Theo thanks her for agreeing to talk to him. She says she’s curious to hear his offer. We engage in small talk, praising the beauty of the region and the village.
“Madame Mesnil,” Theo says, “have you ever heard about an old key found in your cellar?”
“No. Is it valuable?”
“Not in itself.” He smiles. “It isn’t an art object. No gold or gems, either. But it’s important to me.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“To my family,” he clarifies. “It’s an heirloom linked to our past.”
“Then how did it find itself in our cellar?”
Theo turns to me, wordlessly authorizing me to tell her the story of Simon coming into possession of that key during the war and burying it in the cellar while he awaited his execution.
She takes her cheeks in her hands. “What a story!”
“Do you think the key may still be where Simon hid it?” Theo asks.
“It’s possible,” she says. “I grew up in Le Havre with my parents, but I spent all my summers here. I was very close to my grandparents. And, they were chatty! If anyone in the family had found an old key in the cellar, I would’ve heard a story or two about it.”
Theo leans forward. “Here is my offer. We return with tools and dig up the floor in your cellar. If we don’t find anything, I’ll pay to restore the cellar to its original condition, plus ten thousand euros for the inconvenience. If we find the key, I’ll pay you twenty thousand euros more. How does that sound?”
In her shoes, I’d accept the offer at once. But she hesitates.
“Name your price,” Theo says. “And, by the way, you can be present while we dig.”
“Really?”
“Really,” he asserts. “I have nothing to hide. You’ll see for yourself that the key is as described and that I am not trying to cheat you out of a valuable object.”
“Let me think it over,” she says, standing up.
We rise, too.
“I have a lunch appointment I don’t want to miss,” she says. “Why don’t you come back in two hours?”
Hmm…If she wants to ask for more, she could do it right now. Theo made it clear he was open to negotiation…Weird. But, whatever.
We leave the house and head into the village for food. Roberto takes us to the best restaurant in town, where we are seated the same way as we were during the lunch with Jordan and Darrel—Theo and me at one table, and his two assistants at another.
I wonder if Theo feels the same sense of déjà-vu as I do because he looks at Roberto’s table for a long while, his expression grim.
Things are awkward. So, I take my cue from Theo and act as if the night in the cabin and yesterday afternoon never happened. Except they did. And they rocked my world. Something about his lovemaking and him as a person has touched me deeply. I know he’ll be out of my life soon. Once he’s gone, I’ll do everything to erase from my mind how special he was. But as long as he’s here by my side, I’m hopelessly under his spell.
Looking at him, I break the silence, “Do you think Virginie Mesnil was uncomfortable raising the price?”
“I think so, yes.”
“So, she needed the break to get up the nerve?”
“That seems like a sensible explanation.”
“Who attacked us over the Alps?” I surprise myself by asking so directly.
“A man called Kurt Ozzi.” My surprise grows bigger because he answered just as directly.
“Who is he? What kind of resources does he have to do what he did?”
