"Cat."
"Mm."
"Is there something in your pocket."
"No."
"Cat."
"It's aphone,Iris."
"You're holding your phone in your other hand."
"Then it's asecond phone." She marches on ahead of me through the rows, ears absolutely scarlet. "Stop talking."
She takes me up a rise at the far edge of the property — a little lift in the land I have somehow never walked to, where the whole valley suddenly opens out below: the farmhouse, the church tower beyond it, the cut fields running away in every direction.
Cat stops. Turns around. And I watch her lose her nerve in real time.
"Right," she says.
"Right."
"So." She clears her throat. "Monique told me something."
"All right."
"About this spot." She looks out over the valley instead of at me, which is how I know how bad this is. "Marguerite brought Hélène up here. Nineteen eighty-one. Got down on one knee in a lavender field a good thirty-two years before it would have beenworth anything legally, and asked her to spend her whole life with her anyway."
The valley goes slightly out of focus.
"She said yes," Cat says. "Obviously. Then they went home and told absolutely nobody, and got on with it for thirty-five years."
"Cat—"
"I know you've already said yes." She turns round, and her eyes are red. "I know that. You said yes in a kitchen with pastry on your face and I have thought about it every hour since. But I asked you like a woman dropping a tray of glasses, Iris. And you deserved—"
She stops.
"You deserved the version I meant to do," she says. "So I'm doing it."
And then she takes a small stack ofindex cardsout of her back pocket.
I make a noise.
"Don't," she warns.
"You wrotecue cards—"
"I get one attempt at this and my brain empties out every time you look at me, soyes, Iris, I wrote it down." She glares at the top card. "There are four. It isn't a lecture."
She looks at the first one.
Then she puts them all back in her pocket without reading a word.
"No," she says. "That's rubbish. I'll just say it."
She takes both my hands.
