"I'm not going anywhere."
"Iris—"
"No." Iris drops my hand and steps toward her mother. "You need to understand something. I am not the girl you raised. I'm someone new — someone who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to take it. And what I want is this place. This life. This woman." She turns and looks at me, and her eyes are blazing. "I love her. I'm going to spend the rest of my life with her. And if you can't accept that, then I don't need you in mine."
Colette's face crumples. For one single moment I see the human under the armour — a woman who lost her mother, who is losing her daughter, who has spent her entire life running from things she cannot accept.
Then the armour goes back up.
"You're making a mistake," she says. "You'll regret this. When the novelty wears off, when you realise what you've given up—"
"Then it'll be my mistake to make." Iris's voice is calm now. Steady. "That's what being an adult means. Making your own choices and living with them."
"And if the consequences include losing your family?"
"Then I'll build a new one. I already have." Iris takes my hand again. "You should go, Mother. There's nothing more to say."
Colette looks between us — her daughter, standing tall and defiant, and me, the woman she blames for all of it. Something flickers in her eyes. Something almost like grief.
"This isn't over," she says.
"Yes. It is."
She leaves without another word, her heels crunching over the gravel. We watch until the car disappears down the drive.
Then Iris collapses.
She goes down onto the terrace stones, folding, and I go down with her. She cries the way she cried over Marguerite's letter — ragged, ugly, torn out of her — and I hold on and say nothing at all, because I've learned by now that's the only thing that works on her.
Eventually: "I think I'm going to be sick."
"Right." I get an arm under her. "Bucket, or lavender?"
"Lavender," she says, with tremendous dignity, and is then sick into her grandmother's lavender.
"There." I hold her hair back. "Very Provençal."
"Shut up."
"It's the most French thing you've ever done."
She laughs, and then she's crying again, and the two are so tangled together she can't get free of either.
We sit on the terrace while the sun goes down — my back against the wall, Iris against my chest, the lavender going gold and then grey.
"I got what I wanted," she says eventually. Her voice is wrecked. "I said all of it. She heard every word."
"You did."
"So why does it feel like a funeral?"
And there it is. The thing I've known since my own mother died with the truth still in her pocket.
"Because you weren't only telling her off," I say. "You were giving up on her. Those are the same sentence. They aren't the same thing."
Iris doesn't answer. She just turns her face into my shirt.
So I hold her until the light's gone. Then I take her inside and make her eat something, because I am my grandmother's child, and that is what we do.
