“Dr. Sullivan would be very pleased to hear you say that. She was the headmistress.”

“But you were born in France?”

“Yes, in Marseille.”

“Yet you attended English boarding school.” He phrased it less as a question and more as a comment, leaving it up to her if she wished to answer.

“Because my parents were away so often, boarding school seemed like the best option. They told me that it was important that I have a fluency in multiple languages. That I would appreciate the opportunities it afforded later on in life. They weren’t wrong.”

They had reached the edge of the garden, ringed by deep green hydrangeas covered in a riot of snow-white blooms. Narrow openings were spaced between them, and Lia slipped through one, Gabriel following her. Here, just on the other side of the garden, the view of the sea was unimpeded. The breeze was picking up, perfuming the warm air with a bouquet of sweet floral fragrances, rich tones of recently turned earth, and a subdued salty tang from the sea. Behind them a bee droned as it worked, and, above, a seabird shrilled as it wheeled across the sky.

“When I was young, I spent an Easter with my roommate’s family farther up the coast in Scarborough,” Lia said, closing her eyes, tipping her face up to the sun, and inhaling deeply. “It smelled exactly like this.”

“You didn’t spend those holidays with your family?” Gabriel asked and then regretted it immediately. All he had done was to repeat what she had just told him in a slightly accusing manner. The dynamics of her family were none of his business.

“My parents have always spent March to May in Portugal.” Lia opened her eyes, and if she was offended by his question, she didn’t show it. “Though they head to their chalet in Switzerland for the summers before it can get too hot. That’s when I would go back to Marseille to stay with Grandmère, because she never travelled.”

“Never?” Gabriel tried again to reconcile the photos of a vibrant, daring Estelle Allard he had seen in that Paris apartment with the sedentary picture Lia was painting of her grandmother.

“Not while I knew her. Though my mother told me that, when she was a child, Grandmère would go to Switzerland all the time. At least three or four times a year. As she got older, it was only once or twice, and then, eventually, she stopped altogether.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why she went or why she stopped. She didn’t take my mother with her when she went.”

“And your parents never took you with them on any of their travels either—” Gabriel snapped his mouth shut. He sounded like a judgemental idiot. Again. Just because his family did everything together didn’t mean everyone else’s did.

Lia shrugged, ostensibly still not bothered by his lack of tact. “No.”

“That sounds…lonely.”