They didn’t even stop him in customs. All those trips when I had stayed up until 3:00 A.M. trying to figure out how to fit a couple of extra hidden bottles into my luggage in such a way that they wouldn’t break in transit, and he just told them how many bottles over his limit he had and strolled on through without being stopped or taxed or anything. Sometimes I could just about kill the French.

I was too happy, though, to kill him then. His summer tan had faded, and he seemed more nervous and excited than I had ever seen him. Other than that he had not changed. We grabbed each other and held on as tight as we could for a long time.

My parents’ house was about an hour west of Atlanta, near the Alabama border. My parents built their house to be as far as possible from unnerving things like civilization, so we wound and wound our way down country roads, with Sébastien peering through the windows into the dark. The red dirt road to my family home had been paved over at some point during my youth, and the rickety wooden bridge had been replaced with a concrete one high enough to be passable when the Little Tallapoosa River was high. My parents’ driveway, however, had been left untouched, and we jounced and bounced up it in a way that explained why I was the first and last person in my family ever to try getting a small foreign car. The winter-bare branches of trees arched all around us as we reached the house, and Sébastien got out of the car to stand among a jungle of SUVs and pickups and stare overhead at the stars.

“You should see them in Texas,” I murmured. Meaning the stars, although Texas pickups were something, too. “Really, you should.”

Set in the middle of Georgia woods, on a ridge over a brown Georgia river, was the house that my parents and older siblings had built when those siblings were tweens and young teens. All was quiet, in a way that seemed to give Sébastien an earache. In Paris, there was no such thing as silence.