6. Cat
CAT
Jacques arrives at seven the next morning, before Iris has even finished her run.
I watch from the kitchen window as he climbs out of his ancient truck, a man built like a barrel with hands that have spent sixty years doing honest work. He surveys the property with the practiced eye of someone who's been looking after this land since before I was born.
"The lavender needs attention," he announces when I meet him at the door. "Marguerite let it go a bit at the end. She wasn't well enough to do the work herself."
The words hit me harder than they should. She wasn't well enough. I didn't know. I wasn't here.
"What needs doing?" I ask, pushing past the guilt.
"Pruning, mostly. Some of the plants have gotten leggy—they'll need to be cut back if you want them to bloom properly for harvest." He squints at me. "You remember how?"
"Grand-mère taught me when I was eight."
"Good. Then you can teach the other one." He nods toward the road, where Iris is jogging up the drive, her ponytail swinging behind her. "She'll need to learn if she's going to be any use."
I watch Iris approach—her stride even, her breathing controlled, her face fixed in that expression of determined competence she seems to wear like armor. The morning sun catches the sheen of sweat on her skin, and something uncomfortable stirs in my chest that I firmly ignore.
"She's not exactly the farming type," I say.
"I can see that." Jacques shrugs. "People learn. That's how we survive."
Iris takes the news that she'll be spending the day pruning lavender with the grim resignation of someone who's been told they're scheduled for a root canal.
"I don't know anything about gardening," she says, as if this weren't obvious.
"That's why I'm going to teach you." I hand her a pair of gloves and pruning shears from the barn. "It's not complicated. Just time-consuming."
"I should probably be making phone calls. There are things at work—"
"Work can wait." I say it more sharply than I intend, and I see her shoulders stiffen. I soften my voice. "Look, the whole point of these ninety days is for us to be here. With the property. With each other. You can't do that if you're on conference calls all day."
Her jaw tightens. For a moment, I think she's going to argue.
Then she pulls on the gloves.
"Fine," she says. "Show me what to do."
The lavender fields stretch behind the house in neat rows, though "neat" is a generous description at the moment. Jacques was right—the plants have gotten wild, woody stems sprawling in all directions, the silvery-green foliage tangled and overgrown.
"The goal is to keep the plant compact," I explain, demonstrating on a particularly unruly specimen. "You cut back the flowering stems from last year—see these woody parts?—but you don't cut into the old wood. That'll kill it."
Iris watches with an intensity that's almost unnerving. I can practically see her filing the information away, organizing it into categories, making mental notes.
"How far back?" she asks.
"A couple inches below where the leaves start. Like this." I make the cut, quick and clean. "You want to shape it—a little mound, not too tall. Think of a hedgehog."
"A hedgehog."
"Round and spiky. That's the aesthetic we're going for."
Something flickers across her face—not quite a smile, but close. "I'll add 'hedgehog aesthetics' to my list of new skills."
We work in silence for a while, the only sounds the snip of shears and the buzz of bees already exploring the early blooms. The sun climbs higher, warming the back of my neck. The scent of lavender fills my nose, my lungs, my entire being.
This is what I missed. All those years in London, working in restaurant kitchens that smelled like grease and sweat, I missed this. The quiet. The rhythm. The sense of being part of something that's been growing here for generations.
"You're a natural," I say after a while, watching Iris work. Her cuts are precise, her movements efficient. Already her row looks better than when she started.
"I'm a fast learner," she says without looking up. "When I want to be."
"Yeah, I've noticed." I move to the next plant, positioning myself a few feet away from her. Close enough to talk, far enough to think. "Can I ask you something?"
She pauses, shears in hand. "That depends on what it is."
"What did your mother tell you? About Grand-mère. About why you couldn't come here."
The silence stretches. I hear a bird calling from somewhere in the olive grove, a car on the distant road, my own heartbeat.
"She didn't tell me anything," Iris says finally. "That was the point. Grand-mère was just... off-limits. A forbidden topic. I asked, when I was little, but she'd get this look on her face—like she'd tasted something rotten—and change the subject."
"Did you ever push?"
"Once." Iris's voice is flat. "I was ten. I found a letter in my mother's things—from Grand-mère. I didn't get to read much before my mother caught me, but I saw... she said she loved me. That she wanted to know me. That she thought about me every day."
Her hands have stilled on the plant. I wait.
"My mother took the letter. She burned it in the fireplace while I watched. And then she told me that Marguerite Beaumont was a selfish woman who had hurt our family, and I was never to contact her or mention her name again."
The words hang in the fragrant air between us. I think of my own mother, her hard face, her refusal to explain. The parallel is almost too perfect.
"My mother did the same thing," I say quietly.
"Well, not the burning. But the silence.
The forbidden topic. When she told me we weren't coming back to Provence.
I cried for days. Begged her to tell me what happened, what Grand-mère had done.
She wouldn't say. Just that some people couldn't be trusted and we were better off without her. "
Iris looks at me then, really looks—and for the first time since she arrived, I see something behind the armor. Pain. Recognition. The terrible familiarity of a wound that matches your own.
"We were children," she says. "And they kept us from her."
"Yeah."
"And now she's dead, and we'll never know if—" She stops, pressing her lips together. "I keep thinking about what I would have said to her. If I'd had the chance. If I'd been braver."
"What would you have said?"
"I don't know. Maybe just..." She swallows. "Hello. I'm here. I've been wanting to meet you my whole life."
Something in me gives. I've spent the past week resenting this woman—her blood claim, her ignorance, the way she looks at this place like it's a problem to be solved. But standing here in the lavender, watching her fight back tears over a grandmother she never knew, I see the truth.
We're the same. We're both casualties of secrets we didn't keep and choices we didn't make.
"She would have loved you," I say, and I mean it. "She already did love you. She talked about you constantly—every summer, every visit. Her ghost in America. She would have given anything to have you here."
Iris's hands are shaking slightly. She turns back to the lavender, making a cut with more force than necessary.
"Tell me about the summers," she says, her voice rough. "Tell me what it was like."
So I do.
We work through the morning and into the afternoon, and I tell her everything.
The cooking lessons in the kitchen. The walks through the lavender at dusk.
The way Grand-mère read to me in French, and the time I fell in the stream and she wrapped me in her cardigan and told me that falling was the first step to learning how to get up.
In return, Iris tells me about Chicago. Her father, who taught her to cook and laugh before the divorce. Her mother, who taught her to perform and never show weakness.
"That's why I make lists," she says at one point, almost laughing. "If I have a plan, I have control. If I have control, I can't fail. And if I don't fail—"
"People can't leave," I finish.
She looks at me, startled. "How did you know?"
"Because I do the same thing. Just with cooking instead of lists." I shrug. "If I can feed people, they need me. And if they need me, they can't throw me away."
"That's..." She trails off.
"Messed up? Yeah. Grand-mère would have had something to say about it. She had something to say about everything."
We're quiet for a while, working side by side. The sun has shifted, the shadows growing longer. We've covered maybe a third of the field—enough for one day, probably.
"I should say something," Iris says suddenly. "About yesterday. About what Monique told us."
"About Hélène?"
"About Hélène. About what she was to Grand-mère." Iris's voice is careful, measured. "I want you to know that it doesn't... I mean, I don't..."
"You don't care that our grandmother was in love with a woman?"
"I don't care who she loved. I care that I didn't know. I care that I missed all of it—not just her, but who she actually was. The real person, not the ghost my mother turned her into."
I study her face, looking for judgment or discomfort. I find only frustration and grief.
"For what it's worth," I say, "I don't think your mother knew. About Hélène. Grand-mère didn't talk about it much when we were here—I didn't even understand, when I was young. It was just that Hélène lived here, and they loved each other, and that was how it was."
"But that's what caused the rift. Isn't it? Whatever happened between my mother and Grand-mère, it must have had something to do with Hélène."
"Maybe." I think of my own mom, of the things I still don't understand. "Or maybe there's more we don't know yet."
"There's definitely more we don't know." Iris pulls off her gloves, flexing her fingers. Her palms are red from the work, and there's a scratch on her forearm where a branch caught her. She looks almost human like this—disheveled and tired and real.
"I'm going to get water," she says. "Do you want anything from the house?"
"I'm good. I'm going to check something in the barn before we quit for the day."
She nods and heads toward the farmhouse. I watch her go—her stride still precise, her posture still perfect, but something softer in the set of her shoulders than there was this morning.
The barn is cool and dim, full of the smell of old wood and dried lavender.
The distillery equipment sits silent and dusty in the corner—the copper stills, the cooling tanks, the bottles and labels waiting for harvest. I run my hand along the workbench where Grand-mère taught me to measure and pour, remembering.
That's when I see it.
A wooden box, tucked behind a row of empty bottles on a high shelf. It's dusty, clearly undisturbed for years, and someone has written on the top in faded marker.
Pour mes filles.
For my girls.
Plural.
My heart hammering, I pull down the box and lift the lid.
Inside: photographs. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, spanning decades. Grand-mère as a young woman, radiant and laughing. Grand-mère with Hélène, their heads bent together over something I can't see. Grand-mère holding a baby I don't recognize.
And at the bottom, two photographs I've never seen.
One is of me: five years old, in this very barn, grinning at the camera with lavender flowers clutched in my fist.
The other is of a little girl I don't know. Dark hair. Brown eyes. A serious expression that reminds me of someone.
On the back, in Grand-mère's handwriting: Iris. 4 ans.
She had a photograph of Iris. All these years, she had a photograph, and I never knew.
I hear footsteps behind me. Iris has returned, water bottle in hand.
"What did you find?" she asks.
I turn, the box in my hands, and hold it out to her.
"She kept photos of both of us," I say.
Iris looks at the box, at the photographs, at the words on the lid. Her face does something complicated—crumples and firms and crumples again.
"Her girls," she repeats softly.
"Yeah." I swallow past the lump in my throat. "I think maybe we need to stop treating each other like enemies."
Iris meets my eyes. Whatever she sees there makes something in her expression shift.
"We're not enemies," she says. "We never were. We're just two people who've been lied to our whole lives."
She's right. We're not enemies. We're not friends, either—not yet. But standing here in the dusty barn with our grandmother's secrets between us, we're something.
We're her girls.
And maybe that's enough to start.