“Who takes care of all this?” Victorine asked in wonderment.

“I’m a botanist,” Ellie answered. “This is my, and my mother’s, challenge. Like a naughty child, if you like. She bought the chateau for a song back in the fifties when nobody wanted a chateau ruined by the war. We’d come down here every summer from Paris and camp on the grounds and have a marvelous time. A few years ago, we decided to try to restore some of its splendor—it’s called Lieu de Rêves, after all—while keeping the wildness that we both loved about it. She’s upstairs, but she’s working, so she asked me to look after you.”

“Can we walk down to the canal?” James asked.

“Of course.” Ellie and James set off across the garden but Dan didn’t move.

“I think the jet lag might have got to me,” he said at last. “Perhaps I’ll wait in the car.”

“I’ll come with you,” Victorine said.

They waited near the car for a long time, Victorine wandering off a short way every now and again to inspect a flower or to pick strawberries for Dan or to marvel over the peculiar stunted trees that were dotted about or to listen out for James and Ellie, who finally returned.

On the drive back to the hotel, Victorine watched Dan, who didn’t speak. James was oddly reticent too.

“I hope you don’t mind if I have dinner elsewhere tonight,” James said, once they reached the cool fans in the hotel lobby. “There’s a friend nearby who I’d like to see.”

“Sure,” Victorine said. “It will give me a chance to catch up properly with Dan.”

The next few days were strange. They would all begin the morning together and then James would vanish for large parts of the day. Dan was as skittish as a kitten and Victorine honestly didn’t feel as if he was enjoying himself. Then, one night when she couldn’t sleep, she sat in the lounge of the hotel drinking espresso and she saw James come in through the doors with an expression of such misery on his face that her impulse to call out his name died on her lips. Instead, she watched him walk blindly across to the elevators, not noticing her at all.

The following day, they were to leave the area and drive to the Loire. On their way to the highway, James turned off at Lieu de Rêves, muttering something about having perhaps left his hat there. But the house was closed up, and it looked to have been vacated. He hardly spoke on the way to Amboise, where he dropped off Dan and Victorine and then departed early for Paris, and then New York.

It all became clear nine months later. As Victorine sat in her office in Paris, she received a phone call from Jessica May, a woman she’d never really forgotten, a woman who’d been hiding in her unconscious since the last time she’d seen her, when Victorine was almost six years old.