He notices me and shakes his head. ‘You’re up there on planting.’ He points to some raised beds by the Mairie.
‘Oh!’ I stop in my tracks, looking around to see three others heading towards the same spot. ‘Cool,’ I add, hoping the abject fear of having to speak to some complete strangers isn’t immediately obvious.
When I get to the planters, one of the volunteers stands up and turns to me.
‘Ava, welcome.’ I feel the recognition slip in – the warmth in his face although he has a beard now and carries a little more weight around his middle. Something inside me drops.
‘Luc?’ I ask although I know the answer. The man in front of me is the closest thing that Ettie had to a best friend.
‘You remember.’ He smiles.
‘Of course I remember.’ I reach for him, press a soft kiss to his cheeks. He stands back and takes me in with a genuine curiosity that leaves me feeling a little naked.
‘You look well,’ he says after a beat.
I try to gauge whether it’s a compliment. Luc’s face though, the way his eyes deepen as he waits for my reaction, assures me that he is being kind.
‘Thank you.’ I nod a little over-enthusiastically. ‘Yeah I’m doing okay. And you? How are you, the boys?’
‘We’re well.’ He nods and gestures to a woman bending over the flowerpots. I recognise the flash of white in her dark hair; it had made her instantly recognisable. Ettie used to call her the zebra and she had pretended to hate it. They lived in an apartment on the square. When her boys were in bed in the summer we would sit outside the café, baby monitor on the table, working our way through bottles of wine and each other’s life stories.
‘Angelina!’ I call towards her. She looks up briefly, manages a strained nod and then turns back to the soil. I feel like I have been slapped.
‘We should start on that one?’ Luc points to a bed further away, clearly trying to iron over the awkwardness.
‘Yeah sure.’
‘How have you been, Ava?’ Luc asks as we pick the weeds out of the bed and turn over the soil. It’s almost the same thing he had asked earlier but now it’s just the two of us I feel pressured to tell him more.
‘Getting there,’ is all I can manage. ‘It’s been hard but I’m okay.’
‘Did you go back to London?’ He looks up at me briefly while trowelling out a stubborn root.
‘Yes,’ I nod. ‘Back with my parents, still there actually.’
‘That’s nice.’
I look up at him, one eyebrow raised. ‘Is it?’
He smirks. ‘Well, I don’t know your parents but I’d like to think they’re nice people.’
‘Yes.’ I’ll let him have that one. ‘They are, and cheap to rent with too,’ I add, as if that justifies why I’m still there, three years later, rooted in some perpetual Peter Pan existence.
‘Are you… with anyone else?’
‘As in dating?’
Luc nods. I think of Archie, how I could probably say that I was seeing him, try to mentally calculate whether Luc wants to hear that I am and moving on, or that I’m not and therefore still in deep mourning for my dead husband.
I decide on the latter. ‘No, not really.’ I throw some weeds into a nearby bucket. I look up at the hunched figure of my old friend at the other planter. She catches my eye briefly and then quickly turns away when she realises I’ve caught her. ‘Is Angelina okay?’
Luc looks over at her and then turns his gaze back to me. He pulls his lips into a grimace and then he lets out a short sigh. ‘She is upset that you haven’t been in touch,’ he says bluntly. A stone that he has been fishing from the soil lands in the bucket with a loud metallic ding.
‘Oh.’ I feel the statement linger in the air, a heaviness materialising in my stomach. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known my sudden departure would raise questions. Part of me also knew that it would piss some people off, but if there was ever a time to be selfish it was in those weeks after Ettie died. It wasn’t meant to be permanent; there was a while when I thought I would be back. I told my parents I’d be a month, and then two, and then it was Christmas and we were buying a new mattress for my bed. ‘Are you upset with me too?’
‘No.’ Luc shakes his head. ‘I understand you disappearing. It was just a shock when we turned up one day to visit and you were gone.’
‘Everything sort of happened last minute.’ I start to try to defend myself but Luc waves his hands for me to stop.
