Alive

We didn't sleep that night, not properly.

Julien sat at the kitchen table for a long time after Lucas had finally gone quiet upstairs, the phone face-down in front of him like he couldn't decide whether looking at it again would make the thing more real or less. I made tea neither of us drank. At some point I put my hand over his on the table, and he turned his palm up to hold mine, but he didn't look at me, and I understood, without being told, that he'd gone somewhere I couldn't follow him yet.

"She died," he said, at one point, to no one in particular, like repeating it might eventually make it true again. "There was a funeral. I gave a reading. I remember choosing the flowers."

"Julien."

"I chose the flowers, Ellie."

I didn't have anything to offer that would make that sentence smaller, so I didn't try. I just stayed, my hand over his, while the kitchen clock ticked through hours neither of us was using for sleep.

By morning he had a plan, the kind of plan a person builds when the alternative is falling apart in front of a seven-year-old at breakfast. He would find out. He would confirm, one way or another, whether the email was real or some cruel and elaborate fiction, before he let himself feel anything about it at all.

***

The reply, when it came, arrived within the hour and left no real room for doubt. A photograph, recent, unmistakably her, standing in front of a building neither of us recognised. A phone number. A single line beneath it: I understand if you need proof. I would too.

Julien called the number that afternoon while Lucas was at a friend's for the day, and I sat in the next room and listened to one side of a conversation that told me almost nothing and everything at once, his voice going flat and careful in a way I'd never heard it go, the particular flatness of someone holding an enormous weight very still so it doesn't shift and crush something.

"Tomorrow," he said, when he came back into the room, phone still loose in his hand. "There's a café outside Beaune. She wants to meet."

"Do you want me there?"

He was quiet for a moment, and I watched him consider it properly, the way he considered most things, before he shook his head.

"Not yet," he said. "I don't know what I'm going to find when I see her. I don't want you to have to watch me find it."

I understood that, even as some small unworthy part of me wanted to argue with it. This wasn't mine to walk into first. It was his, a door that had been shut for years with him standing on one side of it and a version of his life on the other, and whatever waited behind it belonged to him before it belonged to us.

"I'll be here," I said. "With Lucas. Go."

He kissed my forehead before he left, longer than the moment strictly required, like he was taking something with him.

***

The day he was gone was one of the longest of my life, and I hadn't even been the one to walk through the door.

I kept Lucas occupied with a puzzle he'd been ignoring for months and a film he'd already seen four times, and I checked my phone more often than I would ever have admitted to Julien, given how thoroughly I'd once been scolded, gently, for exactly that habit. There was nothing to check. He'd said he'd call after.

He called at half past six, and I could tell within the first two words that whatever had happened, it had cost him.

"Can you meet me at the gate," he said. "I don't want to come inside yet. I need a minute first."

I told Lucas I was stepping out to meet his father, settled him with the woman from next door who'd half raised half the street's children between shifts, and drove to the end of the lane where Julien was waiting, leaning against his own car with his arms crossed, looking at nothing.

He didn't speak right away. I crossed the distance between us and put my arms around him, and after a moment he let his forehead drop to my shoulder, which was, from him, close to a collapse.

"Tell me," I said, once he'd steadied.

"It's her," he said, into my shoulder. "It's actually her. Older. Different, in ways I can't entirely name. But her."

"What did she say?"

He pulled back enough to look at me, and his eyes were red in a way that told me he'd cried at some point that day, somewhere I hadn't been there to see.

"She said she never died," he said. "She said there was an accident, a boat, near where she'd gone, and that somehow the confusion of it let people assume things that weren't true, and that by the time she understood what everyone believed, it was easier to let it stand than to explain what she'd actually done." His jaw tightened. "She left me for someone else, Ellie. Years before any of that. She left both of us, and then she let me bury her instead of telling me the truth, because the truth was harder to say out loud."

"Julien."

"I chose flowers," he said again, and this time his voice cracked properly, the first real crack I had heard in it since the night we met. "I stood at a grave that had nothing in it and told our son his mother was gone, and she was somewhere else the entire time, living a life she preferred to the one she'd had with us."

I didn't say anything. There was nothing useful to say to that, nothing that wouldn't sound thin against the size of what he'd just been handed, so I simply held onto him instead, in the cooling evening air at the end of the lane, while he shook, once, and then went very still, the way a person goes still when they've decided, consciously, to stop shaking because there's a child at home who needs them steady.

"What does she want," I asked, eventually, when he seemed able to hear the question.

"To see Lucas," he said. "She said that, several times. That she wants to know him. That she knows she has no right to ask, and she's asking anyway."

"Do you believe her?"

He was quiet for a long moment, looking down the darkening lane toward the lights of the house, where our son was almost certainly demanding a second helping of something he'd already been told was finished.

"I don't know what I believe yet," he said finally. "I believed she was dead for four years. I'm not in a hurry to believe anything else about her without proof."

He hadn't mentioned, and I didn't think to ask that night, whether she had come alone.

It was only much later, turning the day over and over the way you do with something that refuses to lie flat, that I remembered a detail he'd said in passing, almost as an afterthought, easy to miss beneath everything else. That there had been a car in the café car park with someone waiting in it the whole time, engine running, never once getting out. Julien hadn't thought it worth mentioning properly.

I would think about it a great deal, before very long.