19. Solenne
— ? —
Solenne
The villa looks different in daylight.
I noticed it yesterday when we arrived, but I was too tired from the flight to think clearly about what had changed.
Summer fell asleep in the car from the airport, and Valentin carried her upstairs while I stood in the foyer looking at the photographs on the wall.
Our wedding. The dinner. Both still there, exactly where I left them last May.
Now it’s our first full morning, and I’m standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, watching the light move across the tiles while Summer eats her breakfast.
“Mama, the eggs are different here.”
“Different how?”
“More yellow.” She holds up her fork for inspection. “See? They’re really yellow.”
“Delfina gets them from a farm nearby. We’ll have to ask what they feed their hens.”
“Do the chickens here have names?”
“I don’t know. We could ask Delfina.”
“I’m going to ask Delfina.”
She finishes her eggs and runs off to find her, leaving me alone with my coffee and the quiet of the house.
It’s the quiet that’s different. I didn’t notice it at first because quiet can mean many things.
In the months I lived here before, the quiet often felt like waiting.
Like holding my breath before the next uncomfortable dinner, the next careful conversation, the next moment when I’d have to decide whether to say something or keep the peace.
This quiet is just quiet. No one is going to appear in the doorway with a comment designed to land like a paper cut. No one is rearranging things when I’m not looking. The house is simply a house, and I’m standing in it drinking coffee.
Valentin appears from the garden, brushing soil from his hands. He’s been in the garden with Summer, helping her search for the shell she insists she left beneath a tree last year.
“Summer found Delfina,” he says. “They’re discussing chickens.”
“She wants to know their names.”
“Of course she does.” He washes his hands at the sink and comes to stand beside me. “How are you?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He nods, accepting this. “The coffee is good?”
“The coffee is good.”
We stand there together, looking out the window at the garden. The lemon trees are starting to bloom, pale flowers against dark leaves. I remember picking lemons from those trees with Summer, making lemonade that was too sour and adding too much sugar to fix it.
“We moved the furniture in the sitting room,” Valentin says. “The arrangement my mother preferred always blocked the light.”
“I noticed.”
“And the curtains in the dining room. They were heavy. I had them replaced with something lighter.”
“I noticed that too.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “I wanted it to feel different. Not just because she’s gone, but because it should have been ours from the beginning. I kept waiting for the right time to change things, and then I realized there wasn’t going to be a right time. I just had to do it.”
“It does feel different.”
“Good different?”
I turn to look at him. He’s watching my face the way he does when he’s not sure what I’m thinking, careful and hopeful and a little afraid.
“Good different,” I say.
His shoulders relax slightly. “Did you get any sleep?”
“Eventually. Summer put her feet on my pillow.”
We were both so tired last night that I fell asleep beside her after unpacking. Valentin took a guest room rather than wake me.
“The master bedroom is ready,” he says. “I can keep the guest room if you want it to yourself.”
I think about the bedroom upstairs. The bed I slept in alone so many nights, waiting for him to come home. The clothes I left in the closet, things I had stopped thinking of as mine. I found them yesterday, cleaned and folded on a shelf, with space beneath for the clothes I brought.
“I don’t want separate rooms,” I say.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it. His fingers are still cool from the garden, but they warm quickly against mine.
“I need to check on Summer,” I say. “Make sure she hasn’t convinced Delfina to let her name all the chickens after cartoon characters.”
“Too late. I heard her suggesting Peppa for the brown one.”
“Of course she did.”
I squeeze his hand and go to find my daughter.
***
The days settle into a rhythm I didn’t expect.
Mornings, Summer and I explore the gardens while Valentin works. She’s discovered a corner near the old well where lizards sun themselves on the warm stones, and she’s determined to count them all. She reports her findings at lunch with the seriousness of a scientist presenting research.
“Seven today. But one might have been the same as yesterday. He had the same tail.”
“How can you tell it’s the same tail?”
“It was crooked. Like this.” She demonstrates with her finger. “I’m going to call him Bendy.”
“What about the others?”
“I haven’t decided yet. Names are important.”
In the afternoons, we walk down to the village for gelato or take Summer to look for shells. Summer is delighted to discover that the man at the gelateria remembers her, even though it’s been a year. He gives her an extra scoop and tells her she’s grown at least a meter.
“I haven’t grown a meter,” she tells me seriously as we walk home. “That would make me very tall.”
“He was exaggerating.”
“Why do grown-ups do that?”
“Because he’s glad to see you.”
She looks back at the shop. “Do you think he’ll be glad tomorrow too?”
“One enormous ice cream at a time, please.”
Evenings, after Summer is in bed, Valentin and I sit on the terrace and watch the stars come out. We don’t always talk. Sometimes we just sit there, close enough to touch, letting the silence be comfortable instead of loaded.
On the third afternoon, I take a work call in the sitting room. It runs past the time we planned to leave for the village. I hear Summer ask whether they’re going without me, then Valentin telling her they can help Delfina until I’m finished.
When I come out, my coat is still on the chair. No one has sent a car away or decided I won’t be coming. Summer complains that the ice cream shop might run out of chocolate, and I apologize for keeping her waiting. Valentin hands me my coat.
It is such an ordinary delay. By dinner, Summer has forgotten it.
I haven’t.
Later, I open the email thread with my lawyer. The last message asks whether I want to keep the proceedings paused. I read it once, then close the screen. I know what I want to say. I want Valentin to hear it from me first.
On our fourth evening, he finds me on the terrace with my shoes off and my feet tucked beneath the chair.
“Would you come down to the cove with me?”
“Now?”
“I’ve thought about it a lot. Being there with you. Just us, no one else.”
I look at him. The moonlight catches the angles of his face, makes him look both older and younger than he is.
“What did you think about?”
“Swimming with you. Talking without wondering who might overhear.” He pauses. “Being with you somewhere I can’t decide to answer one last email.”
“The water’s cold in March.”
“I know. We don’t have to stay in long.”
“Summer?”
“Delfina’s with her. She said she’d read in the chair outside Summer’s door until we’re back.”
I know the path from our walks in the garden. Summer keeps asking to go down again and inspect her shells by the water, as though bringing them back might have changed them.
Tonight the house is quiet behind us. There is nothing I need to finish before I can say yes.
“Okay,” I say.
“Let’s go,” I add, before he can ask whether I mean it.
The path down the cliff is narrow, lit only by the flashlight Valentin brought and the moon overhead. I hold his hand on the steep parts, not because I need to but because I want to. The air smells like salt and wild rosemary, and somewhere below I can hear the waves.
The cove is small, sheltered on three sides by dark rock. The water gleams silver in the moonlight, deceptively calm. Valentin sets down the bag he brought: towels, blankets, a thermos I didn’t notice him packing.
“Hot chocolate,” he says when he catches me looking. “For after.”
“You planned this.”
“I hoped.”
We stand at the edge of the water. It laps against the rocks with a soft, rhythmic sound, patient and endless.
I think about the last year, all the careful steps that brought us here.
The separate apartments. The dinners that ended at different front doors.
The slow rebuilding of something I thought was gone forever.
“It’s going to be freezing,” I say.
“Almost certainly.”
“You’re sure you want to do this?”
“I’ve wanted to do this for months.” He looks at me. “With you. Only with you.”
I reach for the hem of my sweater and pull it over my head. The night air is cool against my skin, but not as cold as the water is going to be. Valentin follows, folding his clothes neatly on the rocks beside mine.
“Ready?” he asks.
“No. Let’s do it anyway.”
We wade in together. The water is shockingly cold, exactly as predicted, and I gasp when it reaches my waist. Valentin makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be a cry of protest.
“This was your idea,” I remind him.
“I’m aware.” He moves deeper, wincing. “I’m deeply regretting it.”
“Too late to back out now.”
I push off into the water, taking two quick strokes before I can talk myself out of it. The cold hits like a physical blow, but then I surface and it’s just cold, not unbearable. Just the sea at night, dark and silver and alive.
Valentin follows me under. He comes up gasping, pushing wet hair out of his face.
“Better once you’re in?” I ask.
“Marginally.”
We swim for a few minutes, not going far from shore. The cold makes everything sharper, more immediate. I’m aware of my heartbeat, of the water against my skin, of Valentin’s presence a few feet away.
When my teeth start to chatter, he gestures toward the rocks.
“Come on. Before we freeze.”
We climb out onto the flat stones near where he left the blankets. He wraps a towel around my shoulders, then another around his own, and we sit close together, letting our body heat warm the space between the fabric and our skin.
“I can’t feel my feet,” I say.