"Yes." She takes my hand. "Build it. Build it with me."
"That's what I was asking."
"Then that's what I'm answering."
We walk home through the fields near midnight, the moon bright enough that we don't need a torch. The party is still going behind us and will probably go until dawn.
Cat is drunk in the specific way that makes her sentimental and slightly vicious, and she is telling me at length about Monsieur Lefèvre's opinions on modern irrigation, and I am not listening to a word of it. I'm just watching her talk, and thinking that I came to this country with a suitcase full of the wrong shoes and a plan to be gone in ninety days.
We come up the track and the farmhouse rises out of the dark, and the sight of it does what it always does now, which is undo something in my chest.
Ourhouse.
My phone buzzes as I reach the door.
I nearly don't look. It's past midnight, and nothing good has ever arrived after midnight.
I look.
Iris—
I've made arrangements to come to France. We need to talk. I'll be there in three days.
—Colette
I stand in the doorway of my own home and feel the entire evening drain out of me.
"What is it?" Cat says.
I turn the phone around.
She reads it. Her face doesn't move at all, which is how I know exactly how bad it is.
"Three days," she says.
"Three days."
She takes the phone gently out of my hand, slides it into her own pocket, and takes my hand instead.
"Come inside," she says. "We'll deal with her together."
I let her lead me in. But my heart is going like something trapped, and behind us the lavender is moving in the dark — and somewhere across an ocean, my mother is packing a bag to come and look at the life she spent thirty-two years making certain I would never have.
26
CAT
The three days before Colette arrives are the longest of my life, and I'm not even the one she's coming for.
Iris copes the way Iris copes. By Tuesday she has reorganised the office. By Wednesday she has reorganised the distillery, colour-coded the harvest ledgers, and drawn up a schedule for the goats, who cannot read.
Colette gets to me first.
Mid-morning, Iris out on her run, me elbow-deep in bread dough. My phone goes with an American number and I answer it like an idiot, because I'm expecting the mill about the flour order.
"Catherine Aldridge?"
I know the voice at once. It's Iris's, aged twenty years and drained of everything warm.
