“Finding Charles’s will and the page at the Sandhurst church—that was good. That was great . . .” I laughed, but there was somberness in the sound. “But I think this whole time it was Julie I needed to find.”
Grant shook his head, perplexed. “Because . . . ?”
I bit my lip. “Because Adeline died. And I could have died too—like Adeline—but . . . but I survived.”
I could see Grant understood. “And so did Julie.”
“So did Julie.” Tears filled my eyes and I didn’t try to hide them. “You think she was happy? When it was all over. Do you think it’s possible for someone who’s lost everything to find happiness again?”
“I don’t know,” Grant said.
I realized how desperately I wanted him to tell me that she had. She’d witnessed the unthinkable and survived the unbearable, and . . . I let my memory flash back to the words Roger had found in the pencil scroll. “I think she did,” I finally said, surprised by the certainty in my own voice. “I think she made a good life for herself here, like her granddaughter wrote, but I just—I don’t know how she did it. How she managed to live beyond the fear and the abandonment and . . .”
I looked over at the silk mill’s ruins and expelled a long breath. Then I looked at Grant, hoping he would understand. “I’ve felt incapable for so long. Just . . . fractured. Like everything was too demolished to piece back together again. My mind. My memories. My dreams. My . . . my everything. But if Julie somehow found a way . . .”
“You’re not demolished, Jess,” Grant said, reaching out to take my hand in a firm, comforting grip. He leaned so close that I could feel his breath against my skin. “Wounded, yes. Scared? Of course. But demolished?” He shook his head. “What happened . . . What they did—” He turned away from me, toward the stream, and I missed the warmth of his hand when he released mine.
He squinted up at the sky with something that looked like anger on his face. When he spoke again, it was in a rough voice. “Your story isn’t over either,” he said, his eyes locking on mine. “You can still steal it back from the forces that tried to end it.”
I shook my head. “But—”
“Fight for it, Jess. Fight for yourself like Adeline fought for those children.”
“But I’m not strong like Adeline,” I whispered.
“You are.”
The shame I’d spent weeks trying to tamp down came surging to the surface again. It scraped across my tattered self-control. “I ran, Grant!” I nearly yelled the words. “I ran and left Bernard lying on that stage.” Images of his face crescendoed my distress. “Then I made up Patrick’s presence so I could run again to the South of France. Grant, I ran! That isn’t courage.”
“You were in shock—”
“It’s cowardice!” I stumbled to my feet, nearly gagging on the word, bent over at the waist, and braced my hands against my knees. I stood like that until the spasms in my lungs stilled and I could breathe again.
When I looked up, Grant hadn’t moved. He still sat where I’d left him, his intense, unfocused gaze on the trees next to the stream. I took a step and a twig snapped under my foot, drawing his eyes to me. A muscle twitched in his jaw. The hands that clasped his leg were white-knuckled with strain. I saw him take a breath.
“When I think of what they did to you,” he began. Then he paused and swallowed hard. “When I think of what they did to all those people and might have done to you.” His face twitched with suppressed rage. “I’ve got to be honest, Jess, there are times when I wish I could have killed them myself.” His eyes were fierce. “But not because they demolished you,” he said, infusing the word with an ardent disbelief. “Because they hollowed out the part of you that Patrick filled.”
I felt his words like a physical wave—a wounding, destabilizing, and liberating wave.
Grant must have seen my posture sag. He was at my side before I realized the moment had sapped the last remnants of my strength. He helped me back to the log, and I rested my weight against it, seared and soothed by the wisdom of his words.
“You ran because you saw the kind of horrors I can’t even imagine,” Grant said softly. “You ran because you’re human—no one can fault you for that.” I felt his hand on the back of my neck, strong and calming. “But maybe . . .” He hesitated. “Maybe you can try to stop running now. Because you’re getting strong enough again and because Julie . . . She survived.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know how to—”
“Breathe,” Grant whispered. “That’s how it starts. Breathe. Discover, risk, create, sing, find beauty . . . Fill that empty space with the things Patrick loved—with the things you loved in him. Show the monsters who wanted to destroy you what it looks like to choose life in spite of fear and loss.”
“Like Julie,” I said as tears coursed down my cheeks and Grant rubbed calming circles on my back.
“Like Julie,” he said.
I knew she’d been there—in Holford’s peaceful glen. I sensed her survival in the stillness of the air and the goldening of the clouds now cloaking the village. I saw her sitting in her home, teaching her daughter to spin raw silk into thread. She’d honored the dead by living. She’d countered the atrocities she’d seen by simply breathing.
“Do you think this is why we came?” I asked Grant, Julie’s survival lending me the courage to lean into him again. His arms came around me. They felt familiar and safe. “Is this what Patrick wanted me to figure out?”
“He loved you,” Grant whispered against my hair. “He’d have wanted you to keep on living.”
We sat there for a while, savoring the silence in the place of Julie’s healing. When I finally pushed away to look at Grant, his face was so close that I could see the steadfast kindness in his eyes. “What about you? You’ve said from the start that you had to follow the pages, too, to find where they led.”
Grant considered the question for a moment. “I guess I needed to know if Adeline had been right about Julie. If what God told her about her sister’s survival was wishful thinking or some kind of sign. I’m a fixer, right? The guy who needs answers. I wanted to be sure.”
Grant paused and smiled at me, and I felt the flutter of something warm unfolding. He shrugged a shoulder. “And I think I needed to help you find your answers, too, because . . .” He shook his head as if to clear it, then fastened his gaze on mine again. “Because I care. About Adeline and her family. But mostly about you.”
I laughed, a bit of panic in my voice, and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, focusing on anything other than Grant’s face. Anxiety tugged at my nerves. I’d made my peace with grief, but connection—the kind of connection he seemed to be hinting at—it still felt like a threatening force.
Unaware of the discomfort his words had caused in me, Grant went on. “And I hate to admit it, but I think this was about proving Mona right too.”
I shook my head. “You’ve lost me.”
“He layers good over the bad,” Grant said, quoting his sister. “She’s been trying to hammer that into my mind since—since everything that happened before I got to France. And I think I had to see it happen in the Baillards’ life to be able to imagine it in mine.”
“It just sounds like a lot of happy-talk to me.” I knew I didn’t want to be convinced. “Optimistic mysticism or . . .”
“Except that it seems true.” He shifted a bit and turned his gaze toward the remnants of the Huguenots’ silk mill. “When I look back at all the bad—the kind that left Mona stranded in France and made me need to escape California and the horrible bad that made you run to Balazuc. If you hadn’t found that box or discovered the hidden papers. If we hadn’t uncovered that change in the Baillards’ name or run into Nelly on a fruitless visit to Canterbury. If she hadn’t sent us off to Dunster to see a long-lost love . . . When I look back at all the pain and start to trace the good that happened in spite of it—and when I look at where we’re sitting now . . .” His conclusion was evident in the sureness of
his gaze.
I couldn’t accept it. “So God or the universe or whatever wanted the Huguenots to be massacred so we could be sitting here today? He wanted the Bataclan to be attacked so I could see some good layered over the death of all those people?”
Grant heard the bitterness in my voice and held up a hand. “No—no, that’s not what I’m saying.” He blew out a breath and let his head fall back. “Truth is, I have no idea what I’m talking about. But if there is a God—the kind that weeps when the weak and powerless get hurt . . .” He looked at me. “I want to believe that there’s a force for good in this world and that that force won’t let the bad have the final word. It doesn’t explain or undo the darkness, but . . . I think somehow it covers it with light.”
I could feel myself frowning, unwilling to accept that Grant saw meaning in the meaningless. Unwilling to admit that the journey since my horror, the orchestrated coincidences I could see now, in retrospect, had been a guided thing. But the more I contemplated the sheer number of the “ifs” Grant had so easily laid out, the more sobered I became. I wanted them to be an arbitrary confluence of random luck and fate. But they seemed far too measured to be just the work of chance.
A mist hovered over Holford’s quiet glen. I watched it blanket stones and trees and felt my spirit’s slow surrender to the things I couldn’t prove but knew I needed to believe. “If Charles hadn’t made the box for Adeline to keep her pages safe,” I admitted, adding to Grant’s list, “and if she hadn’t made the pencil roll for Julie—”
Grant stood up so quickly that I nearly lost my balance. That expression was back on his face again—the one that spoke of discovery and excitement. “He gave her the box to keep the pages safe,” he repeated.
I was confused. “Uh—yes.”
A broad smile broke across his face. “He gave his sister the box to keep the pages safe!”
I just stared, completely baffled by what he was saying.
“Come on!” He grabbed my hand and practically dragged me up the hill to the fence.
“Grant, what on earth—?”
“I may be completely wrong about this, but I’ve got a gut feeling . . .”
I’d been around him long enough to know protesting was no use.
THIRTY-ONE
“ISN’T THIS A LOVELY SURPRISE,” LYDIA SAID WHEN SHE saw us standing outside her front door. Though her expression was pleasant, I could see some confusion too. “Did you want to speak with Roger again or . . . ?”
“We do,” Grant said.
“Right—well, he’s out back. Probably tinkering in the garage he calls a museum.”
“Mind if we . . . ?”
“Be my guest,” Lydia said.
We found Roger cleaning the mechanism of an old mantel clock. “Fancy seeing you again!” he exclaimed. “Did you forget something?”
“We need to take another look at the pencil wrap,” Grant said.
I stepped in. “What Grant means to say is, ‘Hi, how are you, and would you mind if we saw the wrap again?’” I tried for a lighthearted laugh. “There’s a chance he’s lost his mind.”
The silk wrap was still on the desk where Roger had left it earlier. He handed it to Grant. “Something troubling you?”
Grant rolled the fabric out and turned it over in his hands. He ran a finger over the CSF embroidered in red silk. “Would you mind if I split this seam?” he asked Roger, who was standing back, perplexed.
“You want to—what now?”
“If I could just pull out the stitching right along this seam,” Grant explained, showing our host the hemmed edge of the roll.
Roger seemed unsure. “It will probably damage the fabric . . .”
“I’ll buy it,” Grant said, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. “What do you want for it? Name a price and you’ve got it.”
“I wasn’t exactly planning on selling—”
“A hundred euro. Two hundred. How’s that? That’s, what, maybe a hundred and seventy pounds?”
“Are you . . . ?” Now Roger was shocked. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard, then cleared his throat. “If you’re absolutely sure . . .”
“Here,” Grant said, smiling broadly as he handed a sheaf of bills to the bemused Englishman. “You got a knife?”
Roger reached into the drawer for a box cutter. “Will this do?”
Grant cut through one stitch and used the edge of the blade to pull out several more. When he could fit a finger into the gap he’d made, he used it to loosen the rest of the row. Then he pulled the two layers of fabric apart and held them under the lamp on Roger’s desk. His fingers were shaking as he reached into the space and gently pulled a fragile sheet of paper free.
It had been folded over and over again, dissimulated inside the silken pencil case, but it was unmistakably a match to Charles’s and Adeline’s pages.
“How did you know?” I breathed.
“The CSF,” he answered in a hushed tone. “It was on the bottom of Adeline’s box and on this pencil roll . . . If Charles gave his sister that box to hide her pages, it makes sense that Julie would be given something to protect hers too.”
“I take it this is something special,” Roger said.
“It is,” I answered, smiling unapologetically.
He winked. “Should’ve asked double!”
Grant laughed, loud and deep.
I shook my head and ran a finger over the red embroidery on the pencil roll. “If it wasn’t for the monogram . . . ,” I murmured.
“That’s not a monogram,” Roger said. “It’s an acronym.”
Grant and I froze. “An acronym?” I asked, adrenaline surging again. “For what?”
“It’s right there in the letter,” Roger said, reaching for the photo album that held Julie’s note. “That French bit I read to you earlier, remember? The bit about courage, wisdom, and faith.” He found the spot and pointed at it. “See how she used capital letters on those three words? Took me a while to piece it all together, but you can see it right there in the red embroidery. The CSF on that pencil wrap stands for Courage, Sagesse, and Foi.”
I looked up at Grant and knew my elation matched his. “Endure with courage, resist with wisdom—”
“Persist in faith,” he finished.
And somewhere in my spirit, in that bruised and healing space still filled with Patrick’s love, I was certain I heard his irrepressible cheer.
EPILOGUE
GRANT LOADED MY SUITCASE INTO THE BACK OF THE deudeuche and placed the sewing box securely in the passenger seat. Adeline’s and Julie’s pages were nestled in its drawer with the sheaf of diary pages and a pressed leaf from Holford’s glen. “You sure you don’t want me to make the drive with you?”
I shook my head. “It’s only seven hours. And it’ll be good for me to spend some time with Patrick’s mom and dad alone.”
It was Vonda who’d tracked down his wealthy, estranged parents in the aftermath of the attack to tell them of his death. She’d told them about me too—about my closeness to Patrick, my injury, and then my disappearance. They’d been paying the rent on his studio in Paris for nearly three months, unwilling to face it until I could be there too—as if exploring Patrick’s world with someone he loved would restore their bonds with a son they’d lost long before his death.
They’d finally found me through my parents after I returned from England and started communicating again, and I looked forward to introducing them to the man Patrick had become, to the places and possessions that so perfectly defined him.
“Call if you need anything,” Grant said. He leaned in for a kiss.
“There’s a chance I’m going to miss this,” I whispered against his lips and felt him smile.
“See you in Denver?” he asked, pulling back.
It had taken us a while to figure out our next step. We’d finally settled on a plan that would give Grant the chance to make a new start and our relationship the time it needed to be explored and defined. So I�
��d be returning to Denver when I was done in Paris. I had mixed feelings about moving back into the townhouse I’d shared with Patrick, the home he’d left for me in his oh-so-Patrick will—“My digs go to Jessica. My moped goes to Vonda. My clothes go to charity. All the rest is up for grabs.” His parents had stepped in to spare the townhouse from foreclosure, covering the mortgage in the hope I’d reappear. I’d tried to persuade them to rent it out or sell it, but they’d been firm in their desire to honor Patrick’s wishes.
“I’ll see you in Denver,” I said to Grant, stepping in close to wrap my arms around his waist. He held me tightly and kissed my hair. He’d join me there when the barn renovation was far enough along to hand off to local artisans. He’d be starting again from scratch—getting his own place to live, then finding houses to flip and subcontractors to hire. He talked about it with anticipation and purpose, and I knew he’d make it work. Until he did, we’d share the revenue from Patrick’s Trésor store, which I’d wrestled back from the landlord with Grant’s encouragement and help. I’d rename it Ooh-Là-Là Chérie the minute I got home.
The future felt unwritten. It felt inviting too. And though there were still moments when the horrors of the past shoved their way past my defenses, I was learning more each day that I’d only been hollowed out—not demolished or broken. And I purposed to fill the empty space with the good I’d seen lived out by Adeline and her family, with a courage, a wisdom, and a faith I was just learning.
Mona gave me a hug and held on for a while. “You’ll be missed,” she said when she released me.
“But I’ll be out of the cottage so you can rent it again!” I looked into her kind and compassionate face. “I know how much income you sacrificed to let me stay this long.”
She shook her head and repeated, “You’ll be missed,” more seriously this time. “And this,” she added, pointing a finger at her brother and me. “No pressure, but Connor has been calling you Aunt Jess in his bedtime prayers, so . . .”
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