27. Iris
IRIS
I wake at three and know immediately I'm not going back to sleep.
Cat is a warm weight against my back, breathing slow. The house is making its night noises — the loose shutter, the beam above the hallway that ticks as it cools. Everything is exactly as it should be.
And I feel like someone has died.
That's the part nobody warns you about. I won. I said every single thing I've wanted to say to my mother since I was five years old, and she got into her car and drove away, and I won.
And now I'm lying in the dark grieving a woman who is alive and well and asleep in a hotel in Avignon.
I get up.
The kitchen is cold. I sit at the table in one of Cat's shirts and don't turn the light on, because turning the light on would make it a thing.
I'm still sitting there when the floor creaks behind me.
"Don't," I say, without turning around. "Please don't ask if I'm okay."
A pause.
Then the little light over the stove comes on — just that one, low and yellow — and Cat crosses to the fridge in her t-shirt and her ridiculous socks and starts taking things out of it.
"What are you doing?"
"Making you an omelette."
"Cat. It's three in the morning."
"Yes." She cracks an egg one-handed against the bowl. "And you haven't eaten since lunch yesterday, and you were sick in the lavender, and you're sitting in the dark in my shirt like a Victorian widow. So I'm making you an omelette."
She doesn't say are you okay. She doesn't say she doesn't deserve you, or you did the right thing, or any of the things I'd have had to be gracious about.
She just cooks. Butter into the pan. The good knife out of the block. Hair a disaster, face still creased from the pillow, working with the unhurried competence of a woman who has done this ten thousand times for people who couldn't say what was wrong with them.
I watch her, and something in my chest gives out.
"I feel like she's dead," I say.
Cat doesn't stop moving. "I know."
"That's insane. She's not dead. She's in a hotel. She's probably asleep in a silk eye mask being furious in her dreams." My voice does something ugly. "So why does it feel like she's dead?"
"Because you buried her." She slides the omelette onto a plate, adds a fork, and sets it down in front of me.
"That's what yesterday was. You put down a woman you've been carrying for thirty-two years, and now you're standing there with empty arms and you don't know what to do with them. " She sits down across from me. "Eat."
I eat.
It's very good. Of course it's very good.
"Cat."
"Mm."
I put down the fork.
"I need you to take me back to bed," I say. "And I need you not to be gentle with me."
She goes very still.
"Iris—"
"She called it a perversion." My voice comes out perfectly level. It is not a nice level. "She stood in our garden, and she looked at your hand in mine, and she said the word perversion. And I've been lying awake for three hours letting her have the last word." I stand. "I'd like to take it back."
Cat looks at me for a long moment. Something moves behind her eyes — heat, and something rougher underneath it.
"Right," she says. And stands. And takes my hand.
We don't make it quietly down the hall.
She has me against the wall before we're anywhere near the bedroom, her mouth hard on mine, her fist in the shirt I'm wearing — her shirt. And I let her. And then I stop letting her and start taking, which is new, and which she notices instantly.
"Oh," she breathes, when I push her backward through our bedroom door. "Hello."
"Get on the bed."
"Bossy," she says, delighted, and goes.
I don't want to be handled tonight. I don't want to be soothed, or cherished, or told that I'm beautiful. I want to be wanted — obviously, greedily, with no apology anywhere in it — and Cat, who reads me better than anyone alive has ever bothered to, gives me precisely that.
She's rough with me and I ask for more. She pins my wrists and I tell her yes. When she asks — because she always asks, even like this, even with her teeth at my throat — I hear myself say yes, God, don't stop, and the voice coming out of me does not sound like a woman apologising for existing.
I come with her name in my mouth and my mother's word burned clean out of my head.
Then I put her on her back and take my time about it.
"God," she says, much later, when she can speak again. "That was—"
"Yeah?"
"Where did you learn to do that thing with your—"
"Research." I bite her shoulder. "Remember?"
She laughs, wrecked and pleased, and pulls me down onto her chest.
And then, after a while, I notice she's gone quiet.
Not the good quiet. Not the boneless, sated, half-asleep quiet.
She's holding me exactly the way she always holds me — hand moving slow up and down my spine, chin resting on my hair — and she is somewhere else entirely.
"Hey." I lift my head. "Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere."
"Cat."
"I'm here." She kisses my forehead. It's real, and it's warm, and it is absolutely a door closing. "Go to sleep."
I could push. Two months ago I would have pushed — because I'd have needed to know, because not-knowing is a variable, and variables are unacceptable.
Instead I put my head back down and let her have it, because I'm learning that people tell you things when they're ready and not a second sooner.
I fall asleep on her chest.
Right at the very edge of it, I think: her heart is going much too fast for a woman about to sleep.
We sleep late, which is a luxury we almost never allow ourselves.
When I wake, the sun is high and Cat is already up, moving around the room with the quiet efficiency that means she's been awake a while and didn't want to disturb me.
"Coffee's in the kitchen," she says when she sees my eyes open. "And Duval rang. He's got the last envelope."
I sit up. "The last one?"
"The one for after the ninety days." She sits on the edge of the bed. "He wants to bring it himself."
Ninety days.
I have genuinely lost track. Somewhere in the middle of a lavender harvest and a lawsuit and falling in love and burying my mother alive, the clock I flew here to run out simply — ran out.
"It's been ninety days?"
"As of yesterday." Cat takes my hand. "We made it."
"We did rather more than make it."
"We survived Jean-Pierre." She counts them off on my fingers, which is annoying, and which I love. "The village. Your mother. My mother. Several goats."
"You've left out the part where I learned to hold a knife."
"I have blocked that out entirely, for my own safety."
Duval arrives at noon with a single envelope, thicker than the others, sealed with wax. He sets it on the table between us like it might still be warm.
"Did she know?" I ask. "Any of it? Jean-Pierre. My mother." I hesitate. "Us."
And Duval — who has been unfailingly kind and impeccably discreet with us since that first phone call — takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, and for a moment he is simply a tired old man who misses his friend.
"No," he says. "She hoped. There is a great deal of difference."
"But the timing. The letters. The room, the ninety days—"
"Mademoiselle." He smiles, and it is very sad.
"She sat in my office and she wept. She was terrified.
She was quite certain you would sell the house inside a month and never speak to one another again, and she made me swear that if that happened I would burn the letters rather than send them — because she could not bear the thought of you reading them and feeling nothing. "
I don't have anything to say to that.
"She did not plan all this," he says gently. "She guessed. Badly, in several places. She was convinced Catherine would be the difficult one."
Cat makes an outraged noise.
"She was a frightened woman with very little time," Duval says, "who did the only thing she could think of, and then died without ever knowing whether it worked.
" He puts his glasses back on. "You are what she hoped for.
She never found out. That is the tragedy of it — and I would rather you understood that than went on believing she was some sort of oracle. "
We see him out. Then we sit on the terrace with the envelope between us.
"Ready?" Cat asks.
"Not remotely." I pick it up anyway.
Inside: a letter, and photographs.
The first is a wedding photo. A small ceremony — a handful of witnesses, a village hall, no fuss at all. Marguerite in a good coat. Hélène with paint under her fingernails, because of course she does. Both of them looking like women who have got away with something enormous.
"They were married," Cat says. "I never knew they were actually married."
"Look at the date."
The year the law finally caught up. After thirty-three years, they made it official on a Tuesday, in a village hall, with six people watching.
I unfold the letter.
My dear girls—
If you're reading this, you've survived ninety days under the same roof. And if Henri is reading your faces correctly, you've done rather more than survive.
I hoped you would. I did not know. I want to be honest with you at the end, since I was not honest with anyone for most of my life: I did not know, and it frightened me a great deal more than dying did.
The photograph is from our wedding. We waited thirty-three years for the law to catch up with our hearts, and when it finally did we celebrated with six people and a very poor cake. It was the happiest day of my life.
I want you to have happy days too. All of them. Every one I didn't get to spend with you, spend on each other.
The farm is yours now, completely. Run it, sell it, burn it down and build something better. I trust you.
But more than the farm, I leave you this: my blessing. Unreserved. For whoever you choose to be, and whatever you choose to do.
Choose love, my darlings. Always.
Grand-mère
I stop reading.
Cat's hand found mine somewhere in the last paragraph. Neither of us says anything for a while.
"Six people and a very poor cake," she says eventually. Her voice is thick. "That was the happiest day of her life."
"She waited thirty-three years for it."
"Yeah." Cat turns the photograph over in her fingers, looking at those two women who got away with it. "Yeah. She did."
And then she's quiet a beat too long.
She puts the photo down. She stands. She says she ought to get someone out to look at the distillery pump before the light goes, and she kisses the top of my head on her way past — warm, easy, ordinary — and she doesn't look at me once.
So I sit on the terrace with my grandmother's blessing in my lap and my grandmother's wedding on the table, and I watch the woman I love walk away across the lavender.
Where'd you go? I asked her.
Nowhere, she said.
I'm beginning to think that was a lie.