“I need your address,” I say to Lise when she glances up and spots me.
She looks weary. “Let him—”
“Please,” I interrupt. “I have to see him. He’s not a pawn, Lise. He’s the one.”
She stares at me for a long moment, and then she says, “Fine. But I’m going to let him know that you’re coming,” she warns. “It’s up to him how he takes it from here.”
Lise lives ina different town and I have to drive over the mountain pass to get there. Up here, the sky is everywhere, a cloudless blue dome overhead. The land flattens out and the grass-topped hills roll away in every direction, but I catch glimpses of the wide green river sparkling in the valley below. As the road tilts and curves downhill, the mountain swallows up the view once more.
Eventually I find myself on a country road that runs parallel to a river, another tributary of the Ardèche. Up ahead, a town rises out of the landscape: a church steeple and the terracotta roofs of stone houses. I check the GPS on my phone and slow down, turning onto a narrow lane.
Étienne’s car is straight ahead, parked outside a single-story cottage. A flash of orange catches my eye and I notice a kayak tucked up against the stone wall of an outbuilding. A glimmer of green water sparkles beyond it. Was that Eve’s kayak? The one she used to train in? Or is it Étienne’s? He said he had a solo, but I’ve never seen it. Perhaps he keeps it here. Perhaps it makes him feel close to Eve to go out on the river on his own, retracing the same waterways that they used to paddle together.
Pain lances my heart. I take a long, shaky breath, unclick my seat belt, and get out of the car.
The front door opens. Étienne is standing there in the same rumpled gray T-shirt that I hurled at him earlier.
“I remember now,” I say, touching my fingertips to my eyebrow to indicate his scar. “You came to the château. You’d cut yourself falling up the steps.” It wasn’t a lie, what he told me, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. “Sandrine drove you home.”
His eyes flare.
I shake my head, my nose prickling as I approach him. “I hadn’t forgotten. I remember details about that day, but I hadn’t put them together. I didn’t realize it was you.”
He averts his gaze, his brow furrowed.
“Did you know it wasme?” I ask, wrapping my arms across my chest protectively. “When we were seventeen?”
He shakes his head and then pauses before meeting my eyes again. “Not at first. My mother realized right at the end of the summer. It was why I didn’t come to say goodbye before you left.”
I’d asked him to meet me in town because I’d forgotten about Albert’s birthday dinner. I’d thought that maybe he was upset about my feelings for Jackson—only two days earlier I’d fled to his house in tears and blurted it all out.
“I don’t understand. So you found out that I was the little girl, but why would that stop you from coming to say goodbye?”
He looks sad. “Because I went from really liking you to feeling the complete opposite. When I realized you were linked to him, her,them.” He spits each of these pronouns out. “I wanted nothing to do with you.”
I’m so confused. “But I didn’t think your mum had a problem with the factory, with the Osiers. I thought it was just your uncle. Why do you despise them so much?”
He sighs and looks at me. After a long pause, he finally answers. “Because Sébastien was my father.” He sounds exhausted. “Albert is my grandfather.”
Étienne is inthe kitchen, making himself a drink. “I need a coffee if we’re going to do this,” he muttered as he opened the door to me and directed me to the living room.
Now I’m sitting on the sofa, my mind reeling. Albert is Étienne’sgrandfather? Sandrine is hisaunt? Oh my God, Jackson is hiscousin!
I’m distracted from my racing thoughts by a wall of photos. Étienne is with Eve in some of them. My eyes catch on an image of him laughing, his face drenched in sunlight. He has his arm slung around Eve’s shoulder and he’s looking slightly off to the side, while she smiles directly into the camera. They look so happy. I tug my attention away and look around. It’s cozy in here, with colored throw cushions and houseplants scattered around. I wouldn’thave thought Lise would choose to decorate like this, but then I realize that this place probably still has Eve’s stamp all over it.
My face prickles at the reminder that this is where Étienne wants to be. At our first argument, he ran to a place where he obviously feels safe.
“When did you find out?” I ask as Étienne comes back. I declined his offer of a drink. “About Sébastien being your dad. When we were seventeen?”
He shakes his head as he sits down at the other end of the sofa, taking a sip of his coffee. “My mum told me when I was younger. It can’t have been more than a few months before I tried to see Albert. She’d started to get a bit unsteady on her feet. I think she sensed something was wrong, but she hadn’t got a diagnosis yet. She wanted me to know who my family was in case something happened to her.” He snorts. “She thought we might need their help in taking care of me.” He sounds bitter, but I can see from his face that it’s more than that. He’slivid. He hooks his right arm over the back cushion as he turns to face me. “That day when I came to the château, my mother had stumbled and fallen down the stairs. She hadn’t broken anything,” he says when I gasp, “but I was so worried. She’d told me she was fine, that she just needed to rest, and she’d gone up to bed. In the afternoon, I went to check on her. She’d fallen asleep, but I could see a bruise coming up on her face. I tried to talk to her as I had a weird feeling that something bad was coming, but she mumbled that she needed to sleep. She told me to go and watch TV.” He clears his throat. “She hadn’t said much about my dad, only that he’d died before I was born. But she had told me that if anything happened to her, I should go to the château on the hill, ask to speak to Albert and tell him that I was Sébastien’s son.” He releases a heavy breath. “When I struggled to wake her, that’s what I tried to do.”
“Albert didn’t already know about you?”
He shakes his head. “My mother hadn’t told anyone—Sébastien died before she knew she was pregnant. She said it was our secret. Perhaps she was worried about how her brother would react, but also, she had only been a factory worker. She and Sébastien weren’t married; she might have been scared that the family would try to take me away.”
“Albert wouldn’t have done that,” I say quickly. “He would have been happy to have had a connection to his son, to Sébastien—”
“Sandrine made it very clear to my mother,” he interrupts furiously, “that Albert wouldnotwant anything to do with me. She said that he would never recognize me as his grandson and that there was no proof that I was related to Sébastien. She made her father out to be an old man, drowning in grief, and my mother a callous gold digger who wanted to cause him misery. She offered money for us to go away. My mother told her to go to hell.”
