NEAR ARQUES, LANGUEDOC—TUESDAY AFTERNOON
Lia left Paris before dawn. Neither Jordí nor Raoul had responded to her messages. When she stopped for fuel, she dialed Rose’s number, just to hear a familiar voice.
“Lia! Four days and you haven’t called me. Where are you?” The concern in Rose’s voice nearly made Lia cry. She fumbled through something about a dash up to Paris for research, and she promised to stop by the farm as soon as she got back.
Then she sent a second text to Raoul, this time with an address and when she expected to be there. She had to admit, as the miles unrolled before her, that this second message was a test; she had tried not to read anything into his silence, but Lia knew that if Raoul didn’t meet her that afternoon, she would have to let him go.
The hours seemed to drag on, but finally, she neared the turnoff to Minerve. She continued on and traveled south on the Route Alet-les-Bains, bypassing Limoux. At Couiza, Lia turned left onto the D613. Rounding a bend in the two-lane highway, she pulled the car into a small turnout blocked from the road by a low wall.
Burnished gold light illuminated the shorn fields, the white bones of the poplar trees, and the blue-green branches of firs and pines. Two wooden picnic tables were tucked next to the wall, but from the leaves piled on their tops, Lia guessed they hadn’t been used in months. She walked back to the curve in the road, stopping where a dirt trail shot down from the embankment and connected on the other side before ascending again into the forest.
Two summers before, roadblocks had cordoned off this stretch of road from vehicle traffic, and fans had waited off to the side, looking for riders coming through. No one could explain why Gabriel had emerged over half a mile up the road, alone, from the wrong trail. No one had seen a black Mercedes on that stretch of the D613 or on the small roads that fed into the highway from Rennes-les-Bains. Lia knew her husband’s case file held a report from a forensic pathologist that showed the likely rate of speed the Mercedes had been traveling when it allegedly hit her husband’s bike. She’d wanted nothing to do with the details—they only brought her closer to the horror of Gabriel’s death.
But as she stood in the sun on the empty road, she replayed the scene that haunted her nightmares: Gabriel flying off a mountain trail, hunched low, his body and the bike as one, fused muscle and steel. Knowing the road was blocked to cars and crowds, Gabriel, traveling at full speed but in complete control, wouldn’t have slowed his descent. Lia imagined him glancing instinctively to either side as he hit the road, and she wondered how much warning he’d had, if he’d sensed the approach of the sedan before it was upon him.
The berm sloped gently to a copse of trees, and the trail picked up again. Lia had planned to come to this place since returning to Languedoc, but only when she was ready to say her final good-bye. In accepting Raoul’s impossible reality, could that not mean Gabriel might return to her?
Lia stepped into the woods. The trees closed in, the air thickened with the nutmeg musk of forest floor, and her legs crumpled beneath her. She grabbed at the damp earth, closing her fists around clumps of fallen, dried leaves. She said her husband’s name again and again, as if to will him back to this place where life had last coursed through his body. Then stillness fell over her. She sat on her heels and listened to the small birds twittering above, noticed the way the sun seemed to gather and embrace the tender, verdant leaves, felt the rebirth of the season. Lia knew she was finished with this place and the terrible images it held.
She pulled herself to standing and wiped the back of her hands across her damp cheeks. Bending over, she brushed the dirt and leaves from her jeans. The snap of a twig brought her upright. He came to a stop a few feet from her, his hands tucked in the pockets of a black leather coat.
“I didn’t mean to startle you.” Raoul spoke softly. “I saw your car parked in the pullout.”
“How long have you been standing there?”
“Not long.”
The sun dipped behind the mountains, and the shadows swelled. Lia hugged herself against the descending chill. “Did you see me crying?” she asked.
His small smile was a tender, unspoken yes. “Dom told me about Gabriel’s race a few weeks ago, in Barcelona. When you sent the text asking me to meet you here, I wondered if this is what you wanted to show me.” Raoul approached. “I know what this place means to you, Lia. And I know those tears. I’ve shed enough of my own.”
“I came to see for myself, to say good-bye if I could,” she said. In that private moment, in that most terrible and beautiful place, Lia felt vulnerable but no longer wounded by memories. “I meant what I said: I believe you. I don’t know if we knew one another in another life, and there is still so much I don’t understand. But I believe your past is a part of Languedoc’s history.”
He took her face between his palms, the rough calluses on his fingers brushing her cheeks as he traced the outline of her lips. She closed her eyes and relaxed into the cradle of his hands. “Jordí Bonafé told me who you were, Raoul. But he hasn’t told me everything.” Opening her eyes, she asked, “Will you tell me the rest? Will you follow me home?”
“Of course. That’s why I’m here.” He turned aside and motioned her forward.
They walked back along the path toward their cars. She crested the slight rise to the side of the road and looked east toward Arques. As a wave of recognition washed over her, her knees went wobbly again.
“What is it?” Raoul pressed a hand into her back, sensing her unsteadiness.
Lia had seen photographs of the scene where Gabriel died; she’d read the police report. But what she saw before her now was far fresher in her mind than the hazy, jumbled details barely absorbed nearly two years before. It was the same scene as the photograph she’d picked up from the floor of the archives just two days earlier. Yet understanding why the photograph had been there in the first place and what message it held for Jordí did not come with the recognition. She felt only confusion and abiding sorrow.
“It’s nothing,” she said to Raoul. “Let’s just get away from here.”
• • •
The sun was low by the time they returned to Minerve. Lights glowed deep yellow from inside the tiny épicerie off rue des Remparts. Lia parked her car in front and grabbed a shopping tote from the backseat while Raoul pulled in beside her. She motioned for him to roll down his window.
“Would you stay for dinner?” she asked. “Nothing fancy—an omelet, salad.”
“Of course,” he replied. “Can I help?” He nodded to the épicerie.
“I just need a couple of things.”
She returned a few minutes later with a carton of eggs, thin stalks of leeks, and a wrapped square of Pavé de la Ginestarié cheese. Heading to Minerve’s northern edge, she drove slowly through the streets as she led the way to Le Pèlerin.
Inside the house, she motioned Raoul, who carried the shopping bag, to the kitchen while she turned on table lamps in the front room. Crossing the hallway, Lia saw him standing at the far windows that led onto the terrace. She kicked off her shoes and joined him, touching her palm to the cool glass. The windows reflected the gold and green of the river canyon as the setting sun shone its last. Raoul turned, scanning the kitchen until his gaze came to rest on her. He looked bewildered, as though he’d woken abruptly from a dream.
“The first time I saw you, you were standing in this room. It was the morning I…” With a tiny shudder, he seemed to dismiss a thought. “I’d spent the night in a cave near the Cesse. I was injured and somehow I found myself in front of a pool, washing my wound.” He touched his face, grimacing with the memory. “It was like looking through a window into a world beyond.” He turned to Lia. “I thought you were a ghost. You were—”
“I remember.” She smiled. An image of her own naked skin—what he had seen that night—flashed through her mind, followed by a rush of electric longing.
“I wanted to protect you,” said Raoul. “But you vanished. Something changed at that moment. Something gave way.”
• • •
In the living room, the creamy plaster walls and low ceiling crossed by timber beams glowed with golden light. Lia opened a bottle of mellow Savennières that tasted of honeycomb and freshly mown hay and set her iPod on a stream of singer-songwriters; acoustic Stephen Stills, Patty Griffin, and Laura Marling drifted through the warm air. They ate in front of the fireplace with their backs against the sofa and dinner plates perched on their laps.
Lia set her empty plate aside, refilled both wineglasses, and arranged herself in cross-legged fashion next to Raoul. His face in profile didn’t show the scar, and for a moment, she could pretend he was unmarred by history, simply a man with whom she was going through the normal steps of learning to love again.
“Now that I have your undivided attention, I don’t know what to ask first,” she said.
He put his plate on top of hers and set the stack on the far side of his outstretched legs. “Whatever comes to mind. I’ll do my best to answer.”
“Where were you before you came back to Languedoc? Have you been…” Lia struggled for the right words and finally blurted out what she most wanted to know. “What have you been doing the past eight hundred years?”
A hint of a smile flickered across Raoul’s mouth. “I have no memory of wandering through the centuries, if that’s what you mean. I’ve tried to imagine what Adam must have felt, awakening to the world as a fully formed man with no past. Yet there must be some deeper consciousness, some continuation of the self in all of this. How do I have the languages, the muscle memory, the knowledge of how the present works when I can remember only the past? At least I have a past. I knew this place, that I belonged here, that I’d been called back through an inheritance to reclaim my home.” He ran a hand through his hair and exhaled deeply. “There is no recollection. There is only an awakening.”
“But you do remember something. You remember Paloma and your children. Your dreams must be memories.”
“My dreams.” The familiar gesture of his hand tracing his scar pulled at Lia’s belly. “You’re right. I remember the first moment I laid eyes on Paloma in Limoux. I remember my children, twins born two years after we married.” At last, he was opening up, but Lia had to tamp down the sense of detachment from reality—they were talking about a family who had perished in a time nearly lost to all but legend and ruins.
“The Cathar Crusade was declared in March 1208, not five years after we married. I spent months traveling throughout Languedoc, trying to rally resistance against the northern invasion. After the burning of Cluet in July, I knew I could no longer keep my family safe. I sent Paloma and the children to the home of a trusted friend in Gruissan.”
Raoul drew in his legs and rested his chin on his knees. “The day we said good-bye in October was the last time I saw my family. The sénéchal of the Aude and Hérault entered Gruissan the week before Christmas with a handful of soldiers and priests, and they burned the abbey of Saint-Maurice to the ground. I believe my wife and children perished inside that church—burned alive or suffocated by smoke. Paloma was five months pregnant.”
His words hit like a punch to her sternum. Raoul uttered the cold facts, but his voice betrayed his anger and grief. His gaze into the fire was hundreds of years distant.
“My two worlds collided the morning I saw you in Carcassonne. Whatever separate consciousness I carry with me each time this…reawakening or remembering occurs, it joined with whomever I am in this present. I know that I died, Lia. I know what I’ve lost.”
“Why do you think you’ve come back to this time, this place?” Her hands shook as she brought the wineglass to her mouth.
“You said it yourself, Lia. Our souls are lost to reincarnation until we find the path to redemption. I have something to atone for. I failed my family, and now I have a chance to redeem my past.”
She shook her head, even as understanding rumbled through her like menacing thunder. “But that’s just it. All of that is in the past. It’s over now. We can live in the present,” she pleaded.
“Lia.”
He touched her face, and she turned her mouth into his hand. She’d been so afraid he would call her Paloma. She didn’t yet have the courage to face the needle of doubt poking into her heart.
“I had no right to make you so vulnerable,” he said.
He took the glass from her hand and drew her into his arms. As they tightened across her back, Lia realized her own limbs were stiff with reserve. Raoul wasn’t a dream, yet his existence shouldn’t be possible. She willed herself to relax, to shove aside her disbelief and accept the love she held in her arms.
A little less than two years before, Gabriel had held her as they made plans for the future, dreaming of a new life in France. She listened for him now, and the question in her heart was answered by a calm, restful silence.
“Even after all this time, I haven’t learned the fine art of mind reading.” Raoul leaned back to look at her face.
Shyness overcame her, as though she’d been caught saying something aloud when she thought she was alone in the room. “If you can be here in the present, you and Jordí, why can’t Paloma? Why can’t you be with your wife and family?”
Raoul brought her hand to his lips. He kissed her palm. Her fingers traced his scar and ran into his hair. “I don’t know, Lia,” he said. Regret swelled in his eyes, and for a moment, she saw her husband shimmering there. “I don’t. But I know Paloma is lost to me forever, just as Gabriel is lost to you.”