“We’ve arrived,” he said. “This is the address you gave me.”
I shivered. The car had stopped. I looked out at the gravel drive leading up to the rambling house where I’d spent every summer of my life up until Germany invaded France: my aunt and uncle’s house outside Rouen. Yet somehow I was still seeing that café in Provence where two little girls had spent nearly six hours before their parents realized the mistake at the next stop three hours down the road, turned around, and raced back. Those six hours were magic: Rose and I stuffed with goat cheese and madeleines, playing tag among the grapevines, bundling into aprons to help the friendly cook wash the mugs, feeling very grown-up when she allowed us a small glass of watered-down rosé apiece. Sleepily watching the sun come down over the vineyard, heads on each other’s shoulders. Feeling a little disappointed to leave, once our frantically worried parents arrived with breathless hugs and apologies. The best day Rose and I ever had. The best day of my life, really, because of the simplest equation in the world: Rose plus me equaled happiness.
I won’t leave you, I’d promised. But I had, and now she was gone.
“You all right?” Finn asked. That dark gaze of his didn’t miss much.
“Fine,” I said, slipping out of the car. “Stay here with Eve.” She was dozing in the backseat, the sound of snores rising against the summertime buzz of the cicadas. It had been a long afternoon’s drive after a night in Le Havre at a cheap hotel. First a late start because of course Eve was hungover, and then the hours of jolting along rutted French roads, stopping every hour or so for me to get out and throw up. I made excuses about motion sickness, but really it was the Little Problem. Or maybe it was just the thought of what was coming that made me queasy. I looked at the house again, and the shuttered windows looked like dead eyes.
“Go on, then.” Finn pulled a tattered issue of The Autocar from under his seat, leaning an elbow on the window to read. “When you get back, we’ll head into Rouen and find a hotel.”
“Thank you.” I turned my back on the gleaming blue Lagonda and headed up the drive.
No one answered my knock. I knocked again. It took so long, I was ready to start peering in windows. But at last I heard shuffling footsteps inside, and the door creaked open.
“Tante Jeanne,” I began, before the sight of her froze me. My French aunt had always been slender, scented, blond like Rose. An invalid, but the Greta Garbo kind, all pretty lace bed jackets and a delicate cough. The woman before me was horribly thin, gray haired, dressed in a soiled sweater and a drab skirt. I could have passed her on the street and not recognized her—and from her blank look, she didn’t know me either.
I swallowed. “Tante, it’s Charlotte—your niece. I’ve come to ask you about Rose.”
She didn’t offer me tea or biscuits, just sank into an old divan and regarded me blankly. I perched on the edge of a frayed armchair opposite. She lost everything, I thought, looking at the prematurely aged face in front of me. Widowed . . . two sons dead . . . Rose gone. I didn’t know how Tante Jeanne was even standing. I knew she’d loved my cousin, no matter what childish doubts Rose had carried.
“I’m so sorry, Tante,” I began. “For—for everything.”
She trailed a fingertip over the coffee table, leaving a mark in the dust. Dust lay everywhere like a mantle in the darkened room. “War.”
Such a small, hopeless syllable to cover so much loss. Tears pricked my eyes, and I laced my gloved fingers together. “Tante, there’s nothing to be done about oncle, or Jules or Pierre . . . But there’s Rose. I know it’s a slim chance, but she might be—”
Alive. Eve had mocked me for hoping, but I had to hope. I might be a failure at a lot of things, but I was good at hope.
“What do you think I know? She was in Limoges when I last heard from her,” my aunt stated as though that were the end of it. “She left off writing at least three years ago. Mid ’44, I suppose.”
“Why did she leave here?” I asked, trying to see a spark, a gleam—anything—in my aunt’s eyes. “Why?”