I put down the coffee pot. "Say that again."
"Jean-Pierre Beaumont has formally withdrawn his contest of the will. His counsel filed yesterday evening. It is finished."
The kitchen goes very quiet. Down the hall, a floorboard creaks.
"It's over," I say. "That's it? It's just—over?"
"It is over. The estate is yours and Mademoiselle Aldridge's. No contest, no conditions." A pause. "I will tell you one thing more, however, because I would rather you heard it from me than from the village."
Something in her tone puts a hand on the back of my neck. "Go on."
"It was closer than I allowed you to believe."
"How close?"
"His own counsel ran the numbers before they advised him to walk away." Rousseau's voice stays perfectly level, which somehow makes it worse. "With two fewer witnesses to Marguerite's competence, he would have had a case worth arguing. Possibly worth winning."
Two.
I stand in that kitchen with the coffee going cold and I do the arithmetic. Two people. Two names on a list. Two villagers who might have been travelling, or unwell, or simply unwilling to put their signature to a document defending an old woman who had loved another old woman.
Two. And I lose my grandmother's house, and Cat loses her home, and the entire shape of the rest of my life goes somewhere else.
"Mademoiselle?"
"I'm here."
"You had thirty-one," Rousseau says. And then, in a voice that is almost warm: "Madame Monique appears to have been extremely persuasive on the telephone."
Monique.
"Congratulations, mademoiselle. Go and be very happy. Send me nothing further."
She hangs up.
I stand there for a second. Then I go straight to our room, get into bed with all my clothes on, and wake Cat with my mouth against her shoulder and the wordsit's over, it's over, we won.
The harvest supper has been on Mathilde's calendar for a month.
Which is the only reason there's a party at all — nobody in this village could have organised one in six hours, whatever they'd like you to believe. The tables were already going up in the courtyard at Les Oliviers. The lamb was already in the ovens. All that happens is that news travels the way news travels here,which is to say faster than we drive, so that by the time Cat and I come through the gate at seven, the thing has quietly stopped being a harvest supper and started being something else entirely.
I know it the moment we walk in. The noise changes — just a half-beat, where the courtyard notices us and decides, collectively, to be delighted.
Cat's hand tightens around mine.
We haven't discussed this. We've been careful in the village. Not hiding, exactly. Not announcing, either. And now here we are, coming through the gate with our fingers laced, in front of every single person we know.
"They're staring," I murmur.
"Let them." Cat doesn't let go. "They've been gossiping about us for weeks. Might as well give them something accurate."
Monique comes out of the crowd like weather.
"There they are!" She has us both by the shoulders before I can speak, wine sloshing dangerously. "The women of the hour."
"Monique." I catch her wrist. "Thirty-one witnesses."
She waves this away. "I made a few telephone calls."
