"On my way to the Eurostar in an hour."
"Excellent. I should tell you—the other beneficiary has been contacted. She will be arriving within the week."
The other beneficiary. The woman with the blood claim. The real grandchild.
"Right," I say, and I don't manage to keep the edge out of my voice. "Looking forward to meeting her."
I hang up before he can say anything else and shove the phone back into my pocket. The empty flat stares back at me, judgmental and sad, and I suddenly can't stand to be here for another second.
I grab my suitcase. Lock the door. Drop the keys in the lockbox like a good little tenant.
And then I walk away from the last four years of my life without looking back, because looking back has never done me any good, and because somewhere in Provence, there's a farmhouse waiting for me. A farmhouse that smells like lavender androsemary, where the shutters are painted that particular shade of French blue, where the ghost of my grandmother lives in every room.
Where I belong, even if I have to share it with a stranger who probably belongs there more.
The Eurostar is packed with tourists and businesspeople and a hen party from Leeds that's already three bottles of prosecco deep by the time we hit the tunnel. I wedge myself into a window seat with my headphones on and my eyes closed, trying not to think about the last time I made this journey.
I was twelve. Mum had just told me we weren't going back to Grand-mère's—not that summer, not ever. She wouldn't say why, just got that hard look on her face and said some people couldn't be trusted, and when I cried, she told me I'd understand when I was older.
I'm older now. I still don't understand.
The train hurtles through the darkness under the Channel, and I let myself remember. The smell of lavender drying in the barn. The sound of cicadas at dusk. Grand-mère's hands, weathered and strong, showing me how to prune the plants without damaging the stems. Her laugh, rich and warm, when I inevitably did it wrong anyway.
And the kitchen—Grand-mère teaching me to make proper ratatouille, not the tourist stuff, each vegetable cooked separately and layered with intention. That kitchen is where I became a chef, even if I didn't know it yet.
And I haven't been back in twenty-four years because my mother—
I press my forehead against the cold glass of the window and breathe through the familiar wave of guilt and anger and grief. Mum's been dead for four years now. Whatever happened between her and Grand-mère, whatever betrayal she claimed, she took it to her grave. And I let her. I never pushed, never demanded answers, never tried to find Grand-mère on my own.
I told myself I was being a good daughter. Respecting Mum's wishes. Honouring her pain.
The truth is simpler and uglier: I was scared. Scared of what I'd find. Scared of being rejected. Scared that whatever made Mum run would make Grand-mère push me away too.
And now she's gone, and I'll never know what really happened, and the only thing I have left is half a lavender farm and a lifetime of regret.
The rental car is a tiny Peugeot that smells like air freshener and broken dreams. I navigate out of Aix-en-Provence with the aggressive confidence of someone who learned to drive in London traffic, which is to say I nearly clip two cyclists and have a brief but passionate screaming match with a van driver who seems to think right-of-way is a suggestion.
But once I'm out of the city, once the roads start to wind through the hills of the Luberon, something in my chest begins to unknot.
I remember this. The way the light goes soft and golden in late afternoon. The patchwork of fields—some already showing the first purple hints of lavender season, others bright with sunflowers or the silvery green of olive groves. The stone villages perched on hilltops like something out of a fairy tale, ancient and stubborn and impossibly beautiful.
The Domaine des Lavandes is ten kilometers past Saint-Céline-sur-Sorgue, down a rutted dirt road that's probably hell in winter but right now is just bumpy enough to feel like an adventure. I remember this road too. Mum used to let me roll down the window and stick my hand out to brush the lavender as we passed.
I roll down the window now. The lavender isn't fully in bloom yet—that won't happen until July—but I can smell it anyway, faint and promising. The scent of my childhood. The scent of home.
And then the road opens up, and there it is.
The farmhouse.
I pull over and just... look. I can't help it. The bastide sits at the top of a gentle rise, its honey-colored stone glowing in the evening light. Blue shutters, just as I remembered. The terrace with its climbing roses—more overgrown than they used to be, but still there. The barn off to the left, the distillery where Grand-mère made her lavender oil. The rows and rows and rows of lavender stretching out behind the house, purple-grey and waiting.
It's exactly the same. It's completely different. It's the place I've been dreaming about for twenty-four years, and it's real, and it's here, and Grand-mère isn't.
"Okay," I say to myself, because apparently I'm still doing that. "Okay. You can do this."
I drive the rest of the way with my heart in my throat.
The spare key is still under the third flowerpot to the left of the door. Of course it is. Grand-mère was a creature of habit, and some habits outlive their keepers.
