"You could just not," I say that night, into the dark. Neither of us is sleeping. "Ring her. Tell her not to come."
"I can't."
"You could. I'd back you. We could put the goat in the drive."
"Cat."
"He'd do it, too. He hates everyone. It's his single finest quality."
She huffs — barely a laugh, but I'll take it — and rolls over to face me.
"If I don't face her, she wins," she says. "She just stays this thing hanging over everything. Weather." Her voice goes small. "And I'm scared that being near her turns me back. Into the girl who did whatever she wanted, to keep the peace."
"It won't."
"How do you—"
"Because that girl wouldn't have alphabetised her counter-arguments." I feel her go still. "She'd have just gone."
Iris laughs — properly, wet and startled — and puts her freezing feet on my legs, which is a war crime, and is asleep inside of forty minutes.
I don't sleep at all.
Colette arrives at precisely two o'clock, because of course she does.
I watch from the kitchen window as the rental car comes up the drive — a sleek black sedan, entirely wrong for the dirt roads of Provence.
The goat is in the drive.
I don't know how. I put him in the top field this morning specifically so that he would not be in the drive. But he is in the drive, and he has planted himself directly in front of that sleek black car, and he is staring at it.
Colette waits. The goat waits.
I have never been prouder of anything in my life.
Eventually Jacques's grandson runs down and hauls him off by the collar, and the door opens, and a woman gets out who looks so much like Iris it takes the breath out of me.
The same dark hair, though hers is silver-streaked and cut in a bob you could open letters with. The same brown eyes, colder. The same fine bones, worn with the particular tightness of a woman who has spent her whole life controlling everything within reach.
She looks at the farmhouse like it has personally offended her.
"She's here," I say.
Iris comes to stand beside me. Her face has gone the colour of paper. "I know."
"Ready?"
"No." She takes a breath. "Let's go anyway."
The meeting happens on the terrace, because Iris refused to let her mother into the house.
"This is our home,"she'd said."She doesn't get to come inside and judge it. She can talk to me outside."
So we sit in the warm afternoon sun, surrounded by lavender, while Colette perches on the edge of her chair like she's afraid of catching something. She declined the coffee I offered. She declined the water. She has declined, essentially, to acknowledge that I exist.
"Thank you for agreeing to see me," Colette says. Her voice is exactly as cold as I expected — polished, controlled, giving away nothing. "I know our last conversation didn't end well."
"It didn't end at all. I hung up on you." Iris's voice is steady, though I can see her hands shaking in her lap. "Because you called my grandmother's relationship a sin."
