Just like that he was gone, leaving her to talk to Victorine.

“Hello, darling. I know you’re working. But I miss you.”

The familiar voice, a French accent altered only slightly by her years in Australia, the words soaked through with love, made D’Arcy’s eyes fill with tears.

“I miss you too,” D’Arcy said. “I wish you were here with me. You’d love it. You really would. It’d be impossible to have bad memories in a place like this. And, for an added bonus, there’s a rather handsome man here too.”

Victorine laughed. “Don’t tell me France’s romantic powers are working on my determinedly single daughter? I don’t believe it!”

D’Arcy laughed too. “I said he was handsome, not that I want to marry him.”

“But you don’t normally tell me about the handsome men you meet overseas until after the fact, once you’re safely home and out of their reach.”

D’Arcy knew her mother was right, but this time she really wanted to talk about Josh. She hesitated, before the words rushed out. “He’s different to anyone I’ve met. He’s…” D’Arcy searched for the right word “…unhurried. Steady. I don’t know; those aren’t attributes I’d ordinarily find appealing. In him, they are. But he lives in France. So I’ll spend a week or so admiring his looks and then come back to Australia and that will be that.”

“Or you could let yourself see what happens if you stop thinking about the reasons you want it to be impossible.” Her mother’s voice was gentle.

Just as she’d told Josh, for her whole life it had only been D’Arcy and her mother; they understood everything the other was thinking and feeling with just a glance. And D’Arcy thought that, right now, her mother was telling her daughter to choose a different life to the one Victorine had chosen, that even though her mother had never seemed interested in taking up anything serious with a man—she dated occasionally and distractedly, she loved her work and her daughter—and she constantly told D’Arcy she was happy, D’Arcy no longer believed her.

D’Arcy knew then that she would take great care with her next words. If Victorine said nothing, D’Arcy would look for more answers without involving her mother. Because it might all be easily explained away, somehow, and she would never do anything to deliberately cause Victorine pain.

“You were so busy before I left that I didn’t get a chance to tell you what I was coming to France for,” D’Arcy said slowly. “The gallery is exhibiting the works of The Photographer. It’s the first time they’ve ever been in Australia and it’s such a coup to get them. I’m doing the art handling so I get to touch them. They’re amazing. It’s the photographer’s chateau I’m staying at, Lieu de Rêves.” D’Arcy lay back and closed her eyes, sun dancing over her face, expecting Victorine to say—which the picture of her mother picnicking before one of the enchanted trees proved—I went there when I was a child.