So why had she bought a house in a village no one had ever heard of? It wasn’t prestige. So it must be the other.

Money.

CC knew something no one else did about the village, and it meant money.

His interest in Three Pines perked up.

‘Crie! Move, for Christ’s sake.’

It was almost literally true. The fine-boned and swaddled issue of a trust fund and a beauty pageant was struggling to be seen behind the drift that was Crie. She’d made it out on stage, dancing and twirling with the rest of the angel snowflakes, and then she’d suddenly stopped. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that snow in Jerusalem made no sense. The teacher, quite rightly, figured if anyone believed in a virgin birth they’d believe there was a snowfall that miraculous night. What did seem to matter, though, was that one of the flakes, a kind of microclimate unto herself, had stalled in the center of the stage. In front of the baby Jesus.

‘Move, lardass.’

The insult slid off Crie, as they all did. They were the white noise of her life. She barely heard them any more. Now she stood on stage staring straight into the audience as though frozen.

‘Brie has stage fright,’ the drama teacher, Madame Bruneau, whispered to the music teacher, Madame Latour, as though expecting her to do something about it. Behind her back even the teachers called Crie Brie. At least, they thought it was behind her back. They’d long since stopped worrying whether the strange and silent girl heard anything.

‘I can see that,’ Madame Latour snapped. The immense stress of putting on the Miss Edward’s Christmas pageant every year was finally getting to her.

But it wasn’t the stage that petrified Crie, nor was it the audience. It was what wasn’t there that had stopped her dead in her tracks.

Crie knew from long experience it was always the things you didn’t see that were the scariest.

And what Crie didn’t see broke her heart.

‘I remember my first guru, Ramen Das, saying to me,’ CC was now walking around the hotel room in her white robe, picking up stationery and soaps and recounting her favorite story, ‘CC Das, he said. Ramen Das called me that,’ CC said to the stationery. ‘It was rare for a woman to have such honor, especially in India at the time.’

Saul thought maybe Ramen Das didn’t realize CC was a woman.

‘This was twenty years ago. I was just a kid, innocent, but even then I was a seeker of the truth. I came upon Ramen Das in the mountains and we had an immediate spiritual connection.’

She put her hands together and Saul hoped she wasn’t about to say—

‘Namaste,’ said CC, bowing. ‘He taught me that. Very spiritual.’

She said ‘spiritual’ so often it had become meaningless to Saul.