LOGIS DU MARTINET, LAGRASSE—THURSDAY MORNING
Lia awoke to a room filled with the citron light of midmorning. Through the open window came the drone of a distant tractor, and she pictured Raoul turning over the soil beneath the vines, releasing weeds from the fertile earth. She probed the bandage on her temple and prepared for the responding flare of pain, but the hours of deep sleep had soothed most of the ache in her head and muscles. Then she remembered.
“I don’t want to be a part of this,” she said to the bright, empty room. A muffled buzzing sounded: her phone, buried underneath her clothes. She scrambled for it, knocking the freshly laundered and neatly folded shirt and jeans from the chair beside the bed to the floor. The phone vibrated with a text message from Jordí: 3 Chemin du Rossignol, Limoux. Please. As soon as possible.
With a heavy heart, Lia gathered her clothes. A whisper and faint clink caught her ear. Scanning the bare wood floor, she saw a tiny puddle of silver next to her foot. She scooped it up, and a thin chain fell like water between her fingers, leaving the Occitan cross pendant in the center of her palm. Paloma’s cross. The one Lia had seen her wearing in that world suspended below the stairs. How had Paloma’s cross traveled with her?
As she dressed, Lia thought of their embrace, recalling that Paloma had pressed something into her hand in the moments before everything went black. She’d found that letter when she came to in the tiny room that drifted between the present and the past, but this… Raoul did not belong to her any more than he belonged to the present. He belonged only to this place, to Languedoc. To Paloma. Lia raised the necklace to her lips and made her choice.
The tile in the sunroom was warm beneath her bare feet. Opening the door to the terrace, she heard the tractor humming in the vineyards that rose behind the house. The sun shone on, oblivious to her anguish.
Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.
• • •
As Lia followed the sound of Raoul’s tractor, she felt as fragile as a patch of ice over a swiftly moving river. At any moment, her heart could shatter and dissolve into the gelid water of her sorrow. Yet all around her, the earth surged with warm, vibrant life. The vines in the first flush of growth had turned the hillsides into shifting seas of green, and fields of mustard, poppy, and wild narcissus burst in riotous splashes of color. Aromas of thyme and almond blossom drifted in the breeze blowing off the Mediterranean.
Lia wondered what would become of the place after Raoul was gone but pushed the thought away. The common-sense worries of the property and its vines in flower, the tons of wine aging from the previous autumn’s pressing, were more than she could absorb. She could do only what she believed was right and trust the rest would take care of itself.
Isis charged out of the vineyards, her teeth bared in a gleeful grin, and pushed her long snout into Lia’s hip. “You’ll come with me, won’t you, girl?” Lia bent down and embraced the greyhound, pressing her face into the sun-warmed coat. Isis leaned into her, snuffling into her hair, and then sat back on her haunches and considered Lia with amber eyes.
“I won’t leave you here alone.”
The dog tilted her head, and for a fleeting moment, Lia wondered whose soul inhabited the wise and loving creature.
“What am I doing, Isis?” She stood and looked across the expanse of vineyards toward the distant Pyrénées, which were visible only as a blue smudge against the white sky of morning. “How can I let him go? How can I say good-bye again to love and a future? Please tell me it’s going to be all right. Tell me I’m going to be all right.” Isis barked and shot past her, up a row of vines. Lia shifted her features into a smile as the dog twirled in a frenzy of joy: Raoul was descending the hillside toward them.
“You’re up early. How do you feel?”
Lia nodded her reply, not trusting her voice with the truth. With one arm, Raoul pulled her close, kissing her temple just outside the bandage. In his other hand, he held a small silver thermos.
“I thought I’d get an early start and let you sleep,” he said as he filled the small thermos cap with steaming coffee. “I noticed new shoots on the Carignane and grenache that I’ve got to pull in the next couple of days. With this stretch of warm weather, flowering has taken off.” Raoul’s talk of vines soothed Lia’s frayed nerves. If only they could stand forever on this hillside, watching the vines flower and their berries ripen from dull green to deep purples, reds, and golds.
They shared the cup of coffee, taking turns sipping at the hot sludge. “Sorry, I should’ve let you make it.” Raoul grimaced. “Next time,” he said, replacing the cup on the thermos and setting it at their feet.
Next time. The words pierced her. His future was not hers to share. Lia knew she had to do this now, before her heart failed her. “Raoul—” she began.
“There’s so much I need to tell you,” he interrupted, taking her by the waist and pulling her hips into his. “I brought you into this mess, where you have no reason to be.”
An image of Paloma, the sun turning loose strands of her hair to gold, came to Lia, and her misery spilled out of her hot and wretched. Raoul cupped her face and slid his thumbs across her cheeks, catching the tears.
“But that’s just it, Raoul. Don’t you see?” she said. “It’s because of me that this is happening. We’re all connected. You. Me. Lucas.” She hesitated. “Gabriel and Paloma,” she said softly.
“Your husband?” Raoul leaned back, dropping his hands from her face. The motion pained her heart more than the lump pained her head. “What are you talking about?”
“Gabriel’s death is tied to your”—she searched for the word—“your rebirth or awakening or whatever it is that’s happened to you. He passed from this world, and you entered it.”
“That’s crazy, Lia. Are you saying that Gabriel was some sort of sacrifice for me?”
“I don’t know, Raoul. I don’t know.” She willed herself on. “I understand only that I can end this cycle. I can bring you to Paloma. To your children. To the baby daughter you haven’t seen. They were waiting for me yesterday. And they’re waiting for you now.”
He gripped her shoulders, the pads of his fingers pressing into the thin muscles beneath her cotton shirt. “Lia, stop this. Whatever happened to you, whatever you think you saw, happened because of that blow to your head. It was some sort of dream or hallucination. No one is waiting for me, and I’m not going anywhere. Just stop.”
“What I saw yesterday was as real as this moment,” she insisted. “Why can’t it be real? Look around you. How can you explain this place? How are you possible? Lucas? Jordí? How is any of this possible? Yet here you are, flesh and blood.”
Raoul’s mouth was set in a grim line, but his eyes were soft. In them, she read her same love and desire and sorrow.
“Do you believe if you give me up, Gabriel will come back? Is that what this is? Trading one soul, one life, for another?”
Lia reeled. “No,” she said simply. “There is no exchange. Gabriel is gone to me forever. I’m not making a deal with the devil or even with God.”
She closed her fist over the cool silver cross in her pocket and lifted it between their faces. The pendant twirled, glinting in the sunlight, and Raoul caught it in his palm. His gaze clouded, and he pulled away for an instant, but it was enough. The understanding she’d seen in his face rang clear as a church bell. Paloma.
“Where did you find this?”
“Your wife gave it to me yesterday.”
Raoul’s eyes sharpened as he refocused his attention on her face. He pushed down her hand, removing the barrier of the necklace between them. “Paloma died in Gruissan with the children,” he said, agony twisting his features. “I saw their bodies. I found this cross in her hand. Then I went to Minerve where we said we would meet. I didn’t know where else to go. I had her cross with me when…”
You died, Lia finished his sentence in her mind. Whatever he felt for her, she knew it couldn’t compare to the love of a husband for his wife and a father for his children. “No, Raoul. Paloma didn’t die in Gruissan. She and Bertran and Aicelina escaped from that church. I don’t know whose bodies you saw, but your family survived. They lived their full lives, and now they’re waiting for you.” She took his hand. “There’s something I need to show you.”
They walked through the vineyard as the sun spilled into the valley. Would the light ever be as rich and golden, the air as fragrant with forest, field, and sea? Would Languedoc ever be so sweet? Or so bitter?
Isis ran ahead, disappearing into the tangle of scrub and oak trees beyond the vineyards. Lia led the way into the cool, dark winery. This time, she wasn’t surprised by the ruin of an ancient, neglected vault, the stifling odor of ferment and decay. As they passed the splintered vats and the gray piles of rubbish, Raoul protested, but she pulled him on. He grew quiet and tightened the connection of his hand to hers. They entered what had been the bottling room, full of gleaming machinery, but it was now a dark chamber, full of refuse. The door that had locked behind her, trapping her in a tunnel of time, looked insignificant and forgotten at the far end. Lia thought to grab a brick from a pile near the closet.
She pushed on the iron handle, and once again, the small, rounded door opened without a sound. She motioned for Raoul to enter. Before the dark and tiny space could swallow them, Lia set the brick on the floor and closed the door gently against it. There wouldn’t be anyone to rescue her if the door shut fast behind her again.
“What the hell?” Raoul whispered, just as she had the day before, a lifetime ago. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, the tiny room took shape. It was as it had been: a thin stream of cool air poured up from some unimaginable depth along the corkscrew stairwell to the landing where they stood. For an agonizing moment, she wondered if, in making her choice, she had caused the inexplicable transformation of storage room to passageway between worlds. If she clung to Raoul and made him turn around, could that choice make all of this go away? Perhaps that’s what it meant to have faith: complete acceptance, even in the absence of logic and reason.
“I can take you back to Paloma and your children,” she said, her voice sounding hollow in the small space.
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Raoul, I do. Please believe me. We have to try.” Lia nodded toward the stairwell.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’ve never been more certain of anything,” she lied. He took two steps and began to descend, winding out of her view, his footsteps absorbed by the soundless chamber of the stairwell. Her love for him grabbed and shook her so hard that she staggered on the step, clutching at the stone as smooth as the inside of a shell.
“Lia?” Raoul’s face rose out of the darkness, and his solid form met hers, holding her steady. A light shone in his eyes, as though he’d brought hope with him from below. Warmer air pushed past, and Lia knew the end of the stairwell was only steps away. Her feet moved again despite the dizzying mix of exhilaration and dread. It appeared, just beyond a corridor glowing with light: the massive courtyard open to the sky above, with a door set into the thick stone on one side, slightly ajar, a golden field visible just beyond.
Raoul took a few steps into the courtyard. “What is this place?”
“I don’t know what it is,” she replied. “But I do know it’s where you belong. Paloma is here waiting for you. She is so beautiful, Raoul. She looks like an angel. And your children. They are tiny and sweet.” Dizziness washed over her, and she willed her legs to remain firm.
“Lia.” Raoul steadied her again. “No.”
She turned her face to the sun, which was at its zenith, and closed her eyes against the insistent gold. “There has to be a reason why we met. There has to be a reason why your soul was released into this world at the same time Gabriel’s was taken. This.” Lia turned in place, searching for Paloma, for the right words, for the reason she was letting her heart break. “This is the reason.”
And there she was, standing with her hands clasped before her, her hair unbound and streaming like molten gold over a plain brown shift. “Paloma,” said Lia.
Raoul turned.