LOGIS DU MARTINET, LAGRASSE—SAME DAY
“I can imagine what you must be thinking,” Raoul said. He wore a plain white T-shirt, blue jeans, and leather work boots bleached pale brown by the Languedoc sun.
Lia fought the urge to place a hand on his arm, to feel his bare skin, to make certain he was real. Instead, she sank onto a stone bench that sat next to the winery door.
“Can you? Tell me.” She folded her arms across her chest and gripped her elbows, willing herself to breathe.
“That I stayed away after the conferences to avoid seeing you.”
Lia paused before answering. Her throat ached with anger and helpless desire, and her nose stung from weeks of tears. “That thought did cross my mind.”
“I wondered if that was really you inside the winery or if I was seeing ghosts again,” he said. She looked up to see him smile, a gesture to lessen the awkwardness.
“It’s really me,” she said.
“Would you prefer to talk inside?” He motioned to the winery door. “There’s no shade here, and I’ve got chilled wine in the cooler.”
“Charlie said the winery has hidden corridors. I’d rather not take the chance of repeating our adventures in the basilica.” She returned his smile, sharing a joke to show she was willing to let Carcassonne go. For the time being. “Besides, the day is too beautiful to be indoors. It’s hard to believe we’re still in winter.”
He sat beside Lia but didn’t touch her. “It’s hard to believe we never finished our conversation,” he said.
Her thoughts pounded in staccato beats, but she waited for him to continue.
“Lia Carrer.” He said her name with such certainty, and in that instant, her heart fell open.
It’s all right. I understand. I think I’m falling in love with you too… streamed through her mind, and Lia felt a sudden hysteria, alarmed that she might have said the words aloud. When she saw that Raoul’s expression hadn’t changed, she relaxed. Her unbidden thoughts had remained unspoken.
“Lia must be short for…?”
“Natalìo, in the old Occitan tradition,” Lia said. “Natalìo Cloutildou Carrer. But I could pronounce only Lia as a little girl, so Lia it stayed.”
“And Carrer? That isn’t Occitan.”
“It’s from my father’s family in northern Italy. But Béatris, my mother, was raised in Limoux.” When Lia named the town on the Aude River, in the foothills of the Pyrénées, Raoul glanced at her, surprise clear in his eyes. “Do you know Limoux?” she asked.
He shook his head, dismissing the question. “My uncle took me hunting in the Haute Vallée once. We must have stopped in town for supplies or to spend the night. It was a long time ago.”
It was a long time ago. How many men were going to use that excuse to not explain things to her? Two felt like it was becoming a pattern. Raoul’s vague response threatened to close the door, leaving her on the outside of his past. He’d shut her out once before with those words, just as Lucas had in Gruissan.
“At first, I was relieved you’d left town.” She spoke to the forest in front of them, not trusting what she might see in his face. “What happened in Carcassonne, the things you said at Rose and Dom’s… ‘I have memories of you that seem so very old… Like something I knew in another life.’ That’s what you told me. You don’t just toss out those words and then disappear, unless you regret saying them.”
“Lia, I am so sorry. I thought I was giving you space. I thought…” Isis reappeared, and Raoul took her finely sculpted head between his hands. She sat on her haunches and looked at him with her trusting doe’s eyes. “Never mind what I thought,” he said. “I owe you so many apologies, but let me start with this one.” In profile, Raoul’s scar seemed to fade in the balm of lemony light. “You said you knew how it felt to lose your life’s partner. I was an ass for not reacting to that, for not telling you how sorry I am. I’d be honored if you’d tell me about Gabriel.”
By acknowledging the widow Lia would always be, Raoul had acknowledged her whole person. The memories of Gabriel would hurt forever, but there was proof she didn’t have to bear the pain alone. Raoul understood the inexplicable grief. He released her to accept what she’d felt Gabriel telling her just a few weeks before, on that snow-filled day: Go on, Lia. Go on in love. A quiet magic shimmered in the pastel glow of spring.
“I was in the first year of my graduate program at Cal Berkeley,” she said. “Gabriel was just starting to make a name for himself in the mountain-biking circuit. It was a coup de foudre—love at first sight. We were married before I started classes that fall. No wedding, just a simple ceremony.
“We were still in Berkeley when Cascade University offered me a teaching position in the history department. It was a steady income while I finished my dissertation and a place where Gabriel could train. We’d been there for two years when he was killed.”
“Yet you came back here, to these memories, instead of starting over someplace new?”
“This is home,” she said quietly. “You must understand that.”
“I do,” Raoul replied. “I’m just not sure I had the choice to return.”
“Maybe I didn’t either.”
They sat in silence. Lia’s phone chimed with an incoming text, and she glanced at the screen.
Waiting at the citadel. How far out are you? the message read.
Lia weighed the cost of ruining the fragile moment by leaving against the possibility of breaking their delicate truce by expecting too much too soon.
“I’m meeting a colleague at Termes for a project I’m working on,” she said. “I’ll be late if I don’t leave now.”
Raoul walked Lia to her car, shyness falling over them like a shadow. Lia opened her door, and they both spoke at once.
“Please come to dinner.”
“Can I take you to dinner?”
She laughed. “Ladies first. I know it’s a long drive, but would you come to dinner tomorrow? You probably know most of my story, but I still know so little of yours.”
“What time? What can I bring?”
“Let’s say seven. Bring a bottle of your wine.”
“It’ll have to be a barrel sample. It’s months away from being bottled.”
“All the better. I’ll be able to say I knew this wine when…”
They traded phones, punching their numbers into the other’s contact list.
“I haven’t done this in a very long time,” Raoul said, resting a hand on the frame of the open car door.
“This?” she asked. “What is this? What are you doing?”
With his free hand, he lifted the sunglasses from her face and tilted up her chin. Lia felt weightlessness and desire fluttering, tingling, radiating from deep inside, and she heard a small voice encouraging her not to question or doubt but to believe and accept.
Their mouths met, and she tasted salt in the hollow above his lip and breathed in his aroma of sweat and sage and the musky pine of his soap. Her hands hovered near his waist. She was afraid if she touched him, she wouldn’t be able to let go.
Raoul drew back. “When I first saw you at Mas Hivert, standing there in the kitchen like you were waiting for me, I hoped and feared you had the answers. That’s why I stayed away. I didn’t know which I wanted more: to understand or to stay in the dream.”
“Answers to what, Raoul?”
But he looked past her into some distance she couldn’t follow. “I’ve been waiting for something to happen since I arrived in Lagrasse, someone to show me who I should be,” he said.
At last, she understood his evasive ambivalence. Raoul was trying to reconcile his bewildering loss of identity after his family’s deaths with the man who’d carried on, surviving.
“When I woke, I was,” he finished.
The fine hair on her arms and the back of her neck rose. “‘When I woke, I was, ’” Lia echoed. “You sound like Adam coming to life in the Garden of Eden. But I understand. I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking since Gabriel died. Who are you when the other half of your soul is cleaved away?”
Raoul stared at her a moment and gave his head a small toss, as if clearing away an unwanted thought. He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand and lightly kissed her forehead.
He waited until she’d buckled herself into her seat and then reached for her hand through the open window. “À demain. Until tomorrow.” He squeezed her hand and stepped toward the winery.
“Hey, my address—you don’t know where I live!” she called after him.
He walked backward, away from her. “Le Pèlerin, in Minerve, right? I helped build that house.”
It wasn’t until she was back on the road that she thought to wonder what he’d meant.
CHÂTEAU DE TERMES—THAT AFTERNOON
“I could meet you halfway.”
Lia stopped at the familiar voice and tilted her head, raising her hands to block the sun. From his perch on a low wall, Lucas must have watched her hike up the winding path to Château de Termes, the magnificent ruin perched high above the tiny village of Termes. “No, you’ve got the best view. Save me a spot. I’ll be right up.”
The path wound around the back of the castle and rose gradually to meet the steep, grassy sides. She passed a young family sitting on their raincoats to protect their backsides from the damp that lingered in the grass, enjoying a picnic. Lia absently picked through their accents and the few words she could hear. Dutch? Afrikaans? She skirted the south side of the castle.
A modern staircase of treated wood led her up several feet to a platform. From there, she found a corkscrew stairwell, its steps worn down and slippery from millions of feet over hundreds of years. Without handrails to grasp, Lia ascended the tight space with wary steps and a pounding heart. In a matter of moments, she emerged into bright light. The walls surrounding the courtyard radiated heat from the late-afternoon sun.
Lucas leaned against a rampart, his hands in his pockets. A thin cashmere sweater fit him snugly, and wool trousers flowed without a wrinkle to cuffs that just touched his brushed, charcoal suede loafers. A Nikon fitted with a zoom lens hung around his neck, and the camera bag sat on the wall beside him. His dark-blond hair ruffled slightly in the breeze.
“And here I thought photographers wore khakis and combat boots,” Lia teased.
“And here I thought academics wore tweed and tortoiseshell glasses,” he replied, his glance skimming her bare shoulders. Aware of the low-cut neckline of her sundress, Lia wished she’d put on her sweater before leaving the car. What had she been thinking, wearing this dress to meet Lucas? She quivered at the memory of Raoul’s hands on her skin, his warm mouth opening to hers.
“I thought maybe you’d decided not to come.” Lucas’s voice snapped her out of thought, and a warm flush of embarrassment replaced the flutter of pleasure.
She joined him at the wall, uncertain what to do with her hands. Crossing them over her chest seemed defensive, bracing them behind her too suggestive. She tucked them in the pockets of her dress, mirroring him. “I made an unexpected stop in Lagrasse. A friend just got back into town, and I wanted to say hello.”
“It’s good to know you’re feeling better—that flu bug was a nasty one.”
Remembering just in time that she’d used illness as a way to avoid seeing Lucas, she said, “It was just a cold, nothing serious. This warm spell seems to have cured me.”
He’d turned his attention to adjusting his camera and didn’t seem to notice her discomfort. “Yes, hard to believe we’re still in winter,” Lucas answered, snapping a zoom lens into place.
Lia started in surprise. She’d said the same words not an hour before to Raoul. She managed only “It’s beautiful” in reply.
And it was. From their vista at the ruined walls, the Termes Gorges gaped to the west, and the foothills of the Pyrénées marched steadily southward. The mountains wore a cloak of dazzling snow, but a pale-green fuzz of new growth and the white, pink, and orange blossoms of flowering plants covered the Corbières Valley. Yet there was a cool, fragile current underneath the warm air, a reminder that the tramontane wind could still rip through, swelling the rivers with rain and turning newly planted fields to mud; there was nothing settled or predictable about spring in Languedoc.
“It didn’t make much sense to ask you to tramp through these sites with me until the weather cleared a bit. I got some outstanding shots with the snowfall. I’ll send you the digital file. There’s a night shot of Quéribus under the full moon I’d like to propose for the cover. Just let me know what you think.” He snapped off several shots of the valley. “All right, Professor. I’m ready for my history lesson.” Lucas raised the camera to his eye and directed the lens at Lia.
She turned before he could capture her on film and walked to the center of the open courtyard, relieved to talk about something she knew and understood. They made their way through the Château de Termes, Lia revealing its history as Lucas recorded what was left of its past.
The citadel had witnessed one of the most decisive victories of the Cathar Crusade: a four-month siege that ended in late 1210 when the embattled Cathars—those who had not succumbed to starvation or dysentery—surrendered to the notorious Simon de Montfort, conqueror of the Cathars. As she recounted the facts that were so familiar to her, Lia’s mind drifted back to Raoul, to the few strange and tender moments they’d shared and what she imagined—hoped—would happen when they met tomorrow night for dinner, like a normal man and woman getting to know each other. She was grateful for the breeze that pushed her hair over her face, covering a secret smile.
Two hours later, they arrived at the main entrance of the fortress, where the museum and gift shop were housed.
“I’m parked near the river,” Lia said.
“I left my car on the east end of town.”
She stepped away but paused, working over a thought. “That day in Carcassonne,” she said. “When I called you to say I wasn’t feeling well and had decided to go home?”
Lucas lifted his chin in acknowledgment.
“I was certain I’d seen you in the city center, walking ahead of me. Yet when I called, you said you were at the basilica.”
“I never came into town that day.” Lucas lowered his sunglasses over his face, and Lia saw only her own somber reflection. “You must have seen someone else.”
Lia pulled at her lower lip with her teeth and looked past Lucas to see another couple emerging from the visitor’s center. “Sure, I must have,” she said, the false note of brightness in her voice landing flat on the brick beneath their feet. “I’ll write up my notes and send you the text to format, and we’ll meet next week?” Lia leaned in and offered Lucas each cheek for a quick kiss, normal between colleagues, expected between friends. She was relieved that he’d shifted his camera bag into one hand and held his Nikon in the other; she was saved from having to shy away from the touch of his hand on her skin.
“Of course,” he agreed, and Lia moved in the direction of her car. “How goes the quest into Cathar Crusade conspiracy theories?”
Lucas stopped her with his question. She sighed and turned back, her eyes narrowed at the slightly mocking tone.
“I thought you said you took my research seriously.”
“I do, Lia. Of course I do. This just seems like a waste of your time. Historical record will never tell us who Castelnau’s assassin was.”
“Historians are first and foremost detectives,” she volleyed back, thinking of those archives in Carcassonne she still hadn’t seen and of Jordí, who seemed to be too busy of late to meet with her. “It’s a constant chase after red herrings, but you can’t stop believing the truth will find its way.”
“The truth may lead you to things you’d rather not see, Lia.” The finality of Lucas’s statement nearly knocked her off her mental footing.
“I wouldn’t argue with that,” she replied. “But fear is no reason to quit seeking the truth.”
The tension rose between them, heavy with expectation, but Lia was tapped out. With a shrug and a wave, she left the shadow of the building, emerging into the sun of the cobblestone street beyond.