Chapter One

“Edgar Bowen died in his soup,” Rachel Levis said to her husband, looking up from her newspaper. They were just finishing breakfast, and the table was crowded with jams and mugs and the bag that had held the morning’s croissants, now flattened in the center with some buttery crumbs still resting on it.

“His sleep, you mean.” Alan tapped something on his tablet, frowning. The morning light of Paris made an aureole around his dark head.

“No, his soup. It says here in the nécrologie.” Rachel rattled the pages of Le Monde at him across the table, then read aloud, “ ‘Monsieur Bowen died, dining alone at home yesterday, after falling facedown into his soup.’ ”

“Oh, dear,” said Alan absently. He shaded his tablet with one hand.

“ ‘Oh, dear’? That’s all you say?”

He lifted his eyes from the screen. “Oh, dear! Someone we don’t know well and only hear of because he’s also an expat has died in a laugh-worthy way! The world is a poorer place!” Alan made an “ooh” face, then licked an index finger and used it to pick up some crumbs. “Now, can I worry about the fact that the dollar is up?”

Rachel returned to the paper, hoping her face expressed disdainful hauteur. She would tell her best friend Magda when they met later. Magda would grasp the significance of the news.

*   *   *

“Edgar Bowen died in his soup,” Rachel said to Magda as they sat in Rachel’s kitchen later that day. The sun still streamed through the windows, belying the January cold outside.

“His sleep, you mean,” Magda said.

“No, his soup. It was in the paper this morning. He had a heart attack, fainted face-first, and drowned.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Exactly.” The two women’s eyes met. Rachel had known Magda would understand. They had been friends for some twenty years, once girls alone in Paris who had each been grateful for a like-minded soul; now middle-aged women who were in the rare position of having witnessed all of each other’s adult lives. Among other things, this meant that Magda knew Rachel had once been Edgar Bowen’s girlfriend—knew that, in fact, Rachel considered her two years with him her first grown-up relationship. She thought for a minute, then said, “He was a good man.”

“Yes.” Rachel made the word definitive. “He was.”

“He gave you that money to lend me right away that time, remember? And he never asked what it was for.”

“I remember.” Rachel half-smiled. “Just as well, when you consider …”

Magda gave a soft snort. “We were so young.” Her voice was rueful. “Did we know we were that young?”

“No.” Rachel shook her head. “You always seem old to yourself, no matter how young you are. Insight only comes in retrospect.”

Magda put her hand over Rachel’s on the table for a second. Then the past faded, and she took a sip from her mug. “What did Alan say?” she asked carefully.

“ ‘Oh, dear.’ ”

“That bad?”

“No, that’s what he said. He said, ‘Oh, dear.’ He didn’t seem even to remember Edgar, never mind knowing who he was.”

“Oh.” Magda considered. “Well, in a way that’s good.” Long ago, Rachel had explained to her that Alan was a man tortured by overwhelming jealousy. He’d once become wildly angry at the mention of an early boyfriend, and Rachel had never dared to mention another. In light of that, it was probably fortunate that Edgar Bowen’s significance had escaped him.

But even the thought of Alan’s fortunate ignorance couldn’t distract from the unfortunate manner of Edgar’s death. “What a way to go.” Magda shook her head ruefully. “You have to ask yourself which is worse: the fact of the death or the form it took?”

“For him or for us?” asked Rachel.

“Either, I guess. Or both.”

Rachel thought about it for a minute. “For us, the death, surely. But for him, the form.”

Magda looked puzzled. “How do you work that out?”

“Well, he’s dead, and that’s a loss for us, but he doesn’t know about it, since he’s dead. But now whenever somebody hears about it, they’re going to say, ‘In his sleep, you mean,’ or, ‘In his soup?’ ” She shook her head. “And that’s a terrible way to be memorialized. Now he’s forever The Soup Man.” Her tone capitalized the last three words.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Magda countered. “He was kind; he was thoughtful. I remember him as gracious. I think he’ll be remembered as more than The Soup Man.”

Rachel thought of Edgar’s tenderness with his son, David—the care and seriousness with which he had listened to a four-year-old’s monologues and answered his questions. She thought of his patience with his ex-wife Mathilde, with whom he’d managed to carve out an equable relationship despite her being, as Rachel remembered, one of those French women who looked down her long nose at lesser mortals. Yes, he had been kind; he had been thoughtful. Maybe he would be remembered for more than soup.

“Well,” she said, “I’ll be able to let you know how his reputation stands—at the moment, at least—because I’m going to go to the funeral on Thursday.”

Magda reached for a madeleine, nibbling at its golden cakiness with relish. “I’ll go with you.” She wasn’t one to miss out on a bit of excitement.