Chapter 36
LUKAS
WITNESS STATEMENT - IRéNéE SAVATIER [Proprietor, Au Pain Doré]
(Translated from Fr.) “I saw her in that dress and for one moment, I thought it was [REDACTED]."
Saint-émile-sur-Vigne is everything a French village should be.
Its shiny cobblestone streets wind between stone buildings with royal blue shutters and delicate pink geraniums tumbling from window boxes.
Rae walks beside me, her head swiveling to take it all in.
She keeps stopping to peer into shop displays and exclaim over things that would otherwise bore me to tears: a shelf of hand-painted ceramics, a butcher’s case of cured meats, a florist arranging sunflowers in tin buckets.
There’s nothing so small or ordinary that it cannot capture her attention. You’d think it was her first day on earth.
I let her linger. I have nowhere else to be.
“Are you hungry?” I nod toward a boulangerie at the corner. “Best croissants in the region.”
“Say no more.” She skips toward it, singing happily. I follow at a slower pace.
The bakery is small and cramped, with just enough room for three customers at a time, much less one as big as I am. A glass case displays golden pastries and crusty loaves, and the smell of butter and yeast hangs thick in the air.
Madame Savatier stands behind the counter.
She’s been here as long as I can remember.
Nothing has changed about her in decades: neither the white hair pinned back on her scalp nor the flour dusted on her apron, and especially not the suspicious, impatient squint she turns on everyone who walks through her doors.
“Monsieur Lazarev,” she greets. Her French is taut and formal. “It has been some time.”
“Too long, Madame,” I reply.
Rae hovers at my elbow, peering at the pastries. She doesn’t speak French, so she just waits patiently for me to catch her up on what’s happening.
Madame Savatier’s gaze slides to her.
And then it happens.
The old woman’s eyes go wide. Just for a moment. A fraction of a second, really. Her hand tightens on the tongs she’s holding. Her mouth parts.
She doesn’t say anything aloud. She knows better.
But I see the flash of recognition that isn’t recognition at all.
She doesn’t see Rae.
She sees Elena.
The dress, the hair. The posture, the build. Standing in this bakery where Elena stood a hundred times, ordering the same almond croissants, it’s as if my wife has come back to life after eighteen years in the dirt.
To her credit, the old woman recovers quickly. She turns away and busies herself with something behind the counter.
Rae is oblivious to the entire thing. She’s pointing at a pain au chocolat, asking me what it’s called, completely unaware of the ghost she’s become.
I order for both of us. My voice sounds strange in my own ears. Choked, hoarse, wrong.
Madame Savatier bags the pastries and hands them over. Her eyes meet mine briefly. There’s a question there. A warning, maybe.
I pretend not to see it.
“She seemed a little stiff,” Rae notes as we step back into the sunlight.
“Old village,” I say roughly. “Old ways. Not always so friendly to outsiders.”
Rae nods and takes a bite of her croissant. Flakes of pastry scatter down the front of the dress. Elena’s dress. She brushes them away without a thought.
My head won’t stop spinning. It’s not like the resemblance hasn’t occurred to me before, but the longer we spend here, the more it becomes impossible to ignore.
When she’s wearing Elena’s sundress and Elena’s straw hat that she grabbed from the hook by the door, walking the paths Elena walked a thousand times before—she could be her.
She isn’t, though.
That’s the problem.
Elena was my equal. She understood what I was from the first moment we met. She’d seen violence before me and knew how it felt on her skin. There was nothing soft about her, nothing that needed protecting. She was dangerous in her own right.
Rae is none of those things. She’s young. Innocent. Sunshine in human form. The fact that I want to break her anyway is what has kept me awake at night since the moment I strode into the office and found my son with his hand up her skirt.
We keep meandering for a while as I struggle to maintain a normal conversation.
When we walk through the market square, Rae stops at every stall.
She picks up jars of honey and holds them to the light.
She smells bars of lavender soap and closes her eyes.
She asks me to translate the names of cheeses she’s never heard of.
I do all of it. I translate. I explain. I watch her face light up at each new discovery, and I buy everything her fingers so much as hover over.
An old man selling olives recognizes me. He nods once, says nothing. Just like Madame Savatier, his eyes linger on Rae for a beat too long.
I pull her away.
“You’re popular here,” she says, peering back at the old olive seller over her shoulder.
I don’t follow her gaze. “I’ve been coming for thirty years. People remember.”
“Do they remember your wife, too?”
I refuse to let her see my face contort. My stride doesn’t falter. “Some of them, perhaps.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I can feel her working up to something. The next question. One little pinky toe sneaking over the line I’ve drawn in the sand.
“Did you bring her here often?” she asks.
I nod grimly. “Every summer.”
“She must have loved it.”
I don’t answer. I can’t.
Because yes, Elena loved it. Just like Rae, she loved the croissants and the cobblestones and the smell of grapes ripening in the sun. She loved this village. Most of all, she loved the man I became when I was here.
And then I killed her anyway.