Melissa was transferred from Port of Spain to Paris, where she was an Economic Officer at the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international entity then composed of developed countries. The OECD’s headquarters is in Paris. Her focus was monitoring the creation of the European Common Market, a predecessor of the European Union.
With this move, she was now much closer to Alfred, whom she had divorced, got back together again and who was stationed in London. They would visit each other on the weekends and she described this period as one of the most romantic in her life. She conceived her second son, Gregory, who was born in 1996 in London.