"Hey." I lift my head. "Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere."
"Cat."
"I'm here." She kisses my forehead. It's real, and it's warm, and it is absolutely a door closing. "Go to sleep."
I could push. Two months ago I would have pushed — because I'd have needed to know, because not-knowing is a variable, and variables are unacceptable.
Instead I put my head back down and let her have it, because I'm learning that people tell you things when they're ready and not a second sooner.
I fall asleep on her chest.
Right at the very edge of it, I think:her heart is going much too fast for a woman about to sleep.
We sleep late, which is a luxury we almost never allow ourselves.
When I wake, the sun is high and Cat is already up, moving around the room with the quiet efficiency that means she's been awake a while and didn't want to disturb me.
"Coffee's in the kitchen," she says when she sees my eyes open. "And Duval rang. He's got the last envelope."
I sit up. "The last one?"
"The one for after the ninety days." She sits on the edge of the bed. "He wants to bring it himself."
Ninety days.
I have genuinely lost track. Somewhere in the middle of a lavender harvest and a lawsuit and falling in love and burying my mother alive, the clock I flew here to run out simply — ran out.
"It's been ninety days?"
"As of yesterday." Cat takes my hand. "We made it."
"We did rather more than make it."
"We survived Jean-Pierre." She counts them off on my fingers, which is annoying, and which I love. "The village. Your mother. My mother. Several goats."
"You've left out the part where I learned to hold a knife."
"I have blocked that out entirely, for my own safety."
Duval arrives at noon with a single envelope, thicker than the others, sealed with wax. He sets it on the table between us like it might still be warm.
"Did she know?" I ask. "Any of it? Jean-Pierre. My mother." I hesitate. "Us."
And Duval — who has been unfailingly kind and impeccably discreet with us since that first phone call — takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, and for a moment he is simply a tired old man who misses his friend.
"No," he says. "Shehoped. There is a great deal of difference."
"But the timing. The letters. The room, the ninety days—"
"Mademoiselle." He smiles, and it is very sad. "She sat in my office and she wept. She was terrified. She was quite certain you would sell the house inside a month and never speak to one another again, and she made me swear that if that happened I would burn the letters rather than send them — because she could not bear the thought of you reading them and feeling nothing."
I don't have anything to say to that.
"She did not plan all this," he says gently. "She guessed. Badly, in several places. She was convinced Catherine would be the difficult one."
Cat makes an outraged noise.
