“Rémy was early.” She tried to breathe in the pastoral beauty below, the quaint medieval village above, and the swoonworthy French prince before her, but it was useless. “I’m in trouble.”
“The meeting did not go well?”
“That’s an understatement. I claimed the house to avoid losing my thirty thousand-euro security deposit but turns out I can’t leave it vacant for over seven weeks or there’s a ten thousand-euro penalty! If I leave now, I’ll be breaking that rule. And there are other conditions which activate a penalty, too. I could putthe house up for sale in September, but it hasn’t been bought by anyone else in the state it’s in so far. Who’s to say it would sell?”
“So what do you think?”
Marlow had a weak track record with big decisions—not including having Sabine. That had been the best decision ever. Once, when she’d complained to Gustavo about not having made her feature, he’d challenged her to take festival equipment home over the weekend and shoot a scene. A location. Some B roll. Anything. And she hadn’t. She’d just stared out the window all weekend, feeling terrible. Staring out the window now wasn’t an option.
“I think I have to ask for the summer off. I’m technically contract, but I’ve worked at the festival for years. It’ll probably torpedo my efforts to get my boss’s old job—I’m waiting on the interview as we speak—and Oscar will likely flip—and I have no idea how I’ll afford to stay—and there are a billion things to do before Sabine starts university in the fall—but fixing up Maison Perdue means I might, just might, be able to resell it in the fall. So I have to try.”
“I agree with this plan,” said Guillaume.
“You do?”
“In my business, with a new idea, we do the Five Factor Test. We look at time, cost, professional impact, monetary impact, and personal impact. We consult our vision statement and goal setting. And only when we have thought through all these things do we make a decision.”
“The Five Factor Test? I’m lucky if I’m even one step ahead of whatever I’m doing.”
“That may be,” he said. “But of everyone in the world, you are the expert of you.”
No one had ever said that to her before, and certainly not in a to-die-for French accent. She squinted at him. The sunlight framed his profile just so.
“Shall we walk?” he asked. “We can talk about this. Perhaps it would help.”
They walked through the streets of Nenier. “Let’s try this exercise,” said Guillaume. “One: there is time to consider. You mention you are on contract, not full-time. I suspect, then, you are not paid for this time off?”
Marlow shook her head. “That’s what applying for Oscar’s job is about.”
“So time will be a factor,” said Guillaume. “Two: cost. You have already paid for your accommodations here, such as they are. And please know that you can absolutely stay at my house if that is more comfortable … which I suspect it might be.”
“That is a lovely offer,” said Marlow, “but if we can get the electricity going and the water running, I think Sabine and I could maybe stay in Mirabelle.” She didn’t want to impose on him, and she couldn’t afford a hotel all summer, that was for sure.
“Of course, staying in your house would be best,” said Guillaume, “although you are always welcome if there are emergencies, or you cannot stand the house one more minute. As for professional impact, what will this do to your relationship with your boss?”
“It won’t be good. He gets me to do his work, he’s a self-involved ass, he’s a sycophant, and for the most part he doesn’t like me, which offends me even if I don’t like him either. So, basically, things couldn’t get much worse.”
Was all that true? She hadn’t done a mile-high evaluation of her job in a long time. To be fair, it wasn’t terrible. It was just mediocre. And wasn’t that what Noah had been getting on her case about? How she’d settled into mediocrity, and she wasn’t even forty?
“Do you like it at your office?”
“Ish,” she said, standing on her tiptoes to look over a gate into someone’s little garden.
“What is this ‘ish’?”
“It means sort of. I don’t love it or hate it. I hope to move up sometime soon.”
“Will staying here this summer ruin your chances to do that?” he asked.
“A hundred percent. Oscar will never give me a recommendation if I do that. It’s a definite Emperor with No Clothes situation. I’ve been covering for him for years now. He wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“No wonder he’d be upset,” said Guillaume.
“Yes. I did not plan this well. In fact, I didn’t plan it at all.”
“So you cannot abandon your job, or you’ll be fired. You cannot go back to Canada and abandon the house and return in September, or you’ll be fined. What is the third way?”
“Do both?”
