“Needless to say, I missed you,” she said.

“And I missed you.” He kissed her forehead. “I’m glad you could get away.”

They’d been planning this for a year so that everyone’s busy schedules could align—Victorine was publishing director of a French magazine conglomerate and James, Dan’s son, was working at World Media learning the business from Dan—and now at last they were to spend two weeks traveling around France. Dan had insisted on them all getting together; family should know one another, he said, and they didn’t, not anymore. Victorine, knowing that Dan would declare all of Normandy off-limits because of wartime memories and wanting to begin the holiday not too far from Paris to minimize travel after his plane journey, had suggested they begin in the Champagne region. After what she’d thought was a momentary hesitation in Dan, he’d agreed that it might be nice to look at champagne caves and castles and forests and gardens.

“Here’s James. You probably don’t recognize him.” Dan gestured to the man beside him, blond and therefore unlike his father.

“James!” Victorine exclaimed. “It can’t possibly be.”

“I promise it is,” he said teasingly, just like the child he’d always been, able to find the funny side in any situation.

The two of them had always played together as young siblings, but had not known each other as adults. Victorine had insisted to Dan that she be sent to boarding school in France when she was ten years old—James had been four at the time—in order to maintain her French identity; she missed the country of her birth, she’d said. She’d really wanted to escape Amelia, although she hadn’t put it like that and she knew Dan understood.

After she’d finished at school, Victorine began working in France, refusing Dan’s offer of a place in the business in New York because she felt that it wasn’t rightfully hers, although she hadn’t said that to Dan; he’d told her about her true parentage when she was eighteen and while she still loved him as much as ever, she’d wanted to make her own way in the world and had done so. He visited her every year, including one trip to accompany her on an exhaustive and fruitless search to try to find out anything she could about her parents, but there had been so many lost children and lost families in the exodus from Paris, so many records destroyed in the war, that the mystery of Victorine’s parentage would remain forever unsolved.

It suited her, a life consumed by work; she’d always been a grave and earnest person, never a true child, as her teachers used to say. Some people, she knew, mistook that seriousness for humorlessness, thought she was dour, but it was just that there was an impossible-to-shift weight pressing on her, one she’d borne ever since she could remember having feelings, one that seemed to push down all the more if she had moments of unoccupied time.

“How’s your mother?” she asked James now, politely.