“Exactly.”
“I could pitch working remotely, you mean. Work on the house in the mornings, and work for the festival in the afternoons. Only, Mirabelle has no internet.”
“Work at my house.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not? Come and go as you please. Just think about it while we finish our exercise. So, professional impact is serious, but we might have an option. As for monetary impact, what will this do to your finances? If it’s not too rude to ask.”
“I can’t afford to keep the house and be here every seven weeks. Can you imagine the flights? And if I fix it up to resell in the fall, I have to pay for renovations. I already have the thirty thousand-euro security deposit on my credit card. I don’t have a lot of room left.”
“So only do surface things,” he said. “Clean, paint, make it nice to resell, but no moving walls. France has arcane building rules anyway, which change fromdépartementtodépartement. After all, you only need to make more than one euro to be inprofit. And doing just enough will give you time to enjoy being in France.”
He made it sound doable. She eyed the boulangerie’s window on which was written:pains spéciaux, glaces, viennoiseries.
“And lastly, personal impact,” he said. “How will this affect you personally? You don’t have to say these things out loud. Your life is your own.”
Another thing her family would never have said. For them it was most often, think how your decisions affect your daughter. Your stagnant career. Your anemic pocketbook. Us (especially us).
“I don’t want to derail Sabine,” she said as they turned around and headed back up the hill. “I want her to choose her university and be on her way. And my brother—we’re close. He struggles with depression. I don’t want him to feel abandoned if I’m here the whole summer.” She shot Guillaume a glance. “I don’t want him to seem tragic—he’s not. It’s just—we have complicated parents, and he’s living with them at the moment. But he’ll do fine.” She hoped.
“So, given all we’ve discussed, what do you think?”
“I think … I’ll work a bit more at the house, then send my boss an email.”
She was terrified but maybe, this time, she did not have to be a woodchuck chucking wood. Maybe, for once, she was taking care of herself.
Sabine floated up the stairs to Mirabelle. After the slog of high school, she could now say she’d done one frivolous, impetuous thing and kissed a boy. Come Sunday, she and her mum would be gone, and she’d never have to see Aubin again.
She found Marlow in the tiny courtyard, picking up the broken shutters from outside the Maison Perdue kitchen window. She pitched in and helped carry them to the shed.
“How was sightseeing with Aubin?”
“Fine,” said Sabine.
“Just fine?”
“Yep. Nice, actually. I told him I’d check in with you. He’ll pick us up in an hour.” She found herself wanting that. To be beside him again.Weird.
They went inside and were completely taken aback to find a little boy, maybe five years old, with brown, moppish hair and rosy cheeks, at their kitchen table, eating the baguette with Bonne Maman jam from Madame Klein’s basket. He wore a Paris Saint-Germain soccer club sweatshirt that was so big it fit like a dress. His short legs swung back and forth from the fulcrum of his knobby knees.
“Who’s this?” said Sabine.
“No idea. He wasn’t here the last time I looked. I must’ve left the front door open.”
The boy shoved the whole hunk of baguette into his mouth. A dollop of jam fell onto his sweatshirt, and he licked it off.
“Bit Goldilocks and the Three Bears if you ask me,” said Sabine. “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Sabine.”
“Et je m’appelle Marlow.”
“Bonjour!”said the boy.
“Et tu t’appelles …”prompted Sabine.
“Yakiv.”
“D’où viens-tu, Yakiv?”asked Marlow. Where did he come from?
