Whatever happens next, I was here first.
And I'm not going anywhere.
3
IRIS
Twenty-three hours of travel, and I'm fairly certain I've left my sanity somewhere between O'Hare and the Paris connection I almost missed.
The flight was delayed. The layover was chaos. The rental car place in Marseille gave me something approximately the size and structural integrity of a roller skate. And now I'm navigating a dirt road in the dark with a GPS that keeps cheerfully announcing "recalculating" every time I hit a pothole, which is approximately every four seconds.
My mother hasn't spoken to me since our phone call. This is not unusual—Colette Beaumont-Clark can hold a silence like other people hold grudges—but it still settles in my chest like a cold stone. I've disappointed her. Again. Still. Always.
"Recalculating," the GPS announces, and I grip the steering wheel tighter.
"If you recalculate one more time," I tell it, "I'm going to drive us both off a cliff."
The GPS, wisely, says nothing.
The road winds through what I assume is beautiful countryside, though in the darkness it's mostly just shapes and shadows and the occasional alarming rustle of something moving in the brush alongside the car. Lavender, I remind myself. This is lavender country. The brush is probably lavender.
Or wild boars. Do they have wild boars in Provence? I should have researched this better. I should have made a spreadsheet. I should have—
And then the road opens up, and there it is.
The farmhouse is lit up like a beacon in the darkness. Warm yellow light spills from the windows, and there's smoke curling from the chimney, and even from here I can smell something—garlic, maybe, or herbs, something that smells like someone's been cooking.
Someone is here.
I pull up behind a small Peugeot that's already parked in front of the house. My heart is hammering for reasons I don't entirely understand—nerves, probably, or exhaustion, or the strangeness of arriving at a place I've never been that somehow feels like it should have been mine all along.
The other beneficiary. She must be here already. Catherine Aldridge, the woman who somehow earned my grandmother's love.
I kill the engine and sit in the darkness for a moment, breathing. Cataloguing. The stone walls of the house, honeyed even in the dim light. The blue shutters. The terrace to the left, where—
There's someone on the terrace.
A silhouette against the warm light from inside. She's watching me. Waiting.
"Okay," I say to myself. "You can do this. You've handled corporate mergers and a mother who makes ice look warm. You can handle one woman in an apron."
I get out of the car.
The night air hits me immediately—warm and soft and impossibly fragrant, lavender and herbs and something else, something green and alive. For a moment, I just stand there, breathing it in. This is what my mother ran from. This is what she kept me from.
Then the woman on the terrace speaks.
"You must be the other one."
Her voice is British. Warm but guarded, like she's prepared to be friendly but isn't committing to it yet. I walk toward the terrace, my heels crunching on gravel that's clearly designed to destroy expensive shoes, and get my first real look at her.
She's average height, with curly auburn hair escaping from a messy bun. Freckles across her nose. Green eyes that are studying me with an intensity that feels almost physical. She's wearing jeans and a worn t-shirt and an apron—an honest-to-God apron, faded and soft, like she's been here long enough to make herself at home.
She's also, I notice with a particular kind of irritation, gorgeous.
"Iris Beaumont-Clark," I say, extending my hand. "And you must be Catherine Aldridge."
"Cat." She takes my hand—her grip is firm, her palm warm and slightly calloused—and shakes once before letting go. "Nobody calls me Catherine except my dentist and my landlord."
