MAS HIVERT, FERRALS-LES-CORBIÈRES—SAME EVENING
As the meal unfolded, Lia was spared from having to look at the man sitting to her right except to pass the platters of food. She ate little and spoke even less, content to listen to the conversations pulsing around her. It was restful to be removed from the banter yet still sit within this circle of friends and family. Her frayed nerves settled as the evening wore on.
Raoul was subdued as well, until he and Domènec—one on each side of her—began to speak of the vineyards and of their wines. Then the startled and sardonic man from the stable transformed into an earnest, even playful, farmer.
The vines had transitioned from the full flush of harvest to winter dormancy, but pruning was well underway. Throughout Languedoc, laborers—many from Portugal and Spain—were moving through the fields with their shears, cutting and tearing away the unwanted canes from the vines and trimming those they would keep. Their red, chapped digits poked out from fingerless gloves and wove delicate branches around the fruiting wires. As the men spoke of their vineyards, Lia pictured the whole of the Languedoc region trimming, wrapping, tidying, and waiting for the first hint of new growth.
Domènec and Raoul finalized their plans to leave on Monday for VinoMondo, an invitation-only wine conference in Barcelona. Specialty buyers from around the world descended on the Hotel DO: Plaça Reial to taste privately with select winemakers from France, Spain, and Italy. Rose explained to the table how important the convention was for small producers to build their markets in Europe and abroad. Domènec’s earthy, brooding Corbières wines were always in high demand.
After Barcelona, the men would head straight for Nice to attend Vins du Sud, the massive wine show with hundreds of wineries from southern France spread out over acres of expo halls. There, Domènec would share a booth with eight other producers from the region who were being nurtured and promoted by their exporter. Raoul’s own wines were several years from being ready to market, but he’d assist Domènec in the arduous presentation and glad-handing process during the conventions and make connections of his own.
Domènec stopped the flow of the meal and the conversation to make a toast in thanks for his guests and this shared celebration of midwinter. The room hummed again as soon as they clinked glasses in the center of the table.
“Lia, à la tienne.” Raoul chimed his glass against hers. He used the familiar pronoun, denoting a particular intimacy.
“Who were you running from in the basilica?”
Something between longing and sorrow flickered in Raoul’s eyes for a moment and then vanished. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But his fingers tensed around the bowl of his wineglass, and in that tiny movement, Lia read the truth. She looked away to see Rose staring at her. Rose couldn’t hear their conversation, but Lia was certain their grim expressions told a story of their own.
“We have so much to talk about.” Raoul’s voice was so close to her ear that it seemed to be coming from inside her head. “But not here.” The left side of his face was illuminated by the candlelight. Lia swore she could see the faint outline of her palm on his cheek, and with a slight shudder, she recalled the force of her slap.
“Where have you come from?” she whispered, afraid he would fade away or vanish in a wisp of smoke.
He touched his scar gingerly, as if expecting to feel pain.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
• • •
Midnight approached, and Rose’s exhaustion showed in the pinched corners of her eyes. Lia sent her off to a hot bath and bed. In the dark, quiet kitchen, she checked the stove burners and swept the floor, pretending for a moment this was her home.
Exhausted children were carried to bed, their grandparents crept upstairs soon after, and the others assembled in the living room for quiet conversation or games of chess, but Lia craved fresh air. She was in the foyer off the kitchen, tucking her feet into boots, when she sensed a presence behind her. Startled, she spun around.
“Care for some company?” Raoul asked.
The blanket of snow squeaked beneath their feet as they walked. Tiny crystalline flakes sparkled in the faint glow from the house. The breeze soothed Lia’s flushed skin and sent up puffs of snow faeries conjured by starlight.
“It’s so lovely,” she said as they entered the vineyards just beyond the dormant kitchen garden.
“Like another world,” Raoul agreed. He made a strange sound, as though a laugh had caught in his throat and emerged as a sigh, and knocked snow from a tangle of unpruned vines. The powder cascaded in a shimmering cloud.
They continued up a row of vines, gaining elevation as the land sloped into the hills above the house, and emerged onto a clear stretch between vineyards that was wide enough for a tractor to pass through. Straight ahead, the path ran up into the hills and was lost in rock and garigue. To their left, it descended to a cabanon—a small stone shed where Domènec stored tools. They walked there in silence.
Her anxiety at being alone with Raoul had ebbed over dinner as the conversation revealed an empathetic farmer. But the questions Lia had been aching to ask since he’d entered the kitchen dried in her mouth. She probed cautiously at the other emotions surfacing in her heart: the first shock wave of astonishment when she saw Raoul in the kitchen; the anger at having been trapped in a tunnel; the tender understanding of how grief can warp memory. And entwined with all of these: breathtaking desire. In that frozen moment, Lia felt their fragile connection strengthen, as if unseen hands were repairing a frayed rope stretched between them.
Raoul brushed away the light dusting of snow from a bench that sat against the shed, and they perched on its edge. Across the hectares of vines, the lights still burning at Mas Hivert and in the village of Ferrals-les-Corbières glittered. Breathing in air fragrant with wood smoke, Lia found her voice.
“Domènec and Rose have been singing your praises since I arrived in December,” she said. “But it hadn’t occurred to Dom to pry into your personal life, much to Rose’s annoyance.” His faint smile thrilled her. “They said you just appeared in the neighborhood one day…” Her words dangled in the air, but Raoul tugged at his gloves, ignoring the invitation to explain. Still, Lia plunged through the opening she’d created. “I know the pain of losing your life partner, but I cannot fathom the heartbreak of losing children. I am so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
A gust of cold air pulled at her hair like the fingers of a ghost, tossing it across her face. Lia tucked the loose strands into her coat collar. “Your wife’s name was Paloma,” she said. Raoul winced, as though the sound of her name caused him physical pain. “What were your children’s names?”
“Bertran was my son,” he replied. “Aicelina was my daughter.”
His simple declaration broke her heart. There is no other way to say your loved ones are gone but was and were. “Those are old Occitan names.”
“My wife was from Languedoc, like your family.”
“Do you have family in Languedoc still?”
“No. There’s no one left.” His answer was a door clicking shut. Quiet, but final.
“Do you know what it was like to see you walk into the house earlier today?” Lia pressed on. “I felt my sanity slip.”
His jaw worked, the tension causing tiny pulses as his teeth ground together. “I knew you the moment I saw you,” he said at last. “I have memories of you that seem so very old…like something I knew in another life.” Raoul paused, and Lia waited for more. But he seemed lost in those memories.
“My first night at Le Pèlerin, I stood in front of a window, looking at my reflection,” she said, breaking the thin silence. “A man’s face appeared out of nowhere, his cheek gashed and bleeding. Then the face disappeared, and I realized it was some trick of light. It wasn’t a man but an eagle sitting on the railing. Or so I thought, until I saw you in Carcassonne.”
Raoul opened his hands wide. They spanned his thighs and then gathered into loose fists. “I remember what happened in the basilica,” he said. “But I can’t explain it. I thought it was a dream.” He turned his face to her. “I’m sorry.”
The haunted look she’d seen in the medieval Cité was almost but not quite erased. Lia longed to touch his scar, to smooth her fingers across the rough patch of skin. “I know how it feels to miss someone so much that you’re certain if you let go, you’ll shatter into a million pieces,” she said. “Sometimes I hear a voice or a laugh, or I see someone from behind, and for a split second, I think it’s Gabriel. Then I remember. It’s the most horrible feeling, isn’t it? The remembering. It can make you crazy.”
Raoul nodded. “I’m trying to make sense of the images that keep running in my mind. I don’t know if they’re memories or dreams, if they’re real or hallucinations. Or if they even belong to me. It’s like remembering someone else’s life.”
He ran a hand over his cropped hair and rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture so like Gabriel’s.
A stream of wind sent a veil of snow cascading from the cabanon. Lia shivered in her down jacket. Her toes ached, and her face was numb and heavy with cold.
“You look frozen. Let’s get back.” Raoul stood and offered his hand.
She stepped forward and caught her toe on a stone, tilting into him. They were nearly the same height, yet she felt small against his chest and shoulders. Raoul tipped her gently away, cutting short Lia’s soft-focus vision of a kiss that could have so easily come after her stumble. She followed his footsteps through the rows of vines to the house, where a few windows still glowed upstairs and shadows moved behind curtains.
Raoul opened the back door for her but didn’t follow her in. “It’s getting late, and I’ve got a dodgy drive home through this snow.” He stood before her with his hands in his front pockets.
With tension and attraction balanced on the same taut wire, Lia didn’t know how to say good night. She was certain he’d read her mind when he said, “I need some time to think this through. I can’t absorb any more tonight.”
He leaned in to kiss her cheeks, and Lia’s head moved to each side in an automatic response.
“Dors bien,” he whispered into her hair. “Sleep well. Everything will be more clear in the light.”
• • •
When Lia woke the next morning, it was to a quiet house and the bright light of a sun high in the sky. After a quick rinse of her face, she descended to the kitchen. As she waited for the kettle to boil, the note on the island caught her eye.
Sleepyhead. So glad you got some rest. We’ve all bundled off to Mazamet. Heaps of food in the fridge. Leftovers tonight. Text when you get up. We’ll be home before dark. XOXO Rose
Plans had been made over dinner the night before to spend the day sledding and cross-country skiing at Black Mountain. Lia had begged off, preferring to remain inside looking out at the snow rather than covered in its damp cold.
The morning stillness was captivating. The syncopated drip of melting snow as it fell from the eaves competed with the ticking of the mantel clock in the dining room. The snow had transformed the landscape from sharp lines of limestone and granite and barren fields of pruned vines to soft curves and mounds of white.
Lia wandered through the empty house, sipping from a mug of hot coffee. In a small alcove set off from the main room, built-in shelves held treasures from her friends’ years of traveling and living abroad. They’d met in Chile, where Domènec was working the grape harvest and Rose was teaching French and English in Santiago. At first glance, they were an unlikely couple—the tall, urbane American and the robust French farmer—but just weeks after Domènec brought her to Languedoc to show her his family’s vineyards, Rose set her high heels on a high shelf, rolled up her sleeves, and became his winemaking partner as well as his wife.
On one shelf, a bouquet of dried lavender dropped tiny purple buds. Lia snipped off a sprig, crushed it between her fingers, and drew in Languedoc’s musky scent. Next to the bouquet sat a framed photograph taken two summers before. In it, she stood in the circle of Rose and Domènec’s arms, her face glowing with happiness, her gaze on the photographer—her husband, Gabriel—whose shadow spilled into the frame. The Lia in the photograph had no idea what pain awaited her just days away. Lia ran a finger across the glass, lingering on Domènec’s face.
In the kitchen, she stretched her legs on the window seat, replaying the previous night’s conversation as she took in the white expanse of vineyards beyond.
Sleep well, Raoul had said. Everything will be more clear in the light.
But in the white light of day, there was no clarity, only confusion. A bubble of anxiety rose in her chest, and her lungs drew tight. Raoul’s words haunted her. And he was gone. He and Domènec would leave in the morning for Barcelona. Two weeks. She could wait two weeks.
She set down her coffee cup and closed her eyes, imagining the single flame of a candle, the focal point of her meditation practice. Within the candle rose faces of the men who consumed her thoughts. The reawakening of her physical self that she’d felt in Lucas’s presence had embarrassed her, bringing feelings of guilt for wanting to be desired again. She’d danced into that circle but pulled away, repelled by her own vulnerability. His polished beauty, the gleam of a Breitling on his wrist, and the glint of gold in dark eyes that regarded her with an almost raptor-like hunger…that wasn’t her. It wasn’t the kind of love that could honor what she’d had with Gabriel. The man she ached to see was Raoul—to smell the wood smoke and pine that lingered on his skin, to learn more about his past and if she might fit into his future.
Longing to be with another man has nothing and everything to do with my love for you. She spoke to Gabriel from the warm peace in her mind, and in return, she heard the sweet sound of Gabriel’s voice telling her to go on. Go on? What do you mean? Go on and leave? Go on and love? Go on without you?
Lia lifted her head and opened her eyes. The light had shifted to the west. The coffee had gone cold. She wanted to be back at the cottage, alone with her thoughts and her books. She wasn’t ready to face Rose’s concerned, questioning eyes or to explain to Domènec why she thought Raoul had mistaken her for his dead wife.
She rinsed out her cup and assembled a cheese sandwich, eating it upstairs while she packed her bag and stripped the sheets from her bed. After a quick shower, Lia was downstairs again, teasing the snarls out of her wet curls with her fingers. She began to write below Rose’s message but thought better of leaving her words where anyone could read them. She’d text her from the road.
Lia followed the tracks left by the cars that had departed down the long driveway hours earlier. Road crews and the bright sun had cleared the snow from the highway, and she was able to relax her tight grip on the steering wheel. But these wet roads would freeze to black ice. She hoped the skiers would be on their way home soon.
• • •
The next two weeks slipped away as February melted into the wet grasp of March. Lia found excuses not to meet with Lucas in person, feigning a cold and then an extended research trip to Montpellier, but their work continued via email, and she was grateful for the distraction.
Domènec came back to his family and vineyards, while Raoul continued on to Paris to meet with an American importer. A bubble of disappointment burst inside Lia at the news, but she resolved to wait, respecting Raoul’s wish for more time and acknowledging her fear of losing the tenuous grip on her equilibrium. She had come to Languedoc to find herself again, not to lose what little sense of her spirit she still held.