Isabella climbs in, already pulling her hair back against the heat. I crank the AC, give it a minute to cool down, then pull out of the lot onto I-10 headed east.
New Orleans is an hour away. Time to prepare for walking back into a life I left behind, into a family that has every reason to hate me, into a house that won't smell like Maman's magnolias and Papa's cigars anymore.
The drive passes in relative silence. Isabella watches the landscape change from industrial Baton Rouge to wetlands and bayous, cypress trees draped in Spanish moss, water stretching dark and still on both sides of the elevated highway. Beautiful in a haunted way, ancient and patient and utterly foreign to someone raised in Geneva's ordered streets.
"It's like another country," she says softly.
"It is." I keep my eyes on the road, but what she sees is clear enough. The wildness, the sense that civilization is just a thin veneer over something older and more primal. "Louisiana's always been its own place. French, Spanish, African, Caribbean—all of it mixed together until it became something new."
"Like you."
I glance at her. "What?"
"French surname, American accent, but there's something else underneath." She tilts her head, studying me. "Something that doesn't quite fit either category."
She's not wrong. The Pascals have been in Louisiana since before it was Louisiana, Beaumont blood mixing with settlers and slaves and everyone in between until we became our own breed. Maman used to say we were Creole in the truest sense—children of the colony, shaped by heat and hurricanes and the delta's slow drowning.
"My mother's family goes back generations in New Orleans. The Beaumonts were planters before the Civil War, lawyers and politicians after. My father was nouveau riche oil money from Houma, made his fortune in offshore drilling. The Beaumonts never quite forgave Maman for marrying beneath her station."
"But she did anyway."
"She loved him." Simple as that. Never simple at all. "Étienne Pascal was rough around the edges, but he worshipped her. Bought her that mansion in the Garden District, restored it to its former glory, filled it with antiques and art, gave hereverything she could want except the social acceptance her family withheld."
Isabella's quiet for a moment. Then: "But they're both gone and your siblings blame you for not being there."
"They should. I wasn't." The exit for St. Charles Avenue approaches. "Luc called me when Maman collapsed. I was in Yemen, middle of an operation that was already going sideways. By the time I could extract and get to a phone, she was gone."
"That's not your fault."
"Isn't it?" The street opens up before us, live oaks forming a canopy overhead, streetcar tracks gleaming in late afternoon sun. "I chose that life. Chose the SEALs over family, chose contracts over coming home. When they needed me most, I was half a world away playing hero for strangers."
"You were doing your job."
"My job got Maman buried without me there to hold her hand." The words come out harder than intended. "My job meant Papa died asking for a son who couldn't be bothered to show up until the funeral."
Isabella doesn't respond immediately. Smart woman. She recognizes when someone needs silence more than platitudes.
The Garden District unfolds around us; antebellum mansions set back behind wrought iron fences and gardens that riot with subtropical excess. Old money, old families, old wounds that never quite heal in the delta's humid embrace.
I turn onto our street. The Pascal mansion sits mid-block, Greek Revival perfection that Maman restored to its former glory with Papa's oil money. White columns rise two stories to support a gallery porch that wraps the entire front. Shutters painted dark green frame tall windows. Gardens overflow with magnolias and azaleas and roses that Maman tended herself until the day she died.
Luc waits on the gallery, arms crossed, watching our approach with an expression readable from fifty yards away.
Resentment. Anger. Grief still raw as an open wound.
The wrought iron gate stands closed across the drive. I punch in the old code, half-expecting it to fail. The gate swings open smoothly. They haven't locked me out. Don't know if that makes this easier or harder.
I pull into the circular drive, cut the engine. For a long moment, I just sit there, staring at my childhood home through the windshield. Every window holds memories. Every column witnessed fights and laughter and all the messy reality of growing up Pascal in a city that never forgets and rarely forgives.
"Remy." Isabella's voice is quiet, careful. "We can leave. Find somewhere else."
"No." I force myself to move, open the door, step into heat that wraps around me like coming home and walking into fire all at once. "This is the safest place I know. And my siblings... they're not exactly civilians. They can handle what's coming."
"What does that mean?"
"You'll see." I round the SUV, open Isabella's door, offer my hand. "Just trust me on this."
She takes it, steps down with natural grace that makes her borrowed jeans and simple blouse look elegant.
