Besides, the topic they had been discussing intrigued her, despite herself.
“So, your aunt was a marraine de guerre?” Rosalyn asked.
“Yes. She was born and raised in Australia, but her mother came from France. Doris was very wealthy, with patriotic feeling for France, as well as Australia, which had entered the war alongside Great Britain. I never knew her—she was actually my great-great-aunt, I guess, the sister of my great-grandfather—but according to family lore she was a strong-minded woman, a wealthy widow, accustomed to getting her own way. She didn’t have children, so maybe this was her way of showing maternal affection. However she managed it, she and Émile kept up their correspondence throughout the war.”
“I noticed one of the letters was in English.”
“When she first began the correspondence, Doris composed her thoughts in English before translating them into French. But I suppose she became more confident about her French over time and stopped writing the English drafts, or if she still did, I couldn’t find them. Émile mentioned he carried Doris’s letters with him, in a bundle in his knapsack, and put them in a safe place whenever he returned to Reims. I’m hoping I might be able to find them.”
“That’s why you’re interested in the Comtois collection?”
Emma nodded. “It’s a long shot, I know, and that generation is long gone, but I was hoping there might be some reference to them in the museum. I’m no historian, but don’t you think this story would make a fascinating book, with both sides of the correspondence?”
“It would. But didn’t you say Jérôme Comtois has closed his museum?”
She looked pensive. “I’m hoping he’s just being ornery. He’s a bit prickly, doesn’t like tourists. Then again, he had the family business foisted upon him, so perhaps he’ll mellow over time.”
“So that’s the reason you’re going to Champagne? To find your aunt’s letters?”
Emma waved a hand in the air. Broad and slightly bony, it was a hand seemingly more suited to hard work than to manicures. “No, I’m checking on a few vineyards I’ve invested in.”
“Champagne vineyards? I’m impressed.”
She shrugged. “Sounds fancier than it really is. As I’m sure you know, vineyards are just farms, after all. And it’s in the blood; I was raised in the wine business in Australia. You’re Californian?”
“How did you know?”
“You mentioned Napa. Also, the accent.”
“We Californians like to say we don’t have an accent.”
Emma’s laugh was loud and bold, a raucous party. “Everybody has an accent. So, surely you’re not just working in Champagne? Meeting a lover, perhaps?”
A pang, deep in her belly. Climbing the steps to the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, strolling hand in hand past artists’ galleries, poking through the Montmartre cemetery. Imagining Picasso and Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir, wandering those same cobblestone alleyways, now swamped with tourists. Shivering while eating gelato in the park, because even though the day was freezing, the ice cream was too good to resist. Dash bought a silver necklace from a tiny, abandoned-looking jewelry store hidden in a courtyard; the handmade locket hung from a delicate-looking chain. He fastened it around her neck, his nimble hands warm on her skin. From that moment, she had never taken the locket off.
The sheer romance of feeling safe and taken care of, in love with the man who had just become her husband. She had felt so proud, so vital.
She had been so young.
Once again, Rosalyn felt Emma’s eyes studying her and forced herself back to their conversation. This was a classic sign of grief brain, a frequent topic of conversation in the support group she met with for the young bereaved. Jumping from one topic to the next, having difficulty maintaining a train of thought, losing the threads of conversations. It had faded over time but was still there, lurking at the edges of her consciousness, rearing its head especially when she felt stressed or tired.
“No, just business,” Rosalyn said. “I’ll be checking in with some champagne producers, and representing Small Fortune Wines at the festival of Saint Vincent.”
“Oh, that’s great! I’ll be at the festival, too. It ought to be cracking.”
“I’m sure,” Rosalyn said, accepting with an appreciative sigh her glass of red wine from the flight attendant.
“But you’re not looking forward to it.” It was a statement, not a question.
“It’s not that, not exactly. I’m just not really a party person.”
“An introvert, eh?”
“Something like that.”
Emma’s dark eyebrows rose. “And yet you’re in the wine business?”
Rosalyn let out a wry chuckle. “So it seems.”
Emma smiled, her eyes searching Rosalyn’s face. After a long moment, she asked, “Were you always an introvert? Or only since your heart was broken?”
The breath caught in Rosalyn’s throat. When she spoke, her voice was strained. “Excuse me?”
“It’s all over your face, poor thing.”
Suddenly Rosalyn was drowning, her eyes stinging and filling with tears. She scolded herself—not now not now not now—wishing she were back home, ensconced in her little cottage in the vineyard, where she could curl up on the cold tile of the bathroom floor and keen into one of Dash’s old T-shirts, even though they’d long since lost the scent of him.
She took a long pull on her wine, gulping twice, breaking any number of rules of etiquette about taking small, graceful sips in order to appreciate the full flavor.
Ten long, slow breaths.
Rosalyn felt a surge of gratitude when the older woman turned her attention back to the letters. It would only make things worse if Emma reached out to rub her shoulder or grasp her hand, asking her what was wrong—or, worse, apologizing for making her cry. That always made Rosalyn feel as if she should apologize for making the other person feel bad in the first place. C. S. Lewis wrote that grief felt a great deal like fear: the fluttering in the stomach, the repeated swallowing, the impulse to flee. That was all true, but to Rosalyn, it was so much more. Still, in a strange way, the grief itself helped her cope; it muted everything so that she could rarely summon the energy to dwell on all she had lost.
Not just Dash, but the life they’d had together. The future they had dreamed of. Even their past.
Rosalyn had lost the person who had accompanied Dash to Paris.
She had no idea who she was anymore.
Chapter Three