“Hello, Mebel, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you tonight,” he says when he picks up the phone.
“Alain, you want to go to the Cotswolds with me?” Mebel says.
There is a pause, then he says, “Uh, why?”
“Well, you remember my classmate Gemma?”
“Yes,” Alain says carefully.
“She disappear and I am worried about her. So I am going to look for her there. She lives there.”
“I don’t know about this, Mebel. Maybe she just wants to be left alone, no? She is a grown woman, if she wants to talk to you, I’m sure she’ll reach out.”
Mebel sighs impatiently. “Okay, I take Uber.”
“Wait—” Alain pauses again. “All right. I will take you. But, Mebel, I think you’re overreacting.”
Mebel ignores the patronizing tone in his voice. “I see you tomorrow. Nine o’clock.”
She is done with people telling her she’s overreacting.
Alain shows up at twentypast nine the next morning. Mebel is irritated, but she’s also aware that she needs him to drive her to the Cotswolds, and so she bites her tongue when she sees him. He greets her with a hug and a kiss on her cheek, then he says, “How about a day trip to London instead? Lunch at the Ritz? You’d love that.”
Mebel swallows yet more irritation. What is it about her that makes people think they can just ignore what she wants and try to push their own agenda onto her? “I have lunch plenty of time at the Ritz. Is okay, nothing special.”
“All right. What about—”
Without waiting for him to open the car door for her, Mebel opens it herself, slides in, and closes it. She smiles at him through the window and sees his chest heaving in a sigh. When he’s inside the car, she looks at him askance. “Why you don’t want to go to Cotswolds? I thought is your favorite place in England.”
“Oh, I love the Cotswolds. I just think the reason you have to go there is rather suspect. We are intruding on someone who’d rather be left alone. I want to respect her privacy. Now, if you wanted to go to the Cotswolds to have a nice day out, that’s an entirely different matter and I’d only be too happy to oblige.”
Mebel snorts. “That is nice, but I am Chinese mother, I don’t respect anybody’s privacy. Start the car.”
With that, Alain seems to realize that the decision is final, and he does as he is told. Mebel turns away from him and looks out of the window to hide the smirk that’s taken over her face. What is she? She has never spoken to Henk like this before, and it is exhilarating. She could get used to this.
The drive to the Cotswolds is a peaceful one. For Mebel, that is. For Alain, it seems to be a different story altogether. Once or twice, he mutters under his breath in French, but when Mebel says, “What?” he says, “Nothing, ma chérie.”
Maybe he is irritated at having been coerced into driving her there, or maybe he is turned off by Mebel’s insistence at finding Gemma. Mebel decides that either way, she doesn’t actually care. She knows that their relationship has an expiration date, and the knowledge is liberating.
When they get to the Cotswolds, Mebel’s spirits lift even higher. She has never been to a place quite like it before. Whenever she and Henk and their friends have traveled, they have always stuck to glamorous big cities. Paris, Shanghai, Dubai, places dominated by shiny towers. The Cotswolds is an entirely different place. The houses are cottages straight out of a fairy tale, with steepled roofs and flowerpots overflowing with blooms under the windows. Alain finds parking near the center of Northleach, and they climb out of the car.
“I think we should go to market square, ah, there it is,” Mebel says, hurrying ahead.
The town, already charming on its own, becomes straight-up enchanting when Mebel arrives at the market square. Since it’s a Saturday morning, it’s bustling with people going around,perusing the locally made goods. The stands are all selling things one would expect at a local farmer’s market. There’s fresh produce, with some of the biggest heads of garlic and glossiest bell peppers that Mebel has ever seen. There’s freshly baked loaves of sourdough bread and baguettes, and there are baskets of fresh fruit and berries, and for a good while, Mebel is distracted by all of the goodies she’s surrounded by.
Finally, she arrives at a stand selling pots of honey. She looks up at the stand’s name, and sure enough, it says “Clover Lover Farm.”
“Hi, would you like to try some of our clover honey?” the lady behind the stand says when she spots Mebel.
Mebel nods, and the lady unscrews a jar of honey that looks like milk and has the consistency of a paste rather than the usual golden syrupy honey that Mebel is used to. She dips two wooden spoons into the jar and hands them to Mebel and Alain. Mebel puts it in her mouth.
“Mmm,” she says, not expecting the texture at all. It’s a lot more solid than normal honey, almost like a chewy candy, and she can taste the subtle flavor of clover in it. The sweetness is soft and gentle rather than an over-the-top kind that hits your tongue at once. “Ah, is delicious.”
“Yes, it is,” Alain says. “The flavor notes in this are very distinct.”
The honey seller beams. “Thank you. It’s my family farm. It goes back three generations.”
“I will buy ten jars, thank you.” Mebel takes out her wallet.
