Chapter 35 #2
He fell in love with her, even though he knew what was coming. If he’s capable of switching off his feelings, how could he let himself go through that? He knew that he would lose her. He knew that he was in for a world of pain. And yet he allowed himself to love her anyway.
But me? I don’t have a fatal disease. I’m not returning to another country at the end of summer. I’m young and healthy and I’m here. I could be a part of his life. Why won’t he let me? Why won’t he let himself love me?
You really don’t remember, do you?
A cold flush washes over me at the memory of his words. Remember what? What was he talking about? His scar? What about his scar? Three weeks ago he claimed he got it falling over, but it felt like he was holding something back.
I rewind to that conversation—we’d gone to Les Saules for breakfast via Dion’s place to pick up his car.
I’d had that odd sense of déjà vu when I arrived at his house to see his GTi parked on the drive.
It used to be his mum’s car. When we were seventeen it hadn’t been driven in years—it had been left around the back of the house to deteriorate—but at some point prior to that it would have looked clean and shiny. Is that how I remember it?
Déjà vu hits me again. I sit with the feeling. And once again, I think of Sandrine.
A strange awareness prickles over my body as a memory comes back to me of a scrawny dark-haired boy sitting beside me in the car, clutching a bloody tissue to his eyebrow. Jackson is in the front seat next to his mother and we’re pulling up at a house.
It was Les Saules, before the grapevines had run rampant over that side of the building. Sandrine was dropping the boy home from the chateau.
It was Jackson’s first summer in France and we were at the edge of the pool when a boy burst through the pedestrian gate and ran across the lawn toward us, blood and tears streaming down his face. I’d thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest.
Jackson and I shot to our feet as he reached us, sobbing something in French. Neither of us could understand a word he was saying, but then I caught the word Al-bear and turned to Jackson.
“He wants your grandfather,” I said. “Albert?” I asked the boy, pronouncing it the French way.
He nodded his head.
“Go and get him,” I directed Jackson, but just as he started running toward the chateau, Sandrine reappeared. She had been supervising us until she’d needed to go inside so she’d told us to get out of the pool—we were only seven.
“What’s going on?” she asked with alarm at the sight of the boy.
“He wants Grand-père,” Jackson said.
“Why? What’s he doing here?” She looked at him as though he was something she’d stepped on.
Sandrine spoke fast to him in French. He replied just as fast and even more animatedly, pointing down the hill, at the chateau, upriver.
Jackson and I glanced between them, not understanding a word of what was being said, only that Sandrine’s tone was impatient and the boy was clearly distressed. And then Sandrine fell silent and her jaw went slack.
“Get in the car.” She looked shaken as she clicked her fingers at Jackson and me.
“Where are we going?” I asked. Mellie was coming for me in a bit.
“I have to take him home.”
“Is he okay? How did he hurt himself?”
“He fell over on the steps.” She nodded toward the footpath that led down the mountain to town. “He needs to go home to his maman. There’s a tissue in the car. Do as I say and get in and stop asking questions!” she barked.
No one spoke as she drove us down the mountain and crossed over a bridge to the other side of the river, but there was a bad feeling in the car.
I kept glancing across at the boy, worried for him.
He was bouncing around because the road was bumpy and then he turned from his window to look out of mine and I saw that the tissue Sandrine had given him was spotted with bright red blood.
His cheeks were tinted red from where he hadn’t been able to clean it off properly and his fingernails were dirty, rimmed with a mixture of mud and blood. He looked anxious.
As Sandrine pulled to a stop, he wrenched at his door handle, but it wouldn’t open.
He shouted something in French and she snapped a reply over her shoulder, telling Jackson to “Stay in the car.”
The boy tentatively let go of the handle, watching warily as she got out and went to the house. She tried the door and found it unlocked, disappearing inside and closing it behind her.
The boy pulled at his door handle again.
“Child lock,” I told him, shaking my head.
“Comment?” he asked, not understanding.
I tried mine too to show him that it wouldn’t open.
He stared with alarm at the house, pulling at his handle again, more desperately.
Jackson turned around. “She said to stay in the car.”
“Jackson, open his door.”
“Mom said—”
“Open it!” I didn’t care what his mum had said.
Jackson reluctantly got out of the front passenger seat and opened the boy’s door.
He bolted past Jackson and ran into the house.
Jackson slammed the back door and returned to the front seat, flopping in with annoyance.
“When are we going back to the pool?” he groaned, exasperated.
The action of opening the doors had let all the cold air out so it felt as though we were in a furnace. I shifted restlessly. And then Sandrine reappeared, her expression dark. She got in the car and started the ignition, doing a three-point turn.
“Who was that?” Jackson asked her.
“No one,” she replied as we left the house behind us.
étienne was the boy, I realize. But I can’t make sense of anything else. Why did he come to see Albert that day? What did Sandrine say to him? To Estelle?
I pick up my phone and try étienne again, but once more it goes through to voicemail.
In the car’s rearview mirror, I see the grapevine-strewn trellis outside La Terrasse. On impulse, I open the door and get out, crossing the road.
Lise is behind the bar, flanked by photographs of her sister on the wall. It hurts to see the woman étienne allowed himself to love and lose.
“I need your address,” I say to Lise when she glances up and spots me.
She looks weary. “Let him—”
“Please,” I interrupt. “I have to see him. He’s not a pawn, Lise. He’s the one.”
She stares at me for a long moment, and then she says, “Fine. But I’m going to let him know that you’re coming,” she warns. “It’s up to him how he takes it from here.”
Lise lives in a different town and I have to drive over the mountain pass to get there.
Up here, the sky is everywhere, a cloudless blue dome overhead.
The land flattens out and the grass-topped hills roll away in every direction, but I catch glimpses of the wide green river sparkling in the valley below.
As the road tilts and curves downhill, the mountain swallows up the view once more.
Eventually I find myself on a country road that runs parallel to a river, another tributary of the Ardèche. Up ahead, a town rises out of the landscape: a church steeple and the terracotta roofs of stone houses. I check the GPS on my phone and slow down, turning onto a narrow lane.
étienne’s car is straight ahead, parked outside a single-story cottage.
A flash of orange catches my eye and I notice a kayak tucked up against the stone wall of an outbuilding.
A glimmer of green water sparkles beyond it.
Was that Eve’s kayak? The one she used to train in?
Or is it étienne’s? He said he had a solo, but I’ve never seen it.
Perhaps he keeps it here. Perhaps it makes him feel close to Eve to go out on the river on his own, retracing the same waterways that they used to paddle together.
Pain lances my heart. I take a long, shaky breath, unclick my seat belt, and get out of the car.
The front door opens. étienne is standing there in the same rumpled gray T-shirt that I hurled at him earlier.
“I remember now,” I say, touching my fingertips to my eyebrow to indicate his scar. “You came to the chateau. You’d cut yourself falling up the steps.” It wasn’t a lie, what he told me, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. “Sandrine drove you home.”
His eyes flare.
I shake my head, my nose prickling as I approach him. “I hadn’t forgotten. I remember details about that day, but I hadn’t put them together. I didn’t realize it was you.”
He averts his gaze, his brow furrowed.
“Did you know it was me?” I ask, wrapping my arms across my chest protectively. “When we were seventeen?”
He shakes his head and then pauses before meeting my eyes again. “Not at first. My mother realized right at the end of the summer. It was why I didn’t come to say goodbye before you left.”
I’d asked him to meet me in town because I’d forgotten about Albert’s birthday dinner. I’d thought that maybe he was upset about my feelings for Jackson—only two days earlier I’d fled to his house in tears and blurted it all out.
“I don’t understand. So you found out that I was the little girl, but why would that stop you from coming to say goodbye?”
He looks sad. “Because I went from really liking you to feeling the complete opposite. When I realized you were linked to him, her, them.” He spits each of these pronouns out. “I wanted nothing to do with you.”
I’m so confused. “But I didn’t think your mum had a problem with the factory, with the Osiers. I thought it was just your uncle. Why do you despise them so much?”
He sighs and looks at me. After a long pause, he finally answers. “Because Sébastien was my father.” He sounds exhausted. “Albert is my grandfather.”
étienne is in the kitchen, making himself a drink. “I need a coffee if we’re going to do this,” he muttered as he opened the door to me and directed me to the living room.
Now I’m sitting on the sofa, my mind reeling. Albert is étienne’s grandfather? Sandrine is his aunt? Oh my God, Jackson is his cousin!