“Let me explain who I am,” the woman, Jess, said.

“I know who you are,” Victorine whispered, feeling it all now—the love and the joy and yes, the terror.

“I know it’s a lot to ask but I need you to come and see me,” Jess had said.

And she gave Victorine an address: Lieu de Rêves.

Thirty-five

Victorine left work and caught the train to Reims as soon as she hung up the phone from Jess. At the station, a woman she would have recognized anywhere waited for her. Nostalgia and the remnants of childhood love made her throw herself into Jess’s arms. As she did so, the past—everything she’d entombed in her mind’s most secret grotto since the morning Dan had appeared at breakfast with bloodshot eyes and whiskey breath and told her that she would soon have a baby brother or sister and that they should remember Jess inside them but never speak of her again—was finally disinterred.

“It’s so good to see you,” Victorine said at last, wiping her eyes and studying the older woman’s face.

“I hope you still think that when we get to the house and I tell you why I’ve asked you to come,” Jess said in reply.

Which sounded ominous.

To Jess’s credit, she didn’t put it off. As soon as they reached the fairytale castle, Jess took Victorine straight upstairs to a bedroom and pressed a finger to her lips before opening a door. Both women tiptoed in. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, Victorine made out a cot. Inside the cot was a baby, asleep. Victorine’s hand flew to her mouth.

They stepped back outside the room and the pieces began to fit together in Victorine’s mind. “Ellie is your daughter,” she said. “The baby is Ellie’s.”

“Yes. But of course there’s more, otherwise I wouldn’t have dragged you all the way here,” Jess said.

They seated themselves downstairs on the terrace that overlooked the canal. Jess told Victorine that she’d been working upstairs and had seen them all from her balcony when they’d come to the chateau, had watched them step out of the car and had known she couldn’t face them, except through her camera. Because there was the fact of Ellie to explain and that was still, even after almost thirty years, unexplainable.

“That night,” Jess said, “James returned to the chateau and took Ellie out for dinner. The next day, Ellie and I had the worst fight of our lives when I told her she couldn’t see James again. The excuses I used were pathetic. That he was from America and was just having a holiday romance. That he couldn’t possibly be serious. Anything other than tell her the truth.”

“I don’t understand,” Victorine said. “Even if they did go out a few times, why was that such a big deal?”

Instead of answering her directly, Jess said, “Luckily I’m a poor sleeper. I came downstairs one night to make some tea and I found her with her luggage, on her way to meet James. They’d been seeing one another in secret for days, not telling you or your father because Ellie didn’t want it to get back to me. They were in love. They were going to run away and get married. Ellie cried and said she wanted a proper wedding with me by her side but I’d been so unreasonably opposed to James that she hadn’t told me of her plans. Now that I knew, she wondered if I would relent. Would understand that marrying James didn’t mean she was leaving me. She thought that was why I was so upset with her, so against the idea of James. She looked so very hopeful.” Jess’s voice cracked and tears began to drip relentlessly from her eyes, staining her trousers. “I had to tell her the truth. Part of it anyway.”