3. Iris
IRIS
Twenty-three hours of travel, and I'm fairly certain I've left my sanity somewhere between O'Hare and the Paris connection I almost missed.
The flight was delayed. The layover was chaos.
The rental car place in Marseille gave me something approximately the size and structural integrity of a roller skate.
And now I'm navigating a dirt road in the dark with a GPS that keeps cheerfully announcing "recalculating" every time I hit a pothole, which is approximately every four seconds.
My mother hasn't spoken to me since our phone call. This is not unusual—Colette Beaumont-Clark can hold a silence like other people hold grudges—but it still settles in my chest like a cold stone. I've disappointed her. Again. Still. Always.
"Recalculating," the GPS announces, and I grip the steering wheel tighter.
"If you recalculate one more time," I tell it, "I'm going to drive us both off a cliff."
The GPS, wisely, says nothing.
The road winds through what I assume is beautiful countryside, though in the darkness it's mostly just shapes and shadows and the occasional alarming rustle of something moving in the brush alongside the car. Lavender, I remind myself. This is lavender country. The brush is probably lavender.
Or wild boars. Do they have wild boars in Provence? I should have researched this better. I should have made a spreadsheet. I should have—
And then the road opens up, and there it is.
The farmhouse is lit up like a beacon in the darkness. Warm yellow light spills from the windows, and there's smoke curling from the chimney, and even from here I can smell something—garlic, maybe, or herbs, something that smells like someone's been cooking.
Someone is here.
I pull up behind a small Peugeot that's already parked in front of the house. My heart is hammering for reasons I don't entirely understand—nerves, probably, or exhaustion, or the strangeness of arriving at a place I've never been that somehow feels like it should have been mine all along.
The other beneficiary. She must be here already. Catherine Aldridge, the woman who somehow earned my grandmother's love.
I kill the engine and sit in the darkness for a moment, breathing. Cataloguing. The stone walls of the house, honeyed even in the dim light. The blue shutters. The terrace to the left, where—
There's someone on the terrace.
A silhouette against the warm light from inside. She's watching me. Waiting.
"Okay," I say to myself. "You can do this. You've handled corporate mergers and a mother who makes ice look warm. You can handle one woman in an apron."
I get out of the car.
The night air hits me immediately—warm and soft and impossibly fragrant, lavender and herbs and something else, something green and alive. For a moment, I just stand there, breathing it in. This is what my mother ran from. This is what she kept me from.
Then the woman on the terrace speaks.
"You must be the other one."
Her voice is British. Warm but guarded, like she's prepared to be friendly but isn't committing to it yet. I walk toward the terrace, my heels crunching on gravel that's clearly designed to destroy expensive shoes, and get my first real look at her.
She's average height, with curly auburn hair escaping from a messy bun.
Freckles across her nose. Green eyes that are studying me with an intensity that feels almost physical.
She's wearing jeans and a worn t-shirt and an apron—an honest-to-God apron, faded and soft, like she's been here long enough to make herself at home.
She's also, I notice with a particular kind of irritation, gorgeous.
"Iris Beaumont-Clark," I say, extending my hand. "And you must be Catherine Aldridge."
"Cat." She takes my hand—her grip is firm, her palm warm and slightly calloused—and shakes once before letting go. "Nobody calls me Catherine except my dentist and my landlord."
"Cat, then." I glance past her toward the lit-up house. "You've been here a while, I take it?"
"A week." She folds her arms across her chest, a gesture that's probably supposed to be casual but reads as defensive. "The lawyer said the will couldn't be read until we were both here, but he didn't say I couldn't come early."
A week. She's been here for a week, alone in my grandmother's house, cooking in my grandmother's kitchen, sleeping in my grandmother's beds. Something hot and unpleasant curls in my stomach.
"I would have come sooner," I say, keeping my voice carefully neutral. "But I had to arrange things. I have a job in Chicago."
"Had a job in London." Cat shrugs. "Didn't seem that important once I got the call."
The implication hangs between us: I cared enough to drop everything. Did you?
I let it hang. I'm too tired for this particular fight right now.
"Is there somewhere I can put my things?" I ask instead. "It's been a very long day."
Something flickers across Cat's face—surprise, maybe, or disappointment that I won't engage. She steps back from the terrace doorway, gesturing me inside.
"Welcome to the Domaine des Lavandes."
The inside of the farmhouse is exactly what I would have imagined if I'd let myself imagine it, which I carefully haven't for the past thirty-two years.
Stone floors worn smooth by generations of footsteps.
Exposed wooden beams across the ceiling.
Furniture that looks antique because it is antique, collected over decades, maybe centuries.
Bookshelves overflowing with paperbacks in three languages.
And paintings—beautiful paintings, landscapes and flowers and one striking portrait of a woman I don't recognize, all signed with the same initials.
H.V.
Another question for the pile. The pile is becoming structural.
"Kitchen's through there." Cat has followed me inside, and she's watching me look around with an expression I can't quite read. "I made pasta earlier—there's some left if you're hungry."
"I ate on the plane."
"Plane food doesn't count as eating."
I turn to look at her. She's leaning against the doorframe to the kitchen, arms still crossed, chin slightly lifted. There's a challenge in the set of her shoulders that has nothing to do with pasta.
"The bedrooms," I say. "Which one should I take?"
"There are two down the hall. I've been using the one on the right—it's got the better mattress. The one on the left is nice, though. Big windows, looks out over the lavender."
The one on the left. The not-as-good bedroom. Of course.
"And my grandmother's room?"
"Locked." Cat's voice is flat. "The lawyer said it stays locked until the will is read. Part of the conditions, apparently."
"Conditions." I think of what Monsieur Duval said on the phone—living arrangements, stipulations. "Has he told you what those are?"
"Not yet. We're meeting with him tomorrow at ten." She pauses. "Together."
Together. The word sits between us like a test.
"Fine," I say. "I'll see you in the morning, then."
I turn toward the door, but Cat's voice stops me.
"She talked about you, you know."
I freeze, my hand on the handle. "What?"
"Grand-mère." Cat's voice has softened slightly, though her posture is still guarded. "She talked about you. Every summer I spent here, she'd mention you. Her other grandchild, the one in America."
"I'm sure she did." My voice comes out harder than I intended. "The one she never met."
"That wasn't her choice."
"No?" I turn to face Cat, and something in my chest is cracking open, something dangerous. "Then whose choice was it?"
"Your mother's, I'd imagine." Cat's eyes are steady on mine. "Grand-mère sent letters. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds. All returned."
I think of the letter I found when I was ten—the one my mother burned before I could read more than a few sentences. The one that said I love you in handwriting I've never forgotten.
"She called you her ghost, you know." Cat's voice is quiet now, almost gentle. "Because she couldn't see you, but she could feel you. You were always here, even when you weren't."
Her ghost. That's what Monsieur Duval said on the phone. Her ghost.
"How do you know that?" I manage.
"Because she told me." Cat uncrosses her arms, and suddenly she looks less defensive and more tired. "Every summer. She'd tell me about you while she taught me to cook. She'd wonder what you were doing, what you were like. She'd hope you knew she loved you."
I don't know what to do with this—with grief for a woman I never met, with rage at my mother for stealing this from me, with the strange jealousy of standing in front of someone who had what I was denied.
"I don't understand," I say, and I hate how small my voice sounds. "You were here every summer?"
Cat's expression shutters. "Until I was twelve."
"What happened?"
"My mother cut ties. One day we were coming to Provence for the summer, and the next we weren't, and she wouldn't tell me why." Cat's voice is carefully flat. "I never saw Grand-mère again. Until now."
"Your mother," I say slowly. "And my mother. Both of them cut ties."
"Looks that way."
We stare at each other across the stone-floored entryway of a house that belongs to both of us and neither of us, and I feel something shift between us.
We're not friends—we're barely acquaintances—but we're also not quite enemies.
We're something else. Two casualties of a war we didn't start and don't understand.
"The lawyer will explain tomorrow," Cat says finally. "Must be a lot we don't know."
"Obviously."
"For what it's worth—" She hesitates. "I'm glad you came. Grand-mère would have wanted you here."
I don't know what to say to that, so I don't say anything. I just nod, once, and turn back toward the door.
"Iris."
I stop but don't turn around.
"The bedroom on the left really does have the better view. I'll move my things in the morning—you can have the good mattress."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know." A pause. "But she was your family by blood. That has to count for something."
I do turn around then, and Cat is watching me with an expression I can't read—something complicated, something almost wistful.
And I realize, with a start, that she's jealous of me.
That whatever she had with my grandmother, however many summers and cooking lessons and stories about ghosts, she still feels like she came in second to someone who was never even there.
"She was your grandmother too," I say. "Whatever that means. She obviously loved you."
"Yeah." Cat's smile is crooked, not quite reaching her eyes. "But I wasn't blood, was I? And in the end, maybe that's what matters."
Before I can respond—before I can figure out if I even want to respond—she turns and disappears into the kitchen. A moment later, I hear water running, dishes clattering. The sounds of someone cleaning up, occupying their hands so they don't have to think.
I know that strategy well. I invented that strategy.
I head in to the bedroom, looking out at the darkness beyond the windows. Tomorrow there will be lawyers and conditions and a stranger who knows more about my own family than I do.
But tonight, I just stand in the dark and let myself feel it: the grief, the anger, the strange hollow ache of coming home to a place I've never been.
Her ghost.
All my life, I've been haunting a place I couldn't see. And now I'm finally here, and the woman who wanted me is gone, and the only thing she left behind is half a house and a stranger in the kitchen and questions I don't know how to ask.
I press my forehead against the cool glass of the window and breathe.
Tomorrow, I'll be strong. Tomorrow, I'll make lists and plans and charts.
Tonight, I just let myself be lost.