11. Iris
IRIS
Neither of us has said a word about the terrace.
It's been there all morning anyway. Every time she hands me a mug or reaches past me for something, we both go a little too careful, a little too quiet.
I told her last night I needed to think.
I didn't tell her I barely slept—that I lay there until it got light, replaying the exact second her hand closed over mine.
We didn't bring it up over coffee. We didn't bring it up when Cat got off the phone with the notaire, who apparently thinks Jean-Pierre's noise about the will is exactly that—noise, nothing to lose sleep over, just keep documenting everything. We're not bringing it up now, either.
Cat has other plans.
After she hung up, she took one look at me—wound tight and useless, still stewing over everything we weren't talking about—and decided what I needed was to do something with my hands that wasn't making a spreadsheet.
"Cooking is meditative," she said, nodding at the vegetables piled on the counter. "And you've been running on espresso and nerves for three weeks. Your body's about to stage a walkout."
"I'm perfectly capable of feeding myself," I told her.
"You think a cheese sandwich counts as a hot meal." She raised an eyebrow. "You don't get an opinion in my kitchen."
So that's how I end up in Grand-mère's kitchen—our kitchen—the counters buried under vegetables in various stages of prep: aubergines and courgettes and tomatoes so red they look fake, peppers in three different colors, a braid of garlic that smells like something out of a dream.
"You're holding the knife wrong."
I look down at my hand, which is wrapped around the handle of a very expensive-looking chef's knife in what I thought was a perfectly reasonable manner. "I'm holding it like a knife."
"You're holding it like you're about to stab someone in a horror film." Cat appears at my elbow, close enough that I catch the scent of her shampoo. "Here. Like this."
She reaches around me, her hand closing over mine, and adjusts my grip.
Her fingers are warm and sure, repositioning mine with the casual confidence of someone who's done this a thousand times.
I'm suddenly very aware of how close she is, of the way her breath stirs the hair at my temple, of the solid warmth of her body behind mine.
"The blade does the work," she says, her voice low and patient. "You're just guiding it. See?"
She moves my hand in a gentle rocking motion, and the onion beneath the blade falls away in neat, even slices. It looks effortless when she does it. It looks like magic.
"Now you try."
She steps back, and I immediately miss her warmth. Which is ridiculous. Which is a thought I should not be having about my co-inheritor while holding a very sharp knife.
I try to replicate the motion. The onion slides sideways and nearly rolls off the cutting board.
"Okay," Cat says, and I can hear the smile in her voice. "Maybe we start with something less... slippery."
She moves to the stove, where olive oil is already heating in a massive pan. "The thing about ratatouille is that everyone thinks it's just vegetables in a pot. Throw it all together, let it simmer, done. But that's not ratatouille. That's vegetable mush."
"And vegetable mush is bad?"
"Vegetable mush is a crime against Provence." She adds garlic to the oil, and the kitchen fills with a smell so good my stomach actually growls. "Real ratatouille, you cook each vegetable separately. You layer the flavors. You treat each ingredient with respect."
I watch her hands as she works—the quick, confident movements, the way she tilts the pan to spread the oil, the easy grace of someone completely in their element. Her hands are beautiful, I realize. Strong and capable, with short nails and a small scar across one knuckle I've never noticed before.
I wonder how she got that scar. I wonder what else I don't know about her.
"You're staring," Cat says without looking up.
Heat floods my face. "I'm observing. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Observation is educational. Staring is—" I stop, not sure how to finish that sentence.
"Staring is what?" She glances at me over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised, and there's something in her expression that makes my stomach flip. Challenge, maybe. Or amusement. Or something else entirely.
"Never mind." I turn back to my massacred onion. "What do I do with this?"
"Scrape it into the bowl with the others. We'll pretend it's supposed to look like that."
"Your confidence in me is overwhelming."
"I'm an optimist." She grins, and God, that grin. It transforms her whole face, lights her up from the inside. I've been seeing it more often lately—not the polite smile she gave me when I first arrived, but this real one, this warm one. I didn't realize until now how much I was waiting for it.
We work in silence for a while, Cat managing the stove while I prep vegetables under her increasingly amused supervision.
The late afternoon sun slants through the windows, turning everything gold.
The kitchen smells like herbs and olive oil and home—though I'm not sure when I started thinking of this place as home.
"Can I ask you something?" I say, scraping peppers into a bowl.
"You can ask. I reserve the right not to answer."
"Fair." I set down my knife, turning to face her. "Why did you leave London? The real reason, not the 'I needed a break' version."
Cat's hands still on the pan. For a moment, I think she's not going to answer.
"Burnout," she says finally. "The kind that sneaks up on you until one day you're standing in a walk-in freezer at two in the morning, crying over a sauce that won't reduce, and you realize you can't remember the last time you enjoyed any of it."
"That sounds..."
"Pathetic?"
"I was going to say familiar."
She looks at me then, really looks, and I see something shift in her expression. Recognition, maybe. The particular understanding of someone who knows exactly what you mean.
"The restaurant closed six months ago," she continues, turning back to the stove.
"Not my fault—the owners were in over their heads, made some bad investments, the whole thing went under.
But I'd been barely holding on for a year before that.
Twelve-hour days, six days a week. No social life.
No relationships—well, one relationship, but she left. "
"She?"
"Janeen. My ex." Cat's voice is carefully neutral.
"We were together for two years. She got offered a job in Sydney, asked me to come with her.
I said no—couldn't leave the restaurant, couldn't abandon my post. So she went without me.
" A pause. "Sometimes I think I didn't really say no to Sydney.
I said no to her. To the possibility of being happy. "
The words land somewhere tender in my chest. I know that feeling—the way ambition becomes an excuse, the way achievement becomes a wall. I've been building walls my whole life.
"Why?" I ask softly.
"Because being happy means having something to lose." Cat shrugs, but the gesture is too tight to be casual. "And I'm very good at losing things."
The kitchen is quiet except for the sizzle of vegetables in the pan. I want to say something—something meaningful, something that acknowledges the gift of her honesty—but the words stick in my throat.
"What about you?" Cat asks, not looking at me. "What's waiting for you in Chicago?"
The question catches me off guard. I've been so focused on what I'm doing here that I haven't thought much about what I left behind.
"A job," I say slowly. "An apartment. A life I built very carefully according to a plan I made when I was twenty-two."
"And this is a good life?"
"It's a successful life. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
I think about my apartment—beautiful, expensive, perfectly decorated in neutrals that a designer chose because they would photograph well.
I think about my job—impressive title, corner office, sixty-hour weeks that left no time for anything that wasn't on the schedule.
I think about the last time I did something just because I wanted to, and I can't remember.
"I don't know what I want," I admit. "I've spent so long achieving things that I never stopped to ask if they were the right things.
And now I'm thirty-two and I'm standing in a kitchen in Provence learning to make ratatouille, and it's the happiest I've been in years, and I have no idea what to do with that information. "
Cat turns off the burner and faces me fully. Her expression is soft, open—none of the walls I've learned to recognize.
"Maybe you don't have to do anything with it," she says. "Maybe you can just... feel it. Let yourself be happy without immediately turning it into a task on your to-do list."
"That sounds terrifying."
"I know." She smiles, and it's gentle this time, understanding.
"But you're already doing it. You've been doing it for weeks.
Every time you laugh at something stupid I say, every time you sit on the terrace and watch the sunset, every time you—" She stops, shakes her head.
"You're not the same person who showed up here in her heels and her blazer, ready to treat this whole thing like a hostile merger. You've changed."
"Have I?"
"Can't you feel it?"
I can, actually. That's the terrifying part.
The moment stretches between us, fragile and full of possibility. I'm acutely aware of how close we're standing, of the warmth radiating from the stove, of the way Cat is looking at me like she's seeing something she didn't expect to find.
A knock at the door shatters the silence.
We both jump, and Cat lets out a breath that might be relief or might be disappointment—I can't tell which.
"That'll be Sophie," she says, moving toward the door. "She texted earlier. Said she had news about Jean-Pierre."
Sophie enters in a whirlwind of energy, her bag over her shoulder and her dark hair wind-tousled. She kisses both my cheeks, then Cat's, and settles at the kitchen island like she belongs there.
"Jean-Pierre has been asking questions in the village," she announces without preamble. "At the café, at the boulangerie, at Chez Sylvie. He wants to know about Marguerite's mental state in her final months. Whether she seemed confused, whether she made any strange decisions."
"And what are people telling him?" I ask.
Sophie's smile is sharp. "That Marguerite was sharper at eighty-two than he is at seventy-three. That she knew exactly what she was doing with her will. That if he wanted to inherit, maybe he shouldn't have spent the last decade pretending she didn't exist."
Cat laughs, bright and relieved. "I love this village."
"The village loves Marguerite. And by extension—" Sophie gestures between us. "Her granddaughters. Both of them."
The word granddaughters does something complicated to my chest. I've spent my whole life being the granddaughter who didn't count, the one who was kept away, the ghost. And now here I am, being claimed by a village full of strangers, being included in a legacy I didn't know existed.
Sophie stays for dinner, which becomes an extended affair on the terrace as the sun sets over the lavender fields.
The ratatouille is delicious—even the parts I helped with—and Cat opens a bottle of rosé from the cellar that tastes like summer in a glass.
Sophie tells stories about Marguerite, about the village, about the time Jean-Pierre tried to buy a vineyard and accidentally purchased a field of sunflowers instead.
By the time she leaves, the stars are out and I'm pleasantly warm from wine and laughter. Cat walks Sophie to her car while I carry dishes to the kitchen, my mind still buzzing from the evening.
I'm rinsing plates when Cat returns, her footsteps quiet on the stone floor.
"Leave those," she says. "I'll do them in the morning."
"I don't mind."
"I know you don't. You've got—" She stops, and I find her standing very close, her eyes fixed on my face. "You've got tomato. On your cheek."
I reach up to brush at it, but she's faster. Her hand comes up, her thumb sweeping gently across my cheekbone, and the touch goes straight down my spine.
She doesn't move her hand.
I don't move away.
"There," she murmurs, but she doesn't pull back. Her eyes are very green in the low light, and her lips are slightly parted, and I can feel the warmth of her breath on my skin.
Everything narrows to her thumb against my cheek and the drumming of my heart in my ears.
"Cat," I whisper, and I don't know if it's a question or an answer.
"Yeah." Her voice is rough. "I know."
She steps back, and the spell breaks. The kitchen rushes back into focus—the dishes in the sink, the remains of dinner on the counter, the ordinary reality of a Sunday evening.
"I should—" I start.
"Me too," she says.
Neither of us moves.
"Goodnight, Iris." Cat's smile is complicated, layered with things neither of us is ready to say. "Thanks for letting me teach you. You're not as hopeless as you think."
She's gone before I can respond, her footsteps fading down the hall, and I'm left standing in the kitchen with a dishcloth in one hand and my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest.
I press my fingers to my cheek where she touched me, and I can still feel the ghost of her warmth.
This is getting complicated. This is getting dangerous. This is getting—
Good, whispers a voice in my head. This is getting good.
I turn off the kitchen light and head to bed, and I don't let myself think about how right it felt to have her hand on my face. I don't let myself wonder what would have happened if she hadn't stepped back.
I definitely don't let myself hope.
But when I finally fall asleep, I dream of green eyes and gentle hands and the taste of rosé on someone else's lips.