Chapter 6
I met étienne when I was seventeen, the year that Chloe first came to France. That summer had been hideous from the start. Every morning I’d arrive at the pool at Chateau Angèle, hoping that I’d be welcome, and every afternoon I’d leave feeling worse than ever.
Jackson was like a different person with Chloe.
In previous years, with me, he was all “Come and have a swim with me, Gracie!” “Come and play Ping-Pong with me, Gracie!” “Come and play tennis with me, Gracie,” which never went well, but the sight of him in his tennis whites made up for my aching limbs.
I used to walk into a room and his face would light up—and it still did that summer, but if Chloe followed me his lips would sort of straighten as though smiling wasn’t cool.
All he wanted to do was lie around sunbathing, or at most play the occasional game of water volleyball.
I was thrilled whenever he suggested it because I felt like I was getting fun Jackson back, but the lust in his eyes as he watched Chloe bouncing about in her skimpy bikini made me feel sick to my stomach.
One day I was so upset that I left my beach bag at the pool and took off. I didn’t know where I was going, but I had to do something to distract myself from the sparks that were flying back at the chateau, so I walked into town and climbed down to the riverbank, heading away from civilization.
At its widest point, the river was shallow and slow-moving—a tributary of the much larger Ardèche River—but the farther upstream I went, the faster it seemed to flow.
As the vegetation thickened, I was forced right down to the water and had to wade through the shallows, but I didn’t care that my progress was slow. I was in no hurry to go back home.
Eventually, I came across a small two-story house in a clearing surrounded by willow trees. It was on the other side of the river and set back a little, but not by much. If the banks gave way, the ground floor would probably be a foot underwater.
But it was so pretty, even with some of its terracotta tiles missing from the roof and its peach-painted rendered exterior crumbling in parts to reveal ordinary gray building blocks beneath.
Honeysuckle grew up one of its walls, grapevines ran rampant up another, and the tall grass out front was rife with wildflowers.
I noticed a series of rocks protruding from the clear brown water, and it seemed as if they were stepping stones inviting me to take a closer look.
When I was only partway across, the door to the house flew open and a tall boy with dark hair stormed out. He shouted something angry at me in French—and then I saw that he was holding a rifle.
My pulse tripped.
“I’m English! I’m going!” I screeched, throwing my hands up in the air and beginning to back away.
“DON’T MOVE!” he bellowed, raising his gun at me.
I panicked and turned to flee, coming to an abrupt halt as I found myself facing a huge gray wolf standing on the shore, just a few feet away. I froze, staring at it with horror. It stared back at me with amber eyes. And then it snarled.
I full on leaped backward and a gunshot rang out as I crashed into the water, flailing around and jamming my ankle between two rocks as I tried to get back up.
The wolf bolted. And the boy dropped his gun in the long grass and tore toward me, navigating the stepping stones with the sure-footedness of someone who’d been doing it his whole life.
As I cried out with shock and pain, he plunged into the water and grabbed me by my waist, soaking his shorts and the bottom half of his T-shirt as he pulled me out of the river.
He tried to stand me on a rock, but I couldn’t support my own weight, so he braced me with an arm around my back and his hand on my stomach, just below my rib cage.
I remember the press of it as we locked eyes.
Then the pain kicked back in and I winced, both of us looking down to see blood running freely from a cut on my ankle. He swore in French and looked at me again, seemingly unsure what to do. His eyes were a light bluish gray, a striking contrast to his dark hair.
I was shivering, but more due to the shock than the cold.
“I c-c-can’t,” I stammered, staring at him helplessly. I couldn’t believe I was at the mercy of a complete stranger. Nobody knew where I was, and where did that wolf go?
I looked over my shoulder in fear and when I met his eyes again, an expression of gritty determination had settled over his features.
The next thing I knew, he was swinging me up into his arms. I gasped and linked my fingers behind his neck, clutching on to him.
I could feel his muscles tremoring as he carried me across the stones toward his house, treading carefully. He was stronger than he looked.
“Wait here,” he said, slightly out of breath as he laid me on the grass. “My mother is sleeping.”
My ankle had already swollen up—I didn’t think I’d be able to put much weight on it so it was going to be a struggle to walk home.
He came back outside with a towel and draped it around my shoulders. He also had a bottle of water, which he poured directly over my cut.
“Désolé,” he murmured with empathy as I flinched. Sorry.
“It’s okay,” I choked out, tears springing into my eyes. The cut was stinging, but the throb of my ankle was worse.
He went back inside and I heard a tap running and then he reemerged with a first-aid kit and a bowl of water that smelled of antiseptic.
Delicately lifting my foot, he placed it in the bowl—the water was warm, but it wasn’t deep enough to cover the cut—and then he sat down and gently cleaned around the cut with a cotton wool pad.
“I’m so sorry about this,” I mumbled, mortified at the fuss I was causing.
He shook his head to dismiss my apology and then he lifted my foot out of the bowl and placed it on another towel, carefully patting it dry. He seemed to know what he was doing.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“étienne,” he replied.
“Je m’appelle Grace.”
My French was pretty terrible. I had lessons at school and I’d been coming to the Ardèche for years, but I just seemed to suck at languages.
He met my eyes again, his lips twitching. “Why?” he asked, nodding toward the river as he got a bandage out of the first-aid kit.
“I just wanted to go for a walk.”
“Holiday?” he asked, lifting his chin at me.
I nodded. “I’m staying with my grandmother.”
“She is French?”
I shook my head as he applied the bandage. “English.”
His rifle was lying in the grass a few feet away. He noticed me looking. Suddenly he seemed to be struggling to keep a straight face.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
His mouth split into a wide grin and he lifted his hands over his head and waved them about, saying, “Argh! I’m English! I’m going!” in a terrible impression of me.
“I thought you were going to shoot me!” I exclaimed, laughing. “Don’t move!” I batted back, firing an imaginary shotgun at him, complete with sound effects.
He cracked up and warmth flooded my insides, temporarily drowning out the pain.
“I watch a lot of American cop shows,” he said when he’d recovered.
“Were you trying to kill it?” I asked with a frown as he shoved his hair, damp from the river, back from his forehead.
“Non!” He looked horrified. “The wolf…In France…” He struggled to find the word.
“They’re protected?”
“Oui. Yes.” He mimed shooting a gun as he said, “To scare. But he…” His brows pulled together and then he growled at me. “I was scared.” He held his hand to his chest.
I mirrored him, wholeheartedly agreeing with the sentiment. “I was terrified. I thought he was going to pounce. I didn’t think wolves were aggressive around humans.”
He shook his head. “They are not…usually.”
“I didn’t even know they were in the Ardèche.”
He paused, thinking, and I noticed that he had a tiny scar bisecting his right eyebrow, but then a lock of hair fell down to cover it. “They are…”
“Rare.”
“Oui. And they don’t usually—” He growled again.
“Growl, snarl,” I supplied with a smile, hiding how oddly appealing I found the sound.
He had a nice voice: low and deep. And his accent was lovely.
“Can you…get up?” He zipped up the first-aid kit as he rose to his feet.
I tried, but the motion of attempting to stand without putting weight on my ankle made me feel a little faint. I swayed, flapping my hand in front of my face and looking longingly at the shade of a nearby willow tree. “Could I please have a glass of water?”
“Here,” he said, putting his arm around my waist and helping me to hop over to the tree. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “You look—” He hung his head to one side, eyes drooping.
“Dead?” I asked.
He laughed again. “White.”
“Pale?”
“Oui. You would like to eat? I have bread, honey, strawberries.”
I didn’t want to put him out, but I’d missed lunch.
He saw me hesitating and nodded, disappearing inside again.
He brought back a glass of water, half a baguette, and some butter, then he took two empty bowls to the side of the house.
I sipped the water and watched as he plucked some wild strawberries, then he went to what looked like a tap fixed to the outside wall.
“What the…” I murmured as I watched golden liquid pour into the second bowl.
He returned and I lifted my eyes to his with wonder.
“We have bees,” he said as he sat down, placing the bowls between us.
“Inside the wall?”
“Yes.”
“Did you put them there?”
“No.” He smiled. “But we came to an arrangement. That is what my mother says.”
“That’s incredible.” I glanced at a window in the top floor of the house. “Is your mother asleep up there?”
He nodded, his smile flattening. “She is not well.”
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked, expecting him to say that she had a cold or a stomach bug or some minor ailment.
But he hesitated, looking pained before replying quietly, “She has maladie de Charcot. I don’t know how to say in English.”
I didn’t understand the gravity of what he was telling me at the time so we moved on to talk about other things, but a Google search later in my holiday revealed the horrifying truth: that his mother, Estelle, had ALS, a type of motor neuron disease.
I was chilled to discover that it was fatal—there was no cure.
Over the remaining weeks of that summer, I felt a continuous pull to return to the river house.
Even with the language barrier between us, étienne and I got to know each other well.
We played cards, picnicked on the banks, swam in the river, and talked about our families and the things we had in common.
It felt as though we were building the foundations of a lasting friendship, but when I returned the following year, his house was deserted.
I went back a year later and the year after that, but all that had changed were the vines growing up the outer walls, looking as though they were intent on swallowing it whole.
I never found any trace of étienne or his mother again and, for a long time, I wondered what had happened to them.
Eventually that summer began to take on a surreal quality. I gave up hope of finding answers.
And now, ten years on, here is étienne in front of me. A man.