Luc and I were married the first Saturday in June, having decided that was time enough to let my family settle from the shock, although my father had still seemed a little dazed when he had walked me up the aisle, between the chairs in Claudine’s garden, and my mother, when she’d watched Denise set out the cake and cutlery, had asked no fewer than three times, “And who is she again?” as though the tangle of relationships was mystifying.

We had kept the guest list small—no aunts and uncles—so the day thus far had been an easy one to manage, though in honesty I knew that I’d remember little else beyond the look in Luc’s blue eyes as we’d exchanged our vows.

The bouquet went to Noah’s friend Michelle, who made a most impressive dive to catch it, ending with a grass stain on her frock to the resigned amusement of her mother, and preventing open warfare among Fabien’s three daughters.

They were clever lively girls and close in age, the eldest being thirteen and the youngest just turned nine. The middle girl was very clearly on the spectrum like her father and like me, for having failed to catch my bouquet she at first turned gloomy, blaming her own clumsiness and uselessness, until her sisters rallied round to cheer her with a hunt for spiders in the garden.

“Spiders,” said her mother to my cousin, “are her current special interest.”

“Oh, I know,” said Jacqui, picking up on something in the other woman’s tone that I had evidently missed. “With Sara, it was snakes. We had to visit them at zoos. I had to pet one.”

I sat patiently through all of this till Fabien’s wife went across to supervise her daughters. With indulgence I remarked to Jacqui, “You might try not talking as though I weren’t here.”

Smiling, she said, “Sorry. I suppose I’ve just got used to it, having you so far away.”

“Not so far.” She had kept popping over at weekends as though to be certain I hadn’t made some huge mistake, though her visits were less frequent now, which I took as a sign of approval.

She asked, “You’re still liking the job?”

“I am loving the job.”

“You’re not finding it lonely?”

I thought of the room I now worked in at Luc’s house—our house—with my desk and the chair and the second chair next to it where Noah sat after school and did homework. I said, “No. I’m not lonely.”

My cousin’s head turned and she looked at me, then she reached over and clasped her hand over mine, briefly. “I’m glad. I am glad for you, really.” She blinked very quickly and slid on her sunglasses even though we were in shade underneath the big chestnut trees. Looking away, she said, “Luc’s brother seems like a good man to work for.”

He was. He was brilliant. I said so to Jacqui and followed her gaze to where Fabien stood near his daughters, head stoically bent to my mother as she rattled on about something. I did love my mother, but she talked a lot.

Jacqui asked, “Should I rescue him, do you think?”

“He’s fine.” I turned my head to smile at her. “You don’t need to be managing things all the time. Relax.”

“It isn’t in my nature.” But she leaned back in her chair, to please me. “He doesn’t look much like his brother.”

“No.” Fabien looked more like Luc’s mother, I thought—the tall build and fairer hair. Luc had his mother’s blue eyes but in all other ways he was like a young clone of his father. I’d found myself several times watching his father and thinking how Luc’s hair would lighten like that and turn gray one day, and how I’d be there to watch it. I twisted the broad band of gold on my ring finger, liking the feel of it, finding it soothing.

My cousin asked, “What have you done with your husband?”

“He’s taken my father to see the Ducati. They’re bonding.”

In French from across the lawn, Noah called: “Sara? Michelle wants to know if the bouquet means she’ll be the next to get married.”

When I confirmed that was indeed the tradition, Michelle gave a shriek and the bouquet was promptly tossed upward again and kicked off a great game in the garden, all the children catching it and passing it as though it were a hot potato no one wanted to be left with, but when it came round to Fabien’s middle girl she caught it tightly and proudly and held it, not letting it go.

“There, you see?” I told Jacqui. “Things always work out as they’re meant to.”

“I suppose they do.” She was looking, I noticed, not at Fabien’s daughter, but at Alistair, who sat not far away from us, discussing something with Luc’s parents. “I never thought I’d see him so relaxed.”

“He’s like that all the time, here.”

In the five months he’d been living with Claudine he’d made a good start on his new book, having given us a moment of suspense at first when he’d first read the transcribed pages of the diary, all in private, on his own. Emerging from the study he had crossed to the salon and fixed his gaze on me, and then on Jacqui, and had said, “It isn’t what I’d thought it would be.”

Jacqui had said, “No, I—”

“It’s so far beyond my expectations,” he had cut her off. “I really…I can’t tell you how incredible this is.”

The names that had meant little to the rest of us when reading through the diary had been well-known names to Alistair, who’d sought to educate us all that evening in the throes of his excitement. “You see here, this Martin O’Connor who’s mentioned when Mary’s at Chatou? Well, he was with the Mine Adventurer’s Company, and he went down just after this to mine for silver in Provence. And Robinson, George Robinson, he set up with some other men to run some mines in Burgundy, and what they all were really doing was…”