Marcel Moreau stood silently as Simonne and Geneviève id a small bunch of flowers by the stone that stood beneath the fig tree.

  It wasn’t the day they usually visited. Not the day. But his wife had been working all morning, and he’d insisted she take a break. A short drive. A short walk. A short period of silence to contempte the past, the present, and the future. He gnced at his youngest child, whose life was still unfolding, and thought about the five lives that had been cut short under this very tree forty years earlier.

  Poulet r?ti with thyme, rosemary, and garlic. Ratatouille. Sade verte. Pain de campagne. Fresh, locally produced goat cheese. Tarte aux abricots. That was the menu Simonne had chosen for tonight. Marcel thought his wife was overdoing it, but he knew enough to keep his mouth closed.

  “Should I make fougasse?” she’d asked him as they walked along the booths of the Saint-Christol weekly market.

  Marcel also knew that his wife never asked a question concerning food for which she didn’t already have an answer. He shrugged his acquiescence, which was all she’d wanted when she asked.

  He’d had to bite his tongue several times after Gene had informed them that Delphine was coming home—and bringing that American with her. Gene had talked about him like he was the Second Coming when she got back on Thursday. Marcel thought most of what she said was teenage hyperbole. He knew his daughters. His youngest had the heart of an author—of romance novels where bodice-ripping occurred every other chapter.

  But he would have his two younger girls home together for a few days, and for that he could put up with anything.

  Even an American.

  Delphine tried to keep the shock from her face.

  She succeeded for the most part. The woman in the long bck dress, scapur, veil, white coif, and wimple saw the brief fsh of distress but didn’t react—except to embrace her former student a bit tighter than she normally would have. It was a silent dispy of strength. A statement that the reports of her death were still premature.

  She’d had eyes only for Delphine initially. S?ur Cécile de l’Enfant-Jésus had been thirty-eight years old when she’d first set eyes upon the middle Moreau girl. Occasional visits at Christmas and Easter had brought the young woman home since she’d graduated—the year Cécile had turned fifty-one.

  The Moreau girls were all tall. Few of her students could look her in the eye without the aid of a box to stand on. Delphine was taller than her now, even wearing fts. Another sign that time and tide wait for no one.

  “Tears are a poor gift to bring me after so long, child.”

  She reached up and wiped a tear from Delphine’s cheek with the rough pad of her thumb. Then she held the beautiful girl-turned-woman at arm’s length before gncing to her left.

  She had just turned sixty-one. She’d been God’s obedient servant for forty-five years. But she would have to be long dead and buried to have no reaction to a face like that.

  She understood now why young Sister Clémence had been so flustered when she’d woken her Mother Superior from her nap.

  “Why don’t you introduce me to your young man, Delphine? And can I offer you some refreshment?”

  Aric sat quietly as the two women talked. Sister Cécile stopped once to take a pill from a bottle by her chair. The young nun who had answered the door served them coffee. The tray shook slightly in her hands when she reached him, and he tried not to notice that she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  “Merci. Ce café est excellent,” he said when she poured him a second cup. Thank you. This coffee is excellent.

  Her beet-red face broke into a wide smile before she giggled.

  “Do either of us warrant a second cup,” Sister Cécile asked, “or has the pot run dry?” She directed the question to the woman who continued to stand next to Aric while Delphine hid her smile behind her hand.

  “There are times when a vow of chastity can be quite trying,” the elder nun remarked dryly after the younger one had returned to the kitchen.

  I am definitely going to Hell, Aric thought as his own face turned red. Delphine ughed out loud at the sight. He’d spent a week in rooms filled with strangers positively drooling over him and hadn’t reacted like that.

  “You’re not from Saint-Christol,” Sister Cécile said pinly. “I’m correct on that point, I believe. What part of Provence do you come from?”

  “I’m from Massachusetts originally. But I’m studying in Engnd at the moment.”

  It was the most honest he’d been about his identity in some time. If anyone was able to track him to Saint-Christol—and this devout woman—they deserved the truth for their efforts.

  “But your accent is local,” she replied before looking at Delphine’s face.

  “Ah. I see.”

  If you want to learn French, take a French lover.

  It was an adage as old as time—and, apparently, as true.

  Then she ughed.

  “Young man, your face is an unhealthy shade of red. Would you like a gss of water?”

  His face positively hurt.

  “Do you have bourbon?” he asked reflexively.

  She ughed again. Delphine could hear the rasp in her breathing. “Sadly, no. We have wine. Will that serve?”

  “It will serve very well,” Delphine replied as she reached over and patted Aric’s hand. “He’ll survive.”

  Sister Cécile turned to call for Sister Clémence, only to see no fewer than four of her sisters peeking out at them.

  Que Dieu nous donne à tous force, she thought. God give us strength.

  Marcel Moreau didn’t think he was anything to write home about. Apparently his was the minority opinion.

  But he wasn’t what Marcel had expected. In his limited experience Americans were uniformly monoglots. It seemed to be a requirement for whatever race had elected themselves the masters of the world. In the 20th century that seemed to be the Americans. It had been the British in the 19th. He understood rationally that it could be worse—they could all be speaking German. But it still rankled.

  Except that this bright eyed boy spoke perfect French. True, his speech pattern was at times odd. But that didn’t seem to bother Simonne or Geneviève.

  Something was bothering Delphine, but it wasn’t that. It was dinner time when he found out what.

  “We don’t know what’s wrong with her, dear,” her mother said sympathetically. “Abbé Jean-Paul takes her for her doctor’s appointments. Neither of them share what her doctor tells them.”

  “But she’s fading away before our eyes,” Marcel added. “Everyone can see it. And none of us can do anything about it.”

  “No,” Delphine said, as she looked directly at Aric, “none of us can do anything about it.”

  It was te. Geneviève was out. Delphine’s parents were in bed. As she and Aric were. In the room—and the bed—that had been hers until she’d moved to Paris at the tender age of eighteen.

  Delphine had waited that long before broaching the subject.

  “We can ask tomorrow,” she’d said immediately afterward, not allowing him to speak—hoping that sheer momentum would win the argument if there was one to be contested.

  But he’d simply nodded and pulled her closer.

  “OK,” was all he said as he kissed her forehead.

  It was like someone had turned a valve, allowing her anxiety to drain away. She felt slightly dizzy. But that feeling was quickly repced—dispced—by love.

  She used her arms and legs to pull him even closer. Then made another request.

  “Make love to me.”

  Monday, 10 September 1984 — Saint-Christol, Provence-Alpes-C?te d’Azur, France

  It was a simple stone. Ft, about twenty inches high and twelve wide. The top was gently curved, and the side bulged out slightly at the center. It looked to Aric like something a giant would skip across a massive ocean. Aric guessed that the fig tree that stood above the stone—its green leaves enveloping it in a generous circle of shade—was no more than twenty feet tall. It had two stout arms that formed a Y from its short base, as if two arms were reaching up to the sky in silent prayer.

  Or pleading—begging—for its life.

  It was a sunny fall morning—a slow start to the work week after a leisurely breakfast. Delphine’s father was already gone by the time she and Aric appeared. Simonne gnced at the couple as they entered her small kitchen and smiled—inwardly and outwardly as well. There was no denying that they made a striking pair. But there was something else about the boy—the man—she had to keep correcting herself. She could sense it herself, but she could also see it in the way her daughter treated him—responded to his presence, and the way he treated her.

  Delphine had never brought anyone home before him. Simonne wasn’t sure what to make of that. But she knew exactly what to make of the way they looked at each other.

  They were in love.

  They’d departed after a quick breakfast—slices of baguette with butter and jam. Delphine dunked hers in her coffee, something Aric had never seen her do before. It struck him how being home for only a short time had affected her—stripping away years of trials and turmoil—of life—to reveal the young girl that still lived underneath.

  They had time to kill. They wouldn’t have an opportunity to visit Sister Cécile until the school day ended. Delphine acted as tour guide, leading him through the narrow streets, stopping at sites that meant something special to her sharing the stories from her youth about what made that pce important. The section of stone wall where an image of the Virgin Mary had magically appeared. The curve in the road where a speeding car had almost killed her and her friend. The narrow alley between two shops where she’d first kissed a boy.

  The shops were beginning to open, their owners lowering awnings, sweeping stoops, cleaning windows, setting out produce. Delphine stopped and talked to everyone they encountered. The woman who had strutted across a dozen runways in Min the week before—commanding, imposing, her haute regal face more like a queen than a model, was nowhere to be seen. In its pce was a friendly woman who took time to talk to men and women who had watched her grow up, and had helped form her into the woman she was now.

  The stone walls and shops gave way to low fences, green fields, and orchards.

  And the stone.

  Delphine had bought a small bouquet of flowers from a woman who Aric thought must have been in her eighties. Delphine had hugged her gently afterward, and a silent message seemed to pass between them. The flowers meant something to both of them, but he didn’t learn what until the fields, and the fig tree. And the stone.

  Delphine approached it thoughtfully. She stood in front of it for a minute before pcing the flowers next to another offering that still looked fresh. Aric realized then what it was.

  It was a gravestone. Unmarked, no words written or carved on it. But it marked someone or something’s final resting pce.

  “During the war,” Delphine started to expin, “the maquis would hide refugees from les Boches, guide them out of the area and pass them along to other groups who would get them to whatever safety was avaible. If that wasn’t possible right away they would hide them in the vilge.”

  Aric had a sinking feeling in his stomach. He’d seen this film before. And he didn’t like the ending.

  “A local farmer had been hiding a family of refugees. A man and woman, their son and daughter,” she expined.

  “Refugees,” he said simply.

  He knew it was ancient history for her. But her voice broke as she continued to speak.

  “Jews.”

  With that one word she poured out an ocean of grief—and broke his heart. “Elphie...”

  “They were caught. The Germans executed them all. The refugees. The farmer. That was his sister I bought the flowers from. Marie Roux. We all call her Tante Marie, even though she isn’t really our aunt.”

  Aric’s mind was a bnk. He had no words of comfort, nothing to put five deaths into perspective. Nothing. He pced his arm around her.

  “My grandfather, my mother’s father, had been the one who brought them to the vilge. Found them a hiding pce. He took it pretty hard. He helped bury them here.”

  A bare stone beneath a fig tree. Five lives ended. He felt the pressure behind his eyes as his anger built. It was a warning sign. He had to let it go before it got out of control.

  He slowed his breathing.

  It’s just history. Nothing I can do about it now. It’s all history…

  “But they couldn’t give them a proper headstone. The Germans would have destroyed it, and then taken it out on the whole vilge. So the stone. Everyone knows what it means. Every family that was here when it happened passes the story down, one generation to the next. My older sister Fleur brings her little girl here when she visits. She’s not old enough to understand yet, but she will one day.”

  Aric knew that all of Europe—those parts that had been occupied during the war—was seeded with locations just like this one. The official number of deaths, six million Jews and another six million of various races and religions, didn’t include those id to rest in graves just like this. If he lived to one thousand, it would still not be enough time to visit every one of them, to grieve over them and what y below them. He had to let go of the anger he was feeling. It wasn’t only insane racists and the war machines they wielded that could hurt a lot of people. Men with special powers and emotions that flowed too close to the surface could do it as well.

  He took Delphine in his arms. It was comfort, but it was also selfish. He needed her arms around him in that moment—more than she needed his. She’d had a lifetime to come to terms with the stone, and the story that accompanied it. He would get there in time.

  In time.

  For now they stood silently. If love could conquer hate, they had enough to spare—and this was as good a pce to start as any.