My heart pounded. What the fuck was that? I didn’t expect her to worship me or anything, but you’d think I’d just shown her the plans for a nuclear power plant that was going to displace a colony of baby sea turtles. A little acknowledgment that I was at least a decent human being would have been nice. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“No.”

“What did I do?”

She turned to face me. Tears on her cheeks, gutting me, her eyes translucent green. “Nothing. I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s absolutely wonderful. I didn’t mean to make you think otherwise. I’m just tired. I get emotional when I’m tired.”

I lifted my hand and touched the water on her cheek. She closed her eyes.

Debating for a split second, I gave into an instinct and chanced a rejection. “Come here,” I said, and meeting no resistance, hauled her across the back seat onto my lap where she burrowed against my chest. I let my face fall into her thick, luscious hair and held her close, breathing her in deeply. My heart raced as I realized how nervous that small simple move to reach out to her had made me. And how relieved I was that she hadn’t resisted.

After a whirlwind taxi tour of the major sights inside the Calvi city walls, I had the driver drop us at a small restaurant in the port that employed its own fishermen who went out every morning. It was early afternoon, and Josie and I shared a bottle of rosé and I ordered a late lunch of bouillabaisse and Josie had fresh fish, rice, and seasonal vegetables.

Her fingers were halfway across the table, fidgeting with the stem of her wine glass. Without thinking I reached out and took her fingers in mine and found myself holding hands across the table, something I hadn’t done in years. Not since Arriette and I had first met.

It was so natural to want to touch Josie, to be with her. To laugh and to talk. She asked me all kinds of questions about my business, and I shared my work with the alternative energy project power plant that was currently being built near where I lived. I told her about the invention of microfilm that could withstand a cataclysm and last for two thousand years and how everyone wanted to record their technology or their industrial secrets and hide it on the microfilm in a bunker in Iceland in case the world ended. I wasn’t bragging. She was fascinated and I let myself talk.

I told her about my successes and also my failures. I told her about Arriette’s brother and how he’d felt like he deserved Dauphine’s inheritance from her mother. About how I always felt like he was a threat out there and that was why my security around Dauphine was always so high.

“Wow, would he hurt her?”