Chapter 29

The sun rose pink and gold over the fields, while all the world was hungover, except for two old, old people watching the world begin anew.

Jean-Jacques Rosier and Colette Delatour stood just far enough apart their shoulders didn’t accidentally brush in any way that suggested they needed each other to lean on. Even compressed with age, he stood tall. Even compressed with age, she stood only a half head shorter.

“So you got him home,” Jean-Jacques said with satisfaction.

“To think it was the little Lyon girl who got him to stay.”

For a moment, both were quiet, caught in memories of another little Lyon girl, curled up in roses.

“To think it was one of my grandsons who brought her home, too,” Jean-Jacques said quietly.

Colette nodded slowly. It had been hard to take those terrified, somber little kids away from all they knew to strangers. Cruelly hard to know that the only other choice for them was to die.

“We did the right thing, then,” Jean-Jacques said.

Colette looked at him, and then they both looked out over the fields again. Facing the same way, as they always had, but still to this day sometimes it was hard to face each other. Kids these days thought it had been easy back then to do the right thing, as if right and wrong were two loaves of bread you could buy yourself in the bakery, one clearly burned and the other warm and inviting. They didn’t know about the othering, how certain people had been presented over and over as not really human so not worth another human’s sacrifice. They didn’t know about the overwhelming feelings of helplessness into which most people had sunk, as if there was nothing they could possibly do to fight. Kids these days looked back, seventy years later, and saw all the right choices and all the wrong choices as clear as day and couldn’t understand how anyone, anyone, could ever make that wrong choice.

A sense of right and wrong had been strong in Colette and Jean-Jacques, too. It had fueled them, infuriated them, given them strength. But they knew it hadn’t been simple. They’d saved people. But they’d killed people, too. Sometimes with their own hands, but those weren’t the worst. The worst were the people who had died because Colette and Jacky had made the wrong decisions. The villagers they hadn’t even known who got shot in a reprisal for their actions, early on when they were reckless kids and didn’t realize there would be reprisals on people other than themselves. The friends who had died because they followed Colette and Jean-Jacques Rosier into battle against overwhelming evil. When you inspired people to act…the cost of their actions stayed on your soul forever.

Other lives had been lost, other people had never had kids, because they had saved Elena Lyon’s grandmother. Élise Dubois’s death had devastated her own little son, so that he, too, never recovered. Making the choice to fight for what was right had never been simple. Never once been easy.

“We tried,” Colette said. “If you’re not willing to give up your life to save a child’s life, then you’ve lost your soul. I always thought the devil was too pathetic a piece of shit for me to lose my soul to him without trying.” And sometimes it was nice to be around Jacky, who knew exactly how foul her mouth could get, back in the old days, and didn’t look at her as her nephews did sometimes when she cursed, in that affectionate, indulgent way that made her feel as if she was an old lady.

She’d never been a lady, and she couldn’t get too old yet. Somebody had to hang on to this world and make sure it didn’t let itself get that screwed up again. At least they’d taught the boys all the skills they could about how to fight, how to resist, if it ever came to that a second time.

Jean-Jacques nodded, and the two gazed at the pink and green fields. Once, on the limestone cliffs that rose white there at the end of the valley, Jean-Jacques Rosier had carved a message for the Nazis, a rallying call for his own people to hold their ground against the enemy. I am here and here I’ll stay.

That’s right, Colette thought now, to the world. We are.

In the distance, a tall, straight man and a small, red-headed woman came out of the big mas and stood looking at the fields. The man put his arm around the woman and drew her against his chest.

Colette felt a sigh ease through her muscles, a sense of peace with the knowledge that the sun they were watching rise was setting for someone else in the world even now. “It’s good to have them all home,” she said softly. Every one. From the little girl in the roses, to lost Léo’s children, to her war-exiled nephew. All back where they belonged.

“All of them?” Jacky said, his eyebrows drawing together. He picked a rose, gazing at it in his wrinkled hand. Did he ever think about what it had been like when she was nine and he was three, running through these roses, when their hands had been little and innocent? His baby hands and his hands now belonged to the same person, at least that was what DNA would say. One of the reasons Colette didn’t put much faith in things like DNA.

Jacky turned his head to look at her. “Tell me about this lawyer of yours. Antoine Vallier.”

***

A breeze stirred through the cypress and over weathered white-gray tombstones. The late June afternoon was hot and vibrating with cicadas, and the view gave out over the blue promise of the sea.

Elena set a bouquet of lavender before a small, simple stone with its Star of David. “Maman says she never liked the smell of roses,” she murmured to Lucien. He rested a heavy, warm hand on her shoulder.

She draped the chain of a necklace over the headstone, adjusting the heart pendant—deep rich red glass, bought in Venice on a trip with Lucien. She had one for her mother, too. Three generations, fighting to heal. Having a lionheart doesn’t mean you always win. Just that you try as long as you can.

Her own mother, struggling out of the terrible downward spiral she was caught in, to at least give her daughter a lionheart, to try to help her be brave.

And it had helped. She had been brave. Brave enough to live her life, to become someone she liked being. Brave enough to hang a ring on that same chain, the ring that represented everything that Lucien was, offered to her. Brave enough to try to learn to have faith in him. You are here and here you’ll stay.

She stood and rested her hand on the curve of the headstone, gazing out at the sea. Grief and quiet and a kind of rest. She stroked the tombstone the way Lucien always stroked her hair, and Lucien slipped his arm around her waist.

They stood like that for a while, watching the sea, the hint of lavender bringing freshness to the heat and pines.

“I know this is pre-mature,” Elena said, “but can we have a lot of kids? Four or five. And raise them to be happy.”

Lucien tightened his arm around her. “It’s not pre-mature. And I’d like that. After a hundred twenty-six rambunctious teenagers, five sounds just about right.” That intimate, warm crinkling of his eyes just for her. “Easy.”

She snorted and touched his flat belly. That he would get to keep flat. “Feel free to carry a couple of them if you think it’s so easy.”

He covered her hand with his. “Story of our life, I guess. Loving you is always going to be just a bit easier for me than it is for you.”

She looked up at him, so straight and sure and ready for anything, even her. Those blue eyes, and that steady calm, and the warmth that permeated all that toughness. “I’m not scared of hard things. Just scared of the people who don’t do them.”

Direct gaze. A straightforward promise. I’ll do them.

As he’d proven. She wrapped both arms around him. “You make me believe in happiness,” she told him softly. “That I can keep.”

He curved his hand against her cheek in that tender, callused gesture that made her feel so loved. “Exactly.”

She tightened her arms around his waist. “I love you,” she said fiercely. “Whether or not it’s easy.”

He bent his head to hers, and held her close, and the cicadas sang all around them. A song of hope. You’ve been alone until me. But now I’m here.

***

FIN

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My next book will be Elias’s story in the Paris Nights series. Keep reading for an excerpt from the most recent book in that series, Trust Me.

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