Céline and Gil in Juan-les-Pins

NOTHING CAN PREPARE YOU FOR the terrifying experience of being accused of a crime—especially when you can’t tell anyone the whole truth. I came here to steal a Picasso, Officer. I tried to convince the French policemen and the café owner that I’d trespassed upstairs simply to see the room where my grandmother lived. I don’t think this convinced anybody, least of all Chef Gil, who showed up just in the nick of time—looking really, really pissed off.

He said he’d been in Antibes checking in with a restaurant-supply shop which was going to provide him with new uniforms for his waiters. So when Maurice frantically called him, Gil hopped onto his motorcycle and came zipping over here to do damage control, because, as Aunt Matilda later put it, “It wouldn’t look so great for Gil if one of his cooking students got thrown in the clink.”

He argued valiantly on my behalf. For awhile it looked pretty bad for me, since the police viewed Gil as a flashy English chef with a troublemaking girlfriend. Apparently, just a week before, a busboy from this café had been arrested for selling drugs. So the owner of the place—the naked guy who found me in his armoire—naturally assumed the worst. They even searched the rooms upstairs looking for—what? Drugs, diamonds, counterfeit money?

“They don’t really think I’m some kind of drug mule, do they?” I asked, horrified.

As we argued, the cops kept making impatient gestures toward me as if ready to put me in handcuffs. But Gil persevered with calm reasoning that enticed the older cop into an animated discussion of my actions in particular and foreigners in general.

“C’est une vraie Américaine—naïve!” Gil insisted, pleading with the fat, still-damp owner of the café to be raisonnable. Finally the owner threw up his hands in disgust, ordering us to never set foot in his café again. The police looked as if they were still considering hauling me off in chains, and I pictured myself locked in that prison fort on an island off Cannes where the Man in the Iron Mask was sequestered.

“Come on, let’s go before they change their minds,” Gil hissed. We had to walk past the sidewalk terrace where curious onlookers were thronging, aiming camera phones at us as we left.

Gil quickly put on his sunglasses, looking exactly like what he was—a local celeb caught in a bad scene. He jumped on his motorcycle and I stalked off, heading for the spot where I’d parked my rented bike. I heard Gil start up his Ducati, but I didn’t realize at first that he was following me.

“Now where do you think you’re going?” he snapped when I paused to unhook my bike. The little stone cul-de-sac was like an oasis, shady, cool and calm. I put up my kickstand and wheeled my bicycle out, still breathing hard but trying to calm down as I sat on it.

“I have to get this bike back to the rental shop in Antibes,” I said, not bothering to hide my irritation. Gil had a bossy attitude which was really starting to grate on me, even if he had just saved my neck.

“Hold on! Once you drop the bike in Antibes, how are you going to get back to Mougins?” he demanded, grabbing the back wheel of my bicycle as I began to pedal away, causing me to clutch at the handlebars. Immediately the whole bike lurched to one side, and my bag slipped out of the basket.

The outer compartment fell open—and out dropped Grandmother Ondine’s notebook, which I’d stuffed back in there hastily after consulting it for her letter with the café’s address. Now the whole thing lay open, right there on the pavement.

“Damn! Look what you’ve done!” I exclaimed, leaping off the bicycle and letting it crash to the ground. The wind was already tearing at the delicate pages.

Gil sprang into action and scooped it up. “What’s up with you, Céline?” he asked impatiently. “My assistants were worried—they sent me a message saying everybody else got on the bus except you.”

“So I’m out of the class?” I said distractedly. “Well, I assure you, I never was chef material anyway,” I added with false bravado. I sat on the stone curb to assess any damage to the notebook that Gil now handed me. The envelope was still tucked in the back. I carefully checked the pages to see if any of them had come loose.

“Hoo, what’s this?” he asked with sudden interest, snatching a runaway page from the curb. “No plans to be a chef, my ass!” He glanced over my shoulder and saw that the notebook in my lap contained other recipes. “Obviously you’re writing a cookbook? Or opening a restaurant?”

“Frankly it’s none of your business,” I retorted.

“Hell, it’s cooking and that is my business. Most teachers would think you’ve been stealing their recipes. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to me.” His eyes narrowed suspiciously as if he still half-believed that I was some sort of culinary spy. Why else would I skulk around other people’s cafés?

“You wish these were your recipes!” I countered. “They’re my grandmother’s. I bet she could out-cook you any day.”

“Really?” Giving me his million-wattage smile he added, “Can I have another look?” I sensed an opportunity and I took advantage of it.

“If you let me stay in the cooking class, I’ll let you see these,” I coaxed in my most charming, winning way. “But you must swear on your Michelin star that you won’t steal them.”

He held my gaze when he said meaningfully, “You promise no more wandering off the reservation? I’m not some hotel concierge who fixes parking tickets and drunk-driving arrests. Got it?”

“Yeah, sure. Fine,” I said a bit stiffly. That whiff of paternalism again really grated on me.

“Right,” he replied enthusiastically, sitting down beside me now. I reopened the notebook, wondering if he could possibly shed some light on it. He studied it eagerly, then turned a few more pages. “Wow,” he said admiringly. “Wow-ee wow-wow.” I saw a glimmer of his wolfish ambition.

“Are they good?” I asked, curious now.

“Nice. Very nice,” he replied, hungrily scanning a few pages. “Traditional Provence, but with a slightly different twist here and there. Could be regional. Could just be the times your grand-mum lived in. Mmm, nice cassoulet. And here’s a genuine coq au vin made with the rooster’s blood to get that dark sauce—and decorated with his comb and his kidneys,” he said enthusiastically.

“Yuck,” I said inelegantly.

“She uses a carrot to sweeten it,” he said, more to himself now, “and lots of thyme. Huh, and a sprinkle of homemade red vermouth made with Alpine herbs. That’s interesting.”

I closed the notebook, and Gil glanced up as if waking from a spell. “You still haven’t explained what the bloody hell you were doing sneaking around upstairs in that café. What exactly were you looking for?”

“I can’t tell you,” I said quietly, “because it’s something my mother told me in confidence. She never had a chance to come back here for—um, closure,” I said, being deliberately vague now, “so I did it for her. I hope you understand.”

He gave me a searching look, then said, “Okay, obviously you’ve got some emotional connections here. But the last thing I need right now is the local police giving me the fish-eye when I’m applying for business permits! Not to mention the bloody tourists snapping pictures on their phones so they can be the first to blab about us on the Internet before I even open the doors of my hotel.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. But I couldn’t resist trying to lighten things up by adding, “I thought all publicity was good publicity.”

He scowled. “Not in business circles! Investors hate notoriety. Looks too unstable. Nothing must jeopardize the reopening of the hotel. My employees are depending on me to succeed—and if I don’t, it won’t be easy for them to find other jobs. So I can’t let anyone screw it up by doing something reckless or stupid,” he added meaningfully.

“Okay, okay,” I said. I was ready to get on a plane right now and go home.

Gil saw my discouraged look. “Brace up,” he said briskly, looking at his watch. “I’ll follow you to your bicycle shop and then I’ll run you back home to the mas.”

So I pedaled on the road that crossed the peninsula to Antibes, with Gil puttering on his Ducati behind me, and all that traffic roaring around us. The bike-shop people looked glad to see me, perhaps worried that I’d run off with one of their cycles since I was late. I paid them, then returned to Gil.

He gave me his helmet and started up the bike without waiting. “Right, hop on!” he shouted above the roar of the motor. I had no choice but to slide onto the bit of seat behind him, clasp my arms around his waist, and try to keep my legs safely away from any hot metal or the steaming exhaust pipe.

Hanging on to Gil’s broad chest I tried not to notice that he smelled agreeably of sweat, aftershave and laundered shirt, a mingling of bergamot, citrus and spice. With a roar we took off, bypassing the main, shorter route because it was now thoroughly choked with traffic. Gil had chosen a much more scenic road that wound around the coast at the Cap d’Antibes.

It was the first time I’d really absorbed—into my flesh as well as my thoughts—that here I was, in one of the most beautiful spots on the Mediterranean, with its green hills, rocky coves, palm trees, and tucked-away beaches at the edge of the deep blue sparkling sea.

The wind that blew against my face whooshed all my troubled thoughts right out of my head. My heart felt glad for the first time in many months. And as we whirled around the curves and coves, past steep hills with half-hidden villas tucked behind tall, pastel walls, I could just picture Grandmother Ondine carrying a basket of food up these mysterious roads—just a young slip of a girl, with long, flowing dark hair spiraling in rippling tendrils—like a mermaid rising up from the sea, and bearing all sorts of wonderful things for Pablo Picasso to eat.