"Did you ever push?"
"Once." Iris's voice is flat. "I was ten. I found a letter in my mother's things—from Grand-mère. I didn't get to read much before my mother caught me, but I saw... she said she loved me. That she wanted to know me. That she thought about me every day."
Her hands have stilled on the plant. I wait.
"My mother took the letter. She burned it in the fireplace while I watched. And then she told me that Marguerite Beaumont was a selfish woman who had hurt our family, and I was never to contact her or mention her name again."
The words hang in the fragrant air between us. I think of my own mother, her hard face, her refusal to explain. The parallel is almost too perfect.
"My mother did the same thing," I say quietly. "Well, not the burning. But the silence. The forbidden topic. When she told me we weren't coming back to Provence. I cried for days. Begged her to tell me what happened, what Grand-mère had done. She wouldn't say. Just that some people couldn't be trusted and we were better off without her."
Iris looks at me then, really looks—and for the first time since she arrived, I see something behind the armor. Pain. Recognition. The terrible familiarity of a wound that matches your own.
"We were children," she says. "And they kept us from her."
"Yeah."
"And now she's dead, and we'll never know if—" She stops, pressing her lips together. "I keep thinking about what I would have said to her. If I'd had the chance. If I'd been braver."
"What would you have said?"
"I don't know. Maybe just..." She swallows. "Hello. I'm here. I've been wanting to meet you my whole life."
Something in me gives. I've spent the past week resenting this woman—her blood claim, her ignorance, the way she looks at this place like it's a problem to be solved. But standing here in the lavender, watching her fight back tears over a grandmother she never knew, I see the truth.
We're the same. We're both casualties of secrets we didn't keep and choices we didn't make.
"She would have loved you," I say, and I mean it. "She already did love you. She talked about you constantly—every summer, every visit. Her ghost in America. She would have given anything to have you here."
Iris's hands are shaking slightly. She turns back to the lavender, making a cut with more force than necessary.
"Tell me about the summers," she says, her voice rough. "Tell me what it was like."
So I do.
We work through the morning and into the afternoon, and I tell her everything. The cooking lessons in the kitchen. The walks through the lavender at dusk. The way Grand-mère read to me in French, and the time I fell in the stream and she wrapped me in her cardigan and told me that falling was the first step to learning how to get up.
In return, Iris tells me about Chicago. Her father, who taught her to cook and laugh before the divorce. Her mother, who taught her to perform and never show weakness.
"That's why I make lists," she says at one point, almost laughing. "If I have a plan, I have control. If I have control, I can't fail. And if I don't fail—"
"People can't leave," I finish.
She looks at me, startled. "How did you know?"
"Because I do the same thing. Just with cooking instead of lists." I shrug. "If I can feed people, they need me. And if they need me, they can't throw me away."
"That's..." She trails off.
"Messed up? Yeah. Grand-mère would have had something to say about it. She had something to say about everything."
We're quiet for a while, working side by side. The sun has shifted, the shadows growing longer. We've covered maybe a third of the field—enough for one day, probably.
"I should say something," Iris says suddenly. "About yesterday. About what Monique told us."
"About Hélène?"
"About Hélène. About what she was to Grand-mère." Iris's voice is careful, measured. "I want you to know that it doesn't... I mean, I don't..."
