"Grand-mère." Cat's voice has softened slightly, though her posture is still guarded. "She talked about you. Every summer I spent here, she'd mention you. Her other grandchild, the one in America."
"I'm sure she did." My voice comes out harder than I intended. "The one she never met."
"That wasn't her choice."
"No?" I turn to face Cat, and something in my chest is cracking open, something dangerous. "Then whose choice was it?"
"Your mother's, I'd imagine." Cat's eyes are steady on mine. "Grand-mère sent letters. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds. All returned."
I think of the letter I found when I was ten—the one my mother burned before I could read more than a few sentences. The one that said I love you in handwriting I've never forgotten.
"She called you her ghost, you know." Cat's voice is quiet now, almost gentle. "Because she couldn't see you, but she could feel you. You were always here, even when you weren't."
Her ghost. That's what Monsieur Duval said on the phone. Her ghost.
"How do you know that?" I manage.
"Because she told me." Cat uncrosses her arms, and suddenly she looks less defensive and more tired. "Every summer. She'd tell me about you while she taught me to cook. She'd wonder what you were doing, what you were like. She'd hope you knew she loved you."
I don't know what to do with this—with grief for a woman I never met, with rage at my mother for stealing this from me, with the strange jealousy of standing in front of someone who had what I was denied.
"I don't understand," I say, and I hate how small my voice sounds. "You were here every summer?"
Cat's expression shutters. "Until I was twelve."
"What happened?"
"My mother cut ties. One day we were coming to Provence for the summer, and the next we weren't, and she wouldn't tell me why." Cat's voice is carefully flat. "I never saw Grand-mère again. Until now."
"Your mother," I say slowly. "And my mother. Both of them cut ties."
"Looks that way."
We stare at each other across the stone-floored entryway of a house that belongs to both of us and neither of us, and I feel something shift between us. We're not friends—we're barely acquaintances—but we're also not quite enemies. We're something else. Two casualties of a war we didn't start and don't understand.
"The lawyer will explain tomorrow," Cat says finally. "Must be a lot we don't know."
"Obviously."
"For what it's worth—" She hesitates. "I'm glad you came. Grand-mère would have wanted you here."
I don't know what to say to that, so I don't say anything. I just nod, once, and turn back toward the door.
"Iris."
I stop but don't turn around.
"The bedroom on the left really does have the better view. I'll move my things in the morning—you can have the good mattress."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know." A pause. "But she was your family by blood. That has to count for something."
I do turn around then, and Cat is watching me with an expression I can't read—something complicated, somethingalmost wistful. And I realize, with a start, that she's jealous of me. That whatever she had with my grandmother, however many summers and cooking lessons and stories about ghosts, she still feels like she came in second to someone who was never even there.
"She was your grandmother too," I say. "Whatever that means. She obviously loved you."
"Yeah." Cat's smile is crooked, not quite reaching her eyes. "But I wasn't blood, was I? And in the end, maybe that's what matters."
