cast a fishing line into the water; now all I could do was wait and see if anything came up on the other end. I wondered, going upstairs, if I should tell Eve what I’d done, but answered myself with a resounding No. She’d looked so fragile in the car, frail enough to crumble at the slightest blow. I wasn’t raising her hope about anything until I had something in hand to warrant it.
Entering the silence of my pretty little room, I flung open the shutters and looked out into the fast-falling twilight. Couples promenaded below, arm in arm, and I remembered Rose and me laughing about someday being old enough to go on double dates. I saw a tall blonde hand in hand with a laughing boy, but my memory didn’t stubbornly try to give her Rose’s face. She was just a girl, no one I knew. My hallucinatory flashes of seeing Rose everywhere I looked seemed to have stopped since Oradour-sur-Glane. Come back, I thought, looking at the throng. Come back, Rosie—but of course, she wasn’t coming back. Like my brother, she was dead.
A knock sounded. I thought it might be Eve, come to tell me what she had planned once we arrived in Grasse, but it was Finn. He looked different, and it took me a moment to put my finger on it. He’d shaved, put on a jacket (worn at the elbows but a handsome dark blue), and his shoes had been shined to a gleam.
“Come to dinner with me,” he said without preamble.
“I didn’t think Eve would come down to eat tonight. She looked like she wanted a whiskey supper.” Whatever got her to oblivion fastest. Knowing now how Lili had died and how it haunted her, I could understand that better.
“Gardiner’s done for the night.” Finn patted his pocket, jingling with Eve’s nightly haul of bullets. “It’ll just be us. Come to dinner with me, Charlie.”
Something in his tone made me straighten. From the way he’d dressed up, I didn’t think he meant one of our usual quick refueling stops at the nearest café. “Is this—is this a date?” I asked, keeping my hand from going to my mussed hair.
“Yes.” His eyes were steady. “It’s what a man does when he likes a lass. Puts on a jacket. Puts a shine on his shoes. Asks her to dinner.”
“I don’t know any men who do that. Not after we already . . .” I got a flash of what we’d done in the car last night, the windows fogged up and our breath coming ragged.
“Your trouble is, your experience is all with boys. Not men.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Is that the gray-bearded voice of wisdom, coming from a man not quite thirty?”
“What I mean is, it’s not a matter of age. There are boys aged fifty, and men aged fifteen. It’s all in what they do, not how old they are.” He paused. “A boy messes up with a lass, and he slinks off without fixing anything. A man makes a mistake, he fixes it. He apologizes.”
“You’re sorry for what happened, then.” I remembered him last night, his hands spanning my naked back as he said not too distinctly, This wasn’t how I wanted to do this. My heart squeezed. I wasn’t sorry at all.
“I don’t regret it one bit.” His voice was even. “I’m just sorry it wasn’t—slower. Done after dinner and a date, not a fistfight and a bruised lip. That’s not how you start things with a lass you like, and I like you, Charlie. You’re smarter than any woman I know, a wee little adding machine in a black dress, and I like that. You’ve got a sharp tongue, and I like that too. You try to save everyone you meet, from your cousin and your brother to hopeless cock-ups like Gardiner and me, and I like that most of all. So I’m here to apologize. I’m here to take you to dinner. I’m here in a jacket.” Pause. “I hate jackets.”
I fought the smile spreading over my face, but I failed. He gave a smile back that was all in the crinkles around his eyes, and it made me positively weak in the knees. I cleared my throat, tugging at my striped jersey, and said, “Give me ten minutes to change.”
“Done.” He pulled the door closed. An instant later his voice floated through.
“Can you wear that black dress again?”
I didn’t say it would be much of a dinner,” he said.