"Talk to me," I say.
"They're going to put her love on trial." She doesn't look away from the window. "Thirty-five years, and they're going to stand up in a courtroom and call it a symptom."
"Yeah."
"And ours." Now she does look at me. "If it helps them, they'll use ours too."
I don't lie to her. "Probably."
She's quiet a long moment. Then, so quietly I nearly miss it: "It was worth it."
I pull the car into a layby overlooking the valley, the lavender running out below us for miles, and I shut off the engine and turn to face her.
"Say that again."
"Last night. All of it." Her eyes are bright and absolutely steady. "Whatever they try to make of it—it was worth it. I'd do it again. I'd do it in front of the whole court. I—"
She stops.
"Iris."
"I love you."
I freeze.
It's the first time. The first time either of us has put the word in the air and given it weight and shape and consequence. She's looking at me like she's just jumped off something high and isn't certain the water's deep enough.
"I know it's fast," she says, in a rush. "But before the lawyers and the court and whatever else comes—I needed you to know that part is true."
I start to laugh.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because I've been lying awake for two weeks working out how to say it first." I haul her across the gearstick, graceless and desperate, and press my forehead to hers. "I love you too. I have been in love with you for weeks. Possibly since you turned up in those ridiculous heels and looked at me like I was a problem to be solved."
"They weren't ridiculous."
"They were catastrophically ridiculous. I loved them anyway."
She laughs—wet and undone—and then she's kissing me, both hands fisted in my shirt, and I kiss her back on the side of a roadin the middle of a lavender field, with a court date coming and her mother out there somewhere and Jean-Pierre sharpening his knives.
Let them come.
I've got her. She's got me.
That's the whole case.
21
IRIS
Maître Duval arrives on a Tuesday afternoon, just as the heat is reaching its peak.
I'm in the office—the small room off the kitchen that's become mine, buried in spreadsheets and harvest schedules and all the logistics of a lavender farm I'm still learning—when I hear his car come up the drive. Cat appears in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel.
"Six weeks," she says.
"Six weeks."
