"You really believe that?"
"I really do."
She's quiet for a moment, her eyes searching my face. Then she smiles—a real smile, the kind that transforms her whole face, the kind I would do anything to see.
"Okay," she says. "Then I believe it too."
We fall asleep like that, wrapped around each other, the scent of lavender drifting through the open windows. Tomorrow we'll wake before dawn again, work until our bodies ache, collapse into this bed exhausted and satisfied.
Tomorrow we'll keep building this life.
Tonight, we just rest in what we've already made.
25
IRIS
Three days before it ends, I watch the case nearly come apart at the Thursday market.
I'm at the cheese stall when I spot Monique across the square, backed up against the fountain with Monsieur Fabre—the seed merchant, seventy if he's a day, a man who once told me Marguerite taught his wife to graft roses. He's turning his hat in his hands like it owes him money.
I don't mean to listen. I listen anyway.
"—can't do it, Monique. Not in a courtroom."
"You signed your name."
"That was before Bertrand's boy rang." He looks at his shoes. "Jean-Pierre holds the note on my barn. You know that. And his lawyer says if it goes to trial, there will be questions. About her. About how she—" He can't finish it. "I won't stand in front of a judge and be made to talk about how Marguerite lived. It isn't decent."
"It was decent enough when you drank her wine every harvest for forty years."
He flinches. So do I.
I'm halfway across the square with my mouth already open—I can fix this, I fix things, there are angles here, leverage, a spreadsheet assembling itself in my head—when Monique catches my eye and stops me with a look I will remember for the rest of my life. A look that says:not yours. Mine.
So I stand at the cheese stall and watch a woman in her seventies fight for us in a language older than any court. I can't hear most of it. I hearforty years.I hearher girls.I hear something low that makes him close his eyes.
In the end he puts his hat back on and walks away, and I can't tell from his shoulders which way it went.
Monique comes to me at the stall and buys a chèvre she plainly doesn't want.
"Thirty-three names," she says. "It was thirty-six on Monday. He is peeling them off one loan at a time, that man."
"What can I do?"
"Nothing. You can do nothing, and you can beseendoing nothing." She pats my cheek, hard, twice. "You are the granddaughters. You stand in your grandmother's fields and you be worth it. The rest is mine."
Then she walks off across her square like weather, and I go home, and I don't tell Cat how frightened I am, and for three days every ringing phone drops my stomach through the floor.
The phone goes at ten past eight, and I nearly don't answer it.
I'm in the kitchen in one of Cat's shirts, making coffee badly. Cat is still asleep in a way that suggests she may not be vertical before noon. The last thing I want is the outside world.
Then I see the name on the screen.
"Maître Rousseau."
"Mademoiselle Beaumont-Clark." She has never wasted a syllable in her life. "Beaumont has withdrawn."
