Julien Retreats

He stopped coming to bed at the same time as me.

It happened so gradually that I couldn't have said which night it started. First it was twenty minutes, a last email, a call to Dubois that ran over. Then an hour. Then I began waking at two in the morning to find the other side of the bed cool and flat, and a line of light under the study door at the end of the hall.

I didn't go in. I stood outside it once, my hand almost on the handle, and heard the soft, repetitive sound of pages turning, and went back to bed.

***

By February, the weekends with Camille had settled into a pattern that everyone could survive. She arrived at ten. She and Lucas spent the day together, in the garden when the weather allowed, at the kitchen table when it didn't, with either Julien or me hovering within earshot like a lifeguard at a pool. She left at five. Théo waited in the car at the end of the lane and never once came to the door.

It was going well. That was the maddening part. Lucas adored her. Camille was careful and patient and unfailingly punctual, and Dubois reported that her lawyer had acknowledged the staged arrangement without complaint. Everyone behaved as though the worst had been successfully averted.

Julien behaved as though it hadn't.

He rose before dawn and drove to the Domaine, and came home after dark smelling of cold earth and woodsmoke. When he was in the house he was present in the way a man is present at a funeral, courteous and attentive and somewhere else. He answered my questions fully and volunteered nothing. He kissed me goodnight on the forehead. He stopped, without a word of explanation, reaching for my hand under the table at dinner.

I'm not a woman who has ever needed constant reassurance. It was one of the things I'd been proudest of, in the years I'd spent being told I was incomplete. But I had spent a year learning the particular shape of his attention, the unhurried weight of it, and I knew when it was missing the way you know a step is missing from a staircase in the dark.

***

"Are you sleeping in the study?" I asked, on a Tuesday, in the kitchen, while he was packing his bag for the vineyards.

He didn't look up. "I fall asleep over the accounts. I don't want to wake you."

"You wouldn't wake me."

"I snore, apparently, when I'm tired."

"You don't snore."

A very small pause. "Then I'm restless. I'd rather not keep you up."

It was a perfectly reasonable answer. It was composed, gentle, entirely logical, and I recognised it immediately for what it was, which was a door being closed politely from the other side.

"Julien." I set down my cup. "Talk to me."

"About what?"

"About any of it. About her. About the letter and the hearing and the fact that you haven't slept in our bed for nine days."

He zipped the bag. His hands were very steady.

"There's nothing to say that I haven't said," he said. "Dubois is handling it. The weekends are working. I'm fine."

"You're not fine."

"I'm managing." He looked up then, finally, and his face was so tired and so carefully held that I almost let it go. "Ellie, I need you to trust that I'm managing. I can't hold the conversation about it as well as the thing itself. Not yet."

"I'm not asking you to hold it alone. I'm asking you to let me hold some of it."

Something moved behind his eyes, brief and unguarded, and I thought for one breath that he would put the bag down. Then he reached out and touched my cheek with two fingers, lightly, the way you might touch a photograph.

"Not yet," he said again, and went to work.

***

I had a call that afternoon with my manager in London, which I took at the kitchen table with my laptop propped against the fruit bowl. Since declining Copenhagen, I'd negotiated something close to a compromise, remote work for most of the year and short trips to the office when needed, and it had been functioning smoothly. Today it was a polite inquiry about when I might next be physically present.

"No pressure at all," Hannah said. "It's only that the team's been asking. You've been away since December."

"I know. I'm sorry. It's a family situation."

"Whose family?"

I opened my mouth and found that I didn't know how to answer. Mine was a four-hour flight away and asking, pleasantly, when I'd be home. His was upstairs in a bath, singing about dinosaurs, and nobody had asked me to be part of it. I had simply stayed.

"It's complicated," I said. "I'll be back in March. I'll book something."

"Lovely." A pause, and then, gently, "Ellie, are you alright? You seem a bit far away."

"Just tired."

I closed the laptop and sat very still, listening to the water running upstairs and Lucas's high, tuneless voice. I thought of the aunt who'd once asked me when I was going to bring someone home. It struck me that I had done exactly that, and that the someone I'd brought had a house, a child, a former wife who wasn't dead, and no idea how to let me in. I had arrived at the thing I'd run away from my family to avoid. A life arranged around other people's expectations, except that nobody was expecting anything of me at all. I wasn't being measured. I was simply being allowed to wait.

***

Lucas found me there some time later, damp-haired and pink from the bath, wrapped in a towel that trailed behind him like a cape.

"Why are you sad?" he asked, with the clinical interest he brought to everything.

"I'm not sad. I'm thinking."

"Your face is doing the sad thing." He climbed onto the chair beside me and examined my expression at close range. "Is it because Papa is grumpy?"

"Papa isn't grumpy."

"He is," Lucas said, with total certainty. "He forgot the marshmallows again."

I laughed, and then, to my horror, something behind my eyes gave a small, hot lurch, and I had to press my lips together and look at the ceiling.

Lucas, who missed nothing, patted my arm with great solemnity. "It's okay," he said. "Maman says grown-ups get cross when they're worried. It doesn't mean they don't like you."

"Does she?"

"She said it about Papa. She said he's not cross with us. He's cross with the situation." He pronounced the last word carefully, like a piece of borrowed jewellery. "What's a situation?"

"It's," I said, and stopped, and tried again. "It's when a lot of hard things happen at once, and nobody knows what to do about them yet."

Lucas thought about this.

"Like the snow," he said.

"A bit like the snow."

"But snow stops," he pointed out. "Eventually."

"Yes," I said. "Eventually."

He nodded, satisfied, and slid down from the chair to go in search of pyjamas. I sat on in the kitchen with the cold tea and the shut laptop, thinking that a seven-year-old had just given me the only honest comfort I'd been offered in nine days, and that it had come from a child who'd been told, in the last two months, that his mother was alive, that his father was worried, and that none of it was his fault.

He was coping better than any of the adults around him.

That night I heard the study door close at midnight. I lay in the dark and counted, and it was past three before I stopped listening for it to open.