Iris meets my eyes. Whatever she sees there makes something in her expression shift.
"We're not enemies," she says. "We never were. We're just two people who've been lied to our whole lives."
She's right. We're not enemies. We're not friends, either—not yet. But standing here in the dusty barn with our grandmother's secrets between us, we're something.
We're her girls.
And maybe that's enough to start.
7
IRIS
We go through the box that night, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor like children sorting through treasure.
There are photographs of people I don't recognize—men in work clothes, women in floral dresses, the same stone farmhouse in the background across decades. There are photographs of Cat at various ages, gap-toothed and grinning, covered in flour, asleep in a garden chair. There are photographs of Hélène, her face becoming more familiar with each one—sharp cheekbones, clever eyes, paint smudged on her fingers.
And there are photographs of my mother.
I find the first one near the bottom of the stack: a young woman with dark hair and a serious expression, standing in front of the farmhouse with what might almost be a smile. She can't be more than eighteen.
"That's Colette?" Cat asks, leaning over my shoulder.
"I think so." My voice sounds strange to my own ears. "I've never seen her this young."
"She looks..." Cat trails off.
"Happy," I finish. "She looks happy."
The next photograph is worse—or better, depending on how you count. My mother and Marguerite together, arms around each other, laughing at something outside the frame. The resemblance is startling; they could be sisters.
"They were close," I say. "Once."
"Before whatever happened."
I set the photograph aside, unable to look at it any longer. What could have made my mother walk away from this? What could have been bad enough to burn that bridge so completely that I never even knew it existed?
Cat reaches for another photograph, and her breath catches.
"Look at this."
She holds it up: Marguerite, younger but still recognizably herself, seated at a kitchen table with a woman whose face I've grown to know from the paintings on the walls. Hélène. They're holding hands across the table, their heads bent close, and the love between them is so visible it makes my chest ache.
"They look—" I start.
"In love," Cat finishes softly. "They look like they're in love."
The photograph is dated 1985 on the back. Four years before I was born. Fifteen years before my mother cut off all contact.
"Monique said Hélène died in 2015," I say. "That's thirty years together. More."
"Thirty-five, if they met in 1980."
"Thirty-five years." I try to imagine it—thirty-five years with the same person, in the same house, building a life together. I've never managed thirty-five months. "And my mother never knew?"
"Maybe she knew." Cat sets down the photograph gently, like it might shatter. "Maybe that's why she left."
The implication settles over me like a cold blanket. My mother, rigid and conventional and so concerned with appearances. My grandmother, quietly in love with a woman for most of her adult life.
