"Rousseau says two fewer and he'd have had a case."
That stops her. Just for a second the twinkle goes out of her, and something older and harder looks back at me — a woman who has lived in this village for sixty years and knows precisely what her neighbours are and are not capable of.
"Then it is fortunate," she says, "that I do not take no for an answer."
And that's all she'll give me. She's already turning away, already shouting for champagne, already pretending she has not spent three weeks on the telephone defending a dead woman's name.
Cat gets there before I do. She wraps Monique up from behind, presses her face into the old woman's shoulder, and says something in French too low and too fast for me to catch — and Monique goes very still, and pats her hand twice, and says gruffly, "Yes, yes. Enough."
She doesn't let go for quite a while.
The toast happens in the middle of the courtyard, with Monique standing on a chair over Jacques's loud objections about her knees.
"To Marguerite Beaumont," she says, "who loved this land, and loved Hélène Voclain, and never once apologised for either."
The courtyard goes quiet.
It's the first time I've heard it said out loud. In public. In front of everyone. Plainly, like a fact — like it was never a thing to be whispered about at all.
"And to Catherine and Iris," Monique says, raising her glass, "who are going to do it all again. Better. And in front of us."
"To the Domaine!" someone bellows, and the whole courtyard roars it back.
I don't decide to do it. That's the part I'll think about afterward — that I don't weigh it, don't plan it, don't run a single calculation.
I just turn to Cat, in the middle of the courtyard, with the entire village watching, and I kiss her.
She makes a small startled sound against my mouth. Then her hand slides into my hair and she kisses me back, and somebody whistles, and somebody starts clapping, and Sophie shouts something in French that I intend to pretend, for the rest of my life, I did not understand.
When we break apart, Cat is scarlet and laughing.
"Warn a girl," she says.
"No."
Later, at the edge of the courtyard with the lights strung overhead and the music going, she hands me a glass and asks me what I want.
"Legal thing's done. Harvest is in." She bumps my shoulder. "You can do anything now. So what do you want?"
In Chicago my whole self was welded to my work — the events, the clients, the endless performance of competence. Here that woman has quietly dissolved, and I have been waiting six weeks to panic about it, and the panic has never come.
"I want to run the farm," I say. "Properly. Learn the business, get the distillery paying for itself." I hesitate. "And then I want to build something."
"Build what?"
"There's a gap in the market. High-end lavender — cosmetics, home goods, the artisanal end of it. Right branding, right distribution." I hear myself picking up speed and I don't stop. "It could be real, Cat. It could be a proper business."
Cat is looking at me with an expression I can't read.
"What?"
"Nothing." She is fighting a smile and losing badly. "It's only that it's extremely attractive when you do that."
"When I do what?"
"Say the worddistribution."
"You are a deeply strange woman."
