Why Now

"Come with me," Julien said, three days after the hallway conversation, over coffee he hadn't touched. "Not into the room. I'm not ready for that yet. But close by. I don't want to do this entirely alone again."

I understood the difference he was drawing, careful as everything he did, and I didn't push against the shape of it. Some door still wasn't mine to walk through first. But waiting somewhere near it, that much he was ready to let me do.

The café Camille had chosen sat on a corner near Beaune's old market square, the kind of place with steamed windows and a view of the street that made it easy to watch without being watched in return. Julien went in. I took a table at the café directly opposite, ordered something I had no intention of finishing, and angled myself so I could see through the glass without staring too obviously at the two figures already seated at a corner table inside.

There were three of them.

I hadn't expected that. Julien hadn't mentioned it either, which meant, I realised, that he hadn't known.

The man beside Camille sat with the particular ease of someone entirely comfortable being looked at, one arm draped along the back of the booth, a half-smile already arranged for Julien before he'd even reached the table. Even from across the street I could read the shape of the introduction happening, Camille's hand gesturing between them, the man rising slightly, extending a hand Julien took after a pause just long enough to register as a pause.

I didn't hear a word of it. I watched the shapes of it instead, the way you learn to read a conversation through glass, the tilt of a head, the too-quick laugh, the pause before a handshake that told you more than the handshake itself did. Camille looked smaller than I'd imagined her, in the strange way people always do once they stop being a name in someone else's story and become an actual body in a chair, hands folded on the table, hair pulled back plainly, nothing about her appearance suggesting the kind of woman capable of letting her own son believe her dead for four years. That, more than anything, unsettled me. I had built her, without meaning to, into something almost mythical over the past week, and the woman across the street was simply a person drinking coffee too fast, glancing at the door every few minutes like she was waiting for someone to change their mind and leave.

The man beside her sat with the particular ease of someone entirely comfortable being looked at, one arm draped along the back of the booth, a half-smile already arranged for Julien before he'd even reached the table. Even from across the street I could read the shape of the introduction happening, Camille's hand gesturing between them, the man rising slightly, extending a hand Julien took after a pause just long enough to register as a pause. He was better dressed than the occasion called for. I noticed that too, sitting there with my untouched coffee going cold, the small, useless observations a mind reaches for when it has nothing solid yet to hold onto. A café on a weekday afternoon didn't call for a jacket that well cut. I told myself it meant nothing. I kept watching anyway.

Something about the stranger's stillness while Julien and Camille spoke unsettled me before I could have said exactly why. He wasn't awkward, the way a new partner meeting an ex-husband for the first time might reasonably have been, all shifting weight and overcareful nodding. He looked, if anything, entirely at home, the way a man looks when he has already decided how a conversation is going to go before it starts.

***

Julien didn't say much on the drive back. He waited until we were parked outside the house, engine off, before he spoke at all.

"His name is Théo," he said. "Rousset. She's been with him almost two years. He came, she said, because he didn't want there to be any secrets between all of us going forward." A short, humourless breath. "As though secrets were the thing we'd been missing."

"What did she say? About why now, after everything?"

Julien was quiet for a moment, staring at the dark windows of the house, Lucas's silhouette faintly visible upstairs, still awake, still blessedly unaware.

"She said she thinks about him every day," he said. "Lucas. That leaving was the worst decision she ever made and she's spent years telling herself she didn't have the right to come back and disrupt whatever life he'd built without her. She said the article made her realise he was growing up without her ever having tried." He shook his head slowly. "She cried. It looked real, Ellie. I've known her a long time. I couldn't tell you if it was real or not, and that frightens me more than if I'd been certain either way."

"And him? Théo?"

"He was pleasant," Julien said, in the particular tone people use for a word they don't entirely trust. "Charming, even. Asked about the estate almost immediately, how large it was, how the harvest had gone this year, whether I intended to expand the vineyards or keep them at their current size. Ordinary conversation. The sort anyone might make."

"Did it feel ordinary?"

He turned to look at me properly then, and something in his face told me he'd been waiting for someone else to say the thing he hadn't wanted to say himself.

"No," he admitted. "It didn't. I couldn't tell you why. He said nothing wrong. He was polite, interested, appropriately careful around the subject of Lucas. But there was something underneath it, some sense that he already knew the answers before he asked the questions. I told myself I was being unfair. That any stranger stepping into a family this complicated would make me suspicious by default."

"Maybe you're not being unfair."

"Maybe not." He rubbed a hand over his face, tired in the particular way that had nothing to do with the hour. "Camille wants to see Lucas properly. Soon. She's asked that it be just the two of them at first, no Théo, which I suppose is meant to reassure me and mostly hasn't. I told her I needed time to prepare him. She didn't push, which surprised me. I expected her to push."

"What did you tell her about me?"

It was the question I'd been holding since the café window, and I watched it land somewhere behind his eyes, a small flicker of something that might have been guilt or might simply have been fatigue.

"Nothing yet," he said. "She doesn't know you exist. I didn't see the use in complicating an already difficult conversation before I had to."

I sat with that for a moment, the particular sting of being the thing left unmentioned, even for reasons that made a kind of sense.

"She'll find out eventually," I said. "Better it comes from you than from Lucas, in the middle of something else, the way he tells everyone everything."

"I know," Julien said quietly. "I'll tell her. I only wanted one hard conversation behind us before I started the next one."

Upstairs, Lucas's light finally went dark, and the two of us sat a while longer in the cooling car, neither of us in any particular hurry to go inside and pretend, for one more evening, that everything in that house was exactly as it had always been.

He was still awake when we came in, of course, some negotiated extra ten minutes he'd talked the babysitter into, and he met us at the top of the stairs in his pyjamas with the aggrieved dignity of a boy who felt he'd been kept out of an important meeting.

"Where did you go," he demanded.

"Grown-up things," Julien said. "Very boring. You didn't miss anything."

"You always say that."

"Because it's always true."

Lucas narrowed his eyes at both of us with the particular suspicion of a child who suspects, correctly, that he is being managed, but he was tired enough that the suspicion didn't survive contact with his own yawn, and he let Julien walk him back to bed without further protest. I stood at the bottom of the stairs a moment longer, listening to the low murmur of a bedtime story starting up above me, some ordinary, unremarkable ritual continuing exactly as it always had, in a house that had quietly, without his knowledge, become a great deal more complicated than the one he thought he lived in.