Iris laughs — that startled, unguarded one — and rolls into me in the dark, and puts her freezing feet against my legs, which is still a war crime, and will remain a war crime for the rest of my life.
"Are you frightened?" she asks, much later.
I think about it seriously, because she deserves a serious answer, and because this is the last night I will ever be asked that question by a woman who isn't my wife.
The old thing is in there somewhere. It always will be. Twelve years old in the back of a car, watching a house get smaller.
But it's quiet. It's been quiet a good while now.
"No," I say.
And then, because it's true, and because she is the only person alive I would say it to:
"I'm hungry, though."
"It's two in the morning."
"I'm aware."
Iris sighs the sigh of a woman who has made her choices.
"Go on, then," she says.
So I get up, on the night before my wedding, and go along to my grandmother's kitchen in the dark, and make us both an omelette.
33
IRIS
I wake up alone, which is not how I went to sleep.
At some point in the small hours, Monique and Sophie let themselves into our bedroom — into ourbedroom— and removed my fiancée from the bed like a piece of contraband.
"Tradition," Monique said, in the voice of a woman who has never lost an argument.
"Welive together," Cat said, from somewhere inside the duvet. "We have lived together for months. She has watched me eat a pain au chocolat standing over the sink."
"Not on the wedding day."
"Monique, it isfour in the morning—"
"Out," said Monique.
And out she went.
So I wake at eight, alone, in a house that has plainly been up for hours. Footsteps in the hallway. Shouting from the kitchen— Mathilde, furious about something. Someone dragging a table across the terrace with no regard whatsoever for the flagstones.
Nadia comes in with coffee and does not hand it to me.
"Not until you've eaten."
"Nadia—"
"You haven't eaten since yesterday lunchtime. Sophie warned me. Sit."
She's brought bread and apricot jam on a tray, and she stands over me while I eat it, arms folded, exactly the way she used to stand over me before client presentations.
"You're shaking," she observes.
