“No,” Étienne agrees, strolling over to the other side of the bridge and resting his forearms on the railings.
It’s such a pretty view of the town from this aspect: old terraced buildings of varying heights and widths are perched right at the edge of the riverbed. They look as though they were hewn out of the rock with the way the rough stone at the bottom morphs into straight walls rendered with plaster. A long time ago, the walls were painted apricot, but now the color is so faded that only a hint remains, a faint echo of the vibrant terracotta roof tiles.
“Whyisthe water so shallow here?” I ask, going to stand beside him.
“The main body of the river flows underground from back there,” Étienne replies, pointing over his shoulder. “And it comes out along there, joining up with the Ardèche.” He nods downstream.
“So you can’t kayak from your house—sorry, what did you call it? The Willows?”
“Les Saules.”
“You can’t kayak from your place to the Ardèche River?”
“No, I have to drive, although often I hitch a ride with Raphaël.” That’s his friend who has a kayak-hire business. “He’s always going back and forth with tourists.”
“I still haven’t done a kayak tour.” They look like fun—you drive to the hire place, paddle downstream, and then someone comes to collect you in a bus and brings you and the kayak back to the hire place so you don’t have to fight against the current.
“Like I say, the worst tourist to have ever come to the Ardèche.”
Unlike last night, now I can see the twinkle in his eye, but his comment still prompts a pang of guilt.
“Mellie is a nervous driver.” I’m keen to explain. “She never wanted to go far when I came here as a child. Imagine how boring my holidays would have been if I hadn’t been able to hang out with Jackson at his pool.”
“I’m sure you would have found other ways to entertain yourself.”
I glance at him sharply. Was there a hard edge to those words? But he smiles and turns around, leaning against the bridge and folding his arms across his chest.
“Canyoudrive now?” he asks me pointedly.
I hadn’t started learning when we met, even though my seventeenth birthday had been and gone that April. I was a bit freaked out by the idea of getting behind a wheel. And in France, you couldn’t learn to drive until you were eighteen, which was a few months away for him. Every time I visited, he’d take me back to town in his kayak and would then have to paddle himself upstream. No wonder he was strong.
“I cannow. It took me ages to get around to taking my test.” I catch a stray lock of hair that’s blowing in the hot wind and secureit with a hair clip. His dark hair is shifting in the breeze too. “To be honest, I’m so busy at home that I’m usually just glad to get here and put my feet up.”
I freeze as he reaches out and brushes his thumb against my right cheekbone, his gaze focused. “Dirt,” he says, and then I notice that his white T-shirt has suffered the same fate.
“This bridge is filthy.” I laugh as I attempt to dust him off.
His stomach goes concave in reaction to my touch, and then he catches my wrists and my chest contracts. We both look down to see that I’m making an even bigger mess of his T-shirt.
“Oh shit, sorry!”
He chuckles and gently pushes my hands away as he turns and leans over the railing, pointing at the base of the bridge. “So, the first Sainte Églantine is right here.”
I gasp at the sight of the small round painting. I’ve walked over this bridge countless times and it was there all along.
“How did your mother manage it?” It would have been impossible to paint it from this angle. “Can we climb down?” I ask, looking for a way.
“Yes, from over there.”
He leads me across the bridge to the park where the market takes place and turns left in the direction of the public swimming pool. We duck under the railing to get off the footpath and wade through the long grass by the river. I scramble down the bank after him as he drops onto the rocky riverbed, turning around to offer his help.
His hands are rougher than they used to be—I guess years of fixing cars have taken their toll—but his grip is as firm and steady as it ever was and I feel strangely disappointed when he lets me go.
“It’s so beautiful,” I murmur as we stare up at the small round painting of the auburn-haired woman in a yellow dress, encircled by blue birds and pink flowers. It’s remarkably well preserved—his mother, Estelle, obviously used a different material on the metal, and though the paint has flecked off in places, it’s mostly intact. “Do you know how old she was when she painted this?”
“They were all done before she turned twenty-five, which is when she had me.”
“And do you know what inspired her?”
