the gunfire. Not even the locusts dared to stir. Then the blessed sound of retreating footsteps brought my eyes to open and my lungs filled with air.
They laughed as they opened their car doors, talking about quartering Marguerite when they found her—a message to the Résistance. When their doors shut, Marguerite’s body jerked among the catchfly as if each slam was a bullet to her chest.
We sat up once we heard their car speed down the road, dead bugs sticking to our skin and face, bees buzzing above our heads. For a long while we didn’t say anything, both of us watching them disappear into the horizon.
‘Marguerite,’ I said, still shaking. ‘I was wrong. You don’t have to thank me.’
‘You’re right,’ she said, equally shaking. ‘I take it back.’
*
I don’t remember the ride home, or the walk from the patio into Mama’s kitchen, but I do remember getting a bottle of wine from the root cellar. My hands shook after I popped the cork and started pouring the wine into a glass. A chill bumped over my skin but I was sweating and still sticky from the catchfly’s poison. I downed the wine, not wanting to waste another moment sober and awake, small streams of it dribbling from my mouth and down my neck, thinking about how close I had come to being shot. Too close, I thought, too damn close.
‘Feeling all right, Adèle?’
I jumped, wine spurting from the bottle’s neck and onto the floor. Luc. He had been sitting at the kitchen table for God knows how long, watching me drink the wine.
‘Christ, Luc!’ I said, wiping my lips with the back of my hand. ‘You’re always startling me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I was here first.’ He smiled.
I took one last mouthful of wine from the bottle, tasting the flavours of the oak barrel Papa had aged it in with a final swallow. My hands stopped shaking, and I combed out my hair with my fingers, pulling bits of chickweed from it.
Luc had gotten up and examined the wine label—a valuable pinot, the bottle as dusty as the spot Mama had stashed it in. ‘Long day?’
My whole body soaked in sweat, gritty with dirt, and sticky from bugs on my skin. ‘Sure was,’ I said, resting my backside against the sink. ‘What are you doing out in the daylight?’
He gazed into my eyes, which glinted green rather than a river’s blue, and I felt the heat of his body an arm’s reach away. ‘I know about today.’
‘What?’ I stood straight.
‘I only heard half of the radio transmission, but I put the pieces together. I didn’t know until moments before that it was you in the field. With the Germans.’
‘Germans and French.’
Luc nodded. ‘They’re integrating into the Free Zone and into the police.’
I didn’t say it out loud, but I assumed that was why Marguerite wanted to know if I could get back into Gérard’s office. I dug my hands into my skirt pockets and felt the underground newspaper Luc had given me earlier, which I had completely forgotten about. ‘This is yours.’ I held it out for him to take but he pushed it back.
‘I gave it to you to keep,’ he said. ‘Unless… it makes you nervous.’
‘Nervous?’ The zip of the bullets as they whizzed through the catchfly were still very ripe in my mind. ‘It did, honestly, when you gave it to me. But now I can tell you with all certainty, it does not.’
He nodded as if he understood what I meant. Mama had walked outside with a basket full of bed linens to be hung on the clothesline just a few yards from the kitchen window. Luc pointed with his eyes to Mama. ‘Pauline doesn’t know about today. And she won’t unless you tell her yourself.’
We watched Mama as she studied the embroidery on a pillow case hanging from the line, running a flat hand over it before putting it to her cheek—Mama’s trousseau, the linens from her marriage to Papa. Sheets of white hanging on the line flapped in the breeze, hiding parts of her body as she pressed the linen to her face.
‘I don’t think I will. She’ll worry, and she’s got enough going on with Papa,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t need to know the details.’
We watched Mama out the window, the ginger hairs on his arms grazing mine he stood so close, that same musky scent from his microphone coming from his skin and clothes. He reached into his pocket and