‘Fixing,’ Jacques said.
‘You’re really annoying me now!’
‘Good! Because I have come to realise what is missing from all of your articles in the magazine!’
‘Oh, right, so now you’ve finished attacking my plaster-giving personality, you’re going to start on my career? You said you loved my writing!’
She got up from the chair and looked like she was either going to leave the room or attack him with something from the fruit bowl. It didn’t matter either way. He was committing to this.
‘You only write about what’s good.’
‘That’s not true!’ She had leaned on the table and spat the words at him.
‘Yes, it is true. And I don’t know if that’s the inspirational, beautiful picture-painting that you’re told to write, that perhaps your writing in its purest form is then censored somehow but?—’
‘What?’
‘The people and the animals and the extreme places you write about must have elements of hardship to their stories.’
‘Of course they do!’
‘Then why do you only give the tiniest glimpse of that? Surely the more difficult the journey the stronger the happy conclusion will feel.’
‘I write about difficult journeys all the time!’
‘But you never connect with that part of it,’ he told her. ‘Your words wash over it and bring people away from bad stuff and draw readers’ attention to the communities rising, or the animals reproducing, or the environment changing for the good.’
‘If you want to read about how the world is all going to end only a few hundred years from now I can direct you to a very different publication.’
‘You’re not listening to me.’
‘And you’re just deflecting. Like you’ve done since I arrived. Anything to take the attention off you and your identities and your inability to face up to reality.’
‘It takes one to know one? Is that not the saying?’
‘Oh, so you think we’re alike now?’
He stood up, moved around the table until he was closer to her. ‘I think we both hide how we feel so we do not hurt anyone else but ourselves.’
‘Not listening now,’ Orla stated. ‘And I don’t have time for this. I stayed up to ask you about Delphine, I’ve done that and you disagree. You’ve slated my writing which is the one thing I take pride in and you’ve described me as someone who wallpapers over things instead of facing them head on and?—’
He couldn’t help himself. In an exact replica of the move he had made when she first came to his home, he had her flat on her back and silent on the table in a millisecond.
‘You know I think your writing is incredible,’ he told her, leaning over and close. ‘It’s brought the outside world to me here in Saint-Chambéry.’ He smoothed a hand down her hair asshe looked up at him. ‘But you shouldn’t be scared to show the cracks, along with the repair and the resolution.’
She was shaking a little as she replied. ‘No one wants to see the cracks.’
‘Yes, they do,’ Jacques told her. ‘That’s what I’ve only just realised. When I’ve started to want to know how you got broken. It’s those unaffixed parts spiralling away from everything else that makes things interesting.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, Orla. And it’s finding out how that feels, to want to know the parts of someone that aren’t perfect, that has made me see that I need to learn how to show those pieces of myself too.’
He was staring into her eyes now, seeing someone very different to all the other times he’d looked before. She was vulnerable in this moment, as raw as he had seen her. And he liked seeing that honesty reflecting in her eyes.
‘And you want to showmethose pieces?’ Orla asked.
‘Yes.’
