Did I think of James at all? Yes, I did. As that terrible year went on I thought of his voice from time to time, how he spoke to me that night in the cellar after the bombing. Are you all right, Yvette? One evening when I got home I overheard Célia in her room saying some prayers. The door was open. She broke off when she heard my footsteps.

“Did you have a nice time?”

“Yes. I got into top gear on the way home.”

Célia had said nothing more to me about Sébastien since the day on the beach. She had other, heavier things on her mind. Now she merely smiled, indulging my childish triumph, and turned back to her prayers. “O Seigneur, O Dieu tout-puissant, dans ta bonté, épargne la vie de mon époux Peter et de son ami James . . .”

I didn’t know until then that she also prayed for James. And I felt a kind of sore longing for that time when we were companions in the dark and the dust.

Are you all right, Yvette?

Was he all right?

One day we stopped, Sébastien and I, on the edge of a plantation of date palms. The engine was overheating—it really was. No ruse on his part.

The palm leaves caught the least breath of wind. The rustle alone was refreshing. Sébastien handed me a canteen of water as he often did.

“Yvette, why do you always look as if you’ve just been kissed?”

I took my time swallowing down the water. Listened to the engine tick as it slowly cooled.

“Sébastien,” I said at last. “I never heard such nonsense. Has the sun gone to your head?”

He carried on as if I hadn’t spoken. As if he was talking to himself. “Maybe it’s the way your mouth is always slightly open.” He put out his hand and brushed the middle of my lips with his thumb. “Just there.”

I didn’t think it was true but I felt my lips were parted just the same, even though I had no words.

“And there’s a kind of heat in your cheeks, the tops of your cheeks,” he went on. “Not a blush. Just a sort of glow. And in your gaze, the same heat.”

He had turned toward me so that his shoulders and hips and knees were facing me. I saw the sweat at his temples, how dark it had turned his hair there. His eyes were dull tawny, like a lion’s. Or how I imagined a lion’s to be.

“I’ve tried so hard not to say anything,” he said. “But I can’t help it.”

There was a note in his voice, deep, hard and dry, like the bass string of an oud.

—

Yes. A flat, tense, imperious note, older than the human race.

It bypassed my brain entirely.