12. Cat
CAT
The light in Provence does something impossible at this hour.
I've tried to explain it to people who haven't been here—the honey light, the purple shadows, the whole world looking like someone painted it in oils and then gilded the edges for fun.
They nod politely and say "that sounds lovely," and I know they don't understand.
You have to stand in the middle of it while the fields blaze purple-gold like they're on fire from the inside.
"Do you want to walk?"
The words are out before I've thought them through. Iris looks up from the book she's been pretending to read for the last hour—I know she's been pretending because she hasn't turned a page in twenty minutes—and there's something uncertain in her expression.
"Walk where?"
"The fields. It's the best time of day. I used to—" I stop, suddenly self-conscious. "Grand-mère used to take me at this hour. She said the lavender was different in golden light."
The uncertainty in Iris's face melts into something softer, something curious.
"Okay," she says. "Let me get my shoes."
She comes back in trainers—actual trainers, bought from a shop in the village last week because her selection of heels and ballet flats was proving "unsuitable for agricultural life," as she put it. Proof that she's trying.
I've been seeing these small changes for weeks now. She's stopped straightening her hair every morning. She laughs more easily, her whole face going luminous and unguarded.
I need to stop cataloguing these changes. I need to stop noticing her at all.
I'm very bad at doing what I need to do.
We walk in silence at first, following the path between the lavender rows.
The plants come up to our waists here, the purple blooms heavy with bees that drone lazily in the warm air.
The smell is overwhelming—clean and sharp and sweet all at once, the scent of every summer I ever spent here, of every good memory I have.
"Tell me about when you were young," Iris says. "Here, I mean. What was it like?"
The question catches me off guard. We've talked around our childhoods—compared notes on our mothers' silences, swapped theories about what really happened—but we haven't done this. Haven't just shared memories for the sake of sharing them.
"It was magic," I say, and the word isn't an exaggeration. "My life in London was... complicated. My mum was having one of her bad periods, and everything felt heavy, and then I'd come here and it was like stepping into another world."
"What did you do? During the summers?"
"Everything." I run my hand along the top of the lavender, feeling the rough texture of the blooms against my palm. "Helped with the harvest. Learned to cook. Played in the barn until Grand-mère threatened to lock me in with the rats if I didn't stop making such a racket."
"There are rats in the barn?"
"No. She made that up to keep me in line. Didn't work—I went looking for them. I thought it would be like having pets."
Iris laughs, and the sound does something to my chest. I'm increasingly aware that I'm in trouble here, that every moment I spend with her makes it worse, but I can't seem to stop.
"She used to bring me out here at sunset," I continue. "We'd walk all the way to the edge of the property, where you can see the valley. She'd tell me stories about the land, about the family, about the women who worked this lavender before her."
"What happened to them? The other women?"
"Died, mostly. Or married and moved away.
Grand-mère was the last one left—she inherited from her aunt.
It's been passing through women in the family for generations.
Not always the obvious ones." I glance at Iris.
"She used to say the lavender chose its keepers.
That the land would reject anyone who didn't belong. "
"That's very..." Iris searches for a word. "Mystical. For a practical woman."
"She had levels." I smile at the memory. "She could skin a rabbit and balance the accounts and then tell you with complete sincerity that the old stones at the edge of the property were placed there by the goddess herself."
"What goddess?"
"She never said. I think she liked the mystery."
We've reached my favorite spot—a slight rise in the middle of the largest field, where the lavender stretches out in all directions like a purple sea. The sun is lower now, the light going thick and golden, and the mountains in the distance are turning the color of bruises.
"Here," I say, stopping. "This is it."
Iris turns in a slow circle, taking it in. Her hair is loose, catching the light, and there's an expression on her face I can't quite read. Wonder, maybe. Or grief for something she never had.
"She wanted you to know this," I say softly. "She wanted you to stand here and see this. That's why she made us stay. I’m sure of it."
"You think that's why?"
"I think she knew what this place could do to a person. How it gets under your skin." I swallow, suddenly aware of how close we're standing. "I think she hoped it would get under yours."
"It has." Iris's voice is quiet. "More than I expected."
The lavender sways around us, waist-high and warm, and the light is doing something ridiculous to her face—turning her gold at the edges, softening all that careful precision until she looks like someone out of one of Grand-mère's stories.
"You look good in this light," I tell her, because apparently I've lost the ability to keep my mouth shut. "Like—I don't know. Like a dream somebody had about a woman in a lavender field."
Iris huffs a laugh, but her cheeks go pink. "That's very poetic, for someone who threatened me with a courgette this afternoon."
"I have layers."
And my heart's doing something inconvenient about the pink in her cheeks, and I don't trust myself to keep standing here saying words like dream, so I do what I always do when a feeling gets too big for me—I find something to do with my hands.
I snap off a stem of lavender and hold it up between us like a wand.
"Grand-mère's rules," I say. "She used to swear that if you write your dreams big enough across the sky, the sky can't help but hand them back to you. You just have to mean it."
Iris eyes the stem. "You want me to write. In the air."
"I want you to write in the air like you mean it. Big. None of that tasteful little corporate cursive." I sweep the lavender up over my head and drag it across the deepening blue in huge, looping letters. "There. Done. Life-changing wish, cast."
"What did you wish for?"
"A dishwasher that works and one harvest where the tractor doesn't die on me. I'm a woman of vision."
She laughs—really laughs, the surprised kind she keeps trying not to let out—and it goes straight through me.
"Your turn." I pluck another stem and hold it out. "And no fair wishing for good Wi-Fi."
She takes it like it might bite. Lifts it. Hesitates.
"Bigger," I tell her.
"I'm doing it my way."
"Your way is wrong, that's the—"
But she's already lifting her arm, writing something slow and deliberate across the first stars, and I don't catch the whole word, because I'm too busy watching her do it—watching the woman who color-codes her sock drawer paint a secret into the sky.
"What was that?" I ask.
"You'll never know."
"Iris."
"The sky knows." She tips her chin up, insufferably pleased with herself. "That's the whole point. You said so."
So we write our way out of the field—her wishing things she won't tell me, me wishing things I definitely can't—tracing nonsense and secrets across the dark, bumping shoulders, arguing about penmanship, laughing at nothing the way you only do when the nothing is quietly everything.
By the time we reach the terrace, the stem in my fist is a crushed, fragrant ruin, and Iris is flushed and grinning and looks nothing like the woman who crossed her arms at me a week ago.
"Thank you," she says, suddenly quiet. "I don't—do this. Any of it." She turns the broken lavender over in her fingers. "So. Thank you."
"Anytime, Beaumont-Clark."
She goes in first. I stay out a while, listening to the old house settle around her, watching the light bloom gold in her window.
I pour myself a glass of wine and drink it on the terrace, where the last of the light is bleeding out of the sky and the first stars are coming through.
The lavender's a dark sea now, purple-grey in the twilight, and somewhere out past the fields an owl keeps asking the same question over and over.
I've still got my stem of lavender, crushed to almost nothing between my fingers. I lift it and write one more word across the dark—the one I wouldn't let myself write in front of her—big, and like I mean it. Then I lower my arm, feel like an idiot, and don't regret it even a little.
This is bad. This is so bad. This is exactly the situation I've spent my whole life dodging—falling for someone with one foot already out the door, wanting something I'm not going to get to keep, lining myself up for the day she flies back to Chicago and takes a piece of me with her.
But every time I close my eyes I see her out in that field, arm flung up at the sky, writing a secret she wouldn't tell me and laughing like she'd forgotten how not to.
I stay out until the wine's gone and the night's gone fully black, until I'm cold enough to have an excuse. Then I rinse my glass, kill the lights, and head for my room.
Iris's door is shut. No light underneath.
I stand there a long moment, hand half-raised, my heart doing that thing again—half fear, half hope, no idea which one's winning.
I don't knock.
I go to my own room, shut the door, and sit on the edge of the bed in the dark. The window's open, and the lavender drifts in on the night air, sweet and everywhere.
I press the little crushed sprig to my lips without really meaning to.
"Fuck," I tell the empty room.
The room doesn't answer. The lavender just keeps breathing its perfume into the dark.
I fall asleep eventually and when I finally do, I dream in gold and dark: her face in the last of the light, her arm sweeping up toward the stars, and the word she wrote where I couldn't read it, hanging over both of us like a promise neither of us has said out loud yet.