both hands, aiming. ‘There’s two barrels when I do,’ I said, repositioning my feet. ‘And seems too far away to hit.’
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Close one eye.’ He held me tighter, the smell of his skin almost as distracting as his strong, warm touch. ‘And look down the barrel, you should see one target.’
I closed one eye, and the distant target was now much closer, more manageable to hit. ‘I see it now.’ I lowered the gun, his hands slipping from mine.
‘Keep the gun on you,’ he said. ‘Even if you think you don’t need it.’
I had to wonder where I was supposed to put it. Dresses didn’t have pockets big enough to hide something so bulky. ‘Where?’
Luc touched my inner thigh. ‘Here. Around your leg,’ he said, kissing me.
I resisted the urge to throw my head back and let him take me once more, but with the gun in my hand and the busyness of the Maquis moving arms and trucks down the road away from camp, I knew our time together on the cliff was nearing its end.
He shouted to someone running equipment between sputtering vehicles for a leg holster. I fastened it to my thigh myself, pulling the leather strap tightly around my leg.
‘When will I see you again?’ I said.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll miss you every day.’
Gill motioned for Luc to hurry up and get in his running truck. ‘We’re leaving!’ he yelled to Luc.
Luc looked back and forth between me and the truck.
We kissed, holding each other’s hands, drawing out our last few moments together, but then Gill yelled again, and our hands slid excruciatingly away from each other.
*
Marguerite drove me to Vichy in an unassuming black car after she changed into a clean postulant’s skirt and shirt. We stopped a kilometre or so away from Papa’s vineyard, the door to Mama’s kitchen a hazy outline in the distance.
‘Be careful, Adèle. Know the costs of love in the Résistance.’ She turned toward me as she sat behind the wheel of the running car, and I caught a glimpse of the locket under her smock. ‘You’d be wise not to tell anyone. Not even your mother. Gérard will kill him if he finds out what you’re doing.’
‘I know.’
She rubbed the locket in her fingers, and we sat without a word between us, the midmorning sun shining onto the Vichy hills and over Creuzier-le-Vieux, over Papa’s craggy vines.
‘Marguerite,’ I said, and she looked at me. ‘There’s something else I’m going to do for the Résistance. I thought you should know.’
She didn’t look surprised but rather turned my forearm over to get a better look at what little paint the spring hadn’t washed off. ‘In the Occupied Zone some are scrawling the letter V in places for Victoire. Timing is everything,’ she said. ‘Résistants get caught when they’re careless. Remember that.’
Timing. ‘I will.’
‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘There will be a lot of police activity after the foiled raid, and a lot of distrust. They will be looking for leaks, spies. You’ll need to find a way to distance yourself from the Hotel du Parc and Gérard during this time. For a little while anyway, until things die down.’
I was surprised, to say the least. Pleasantly surprised.
‘It will be a delicate walk,’ she said. ‘Be careful. Make it seem natural, be conveniently busy. He will be busy himself.’
‘All right.’
We took each other’s hands. ‘If you would have told me months ago I’d be holding your hands, I would have called you a liar,’ Marguerite said.
‘Actually, I would have called you a liar, and then you would have swatted me with a switch.’
‘Hanger.’ She smiled. ‘I think I’d prefer the hanger.’
‘Indeed,’ I said, laughing.
‘We were awful to each other on the train, weren’t we?’ I said.
‘Saving my life makes me like you a lot more, Adèle.’
‘I feel the same.’
We kissed each other’s cheeks before I opened the door, the wrought smell of old vines and soured grapes coming from Papa’s crusted, broken-down vineyard reminding me I was home.
‘Adèle?’ Marguerite stopped me with her voice. ‘I always wanted to know,’ she said, leaning over the seat, catching my gaze as I stood outside holding the door open, ‘in Lyon you said one of the reasons why you didn’t marry Gérard was because he was a collaborator.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s true.’
‘What’s the other reason?’ she asked. ‘I heard he was different before the war.’
‘He was different,’ I said. ‘But even if he went back to the boy he was before