for day. Everything brings me back to her. I believed that I took this abandonment as a relief. But it weighs on me already.

[My Beautiful Bus, Jouet, J.]