“But you had to give up being a doctor.”
“Until I can afford to pass my medical exams here, this dream is not dead. It is just napping. Also, you have a daughter who will change the world. You have spent the summer in France. You have slept with two not-so-bad men.”
They burst out laughing at that.
“What is the funny?” asked Yakiv, eyeing them from under his cardboard helmet. He’d learned bits of English from Marlow over the summer.
“Nothing,” said Marlow. “Your mum made a joke.” Yakiv went back to slaying foes.
“OK, not a complete disaster,” said Marlow. “But what will I do about the taxes? No one’s going to buy the house with that on the books. I can’t afford to keep it, and I can’t afford to sell it.”
Lali shrugged. “We also have back taxes. They sit on our account, but they are not an emergency because we don’t want to sell the house. Luc, too. Madame Belleville has back taxes, and they must be expensive—look at the size of her house. Rémy makes noise sometimes, but if she forced the issue, there would be no one left in Mirabelle. Her program would be a failure.”
Marlow nibbled on flaky quiche crust. “I’ll miss this when we go back to Toronto.”
“It’s amazing you will miss that and not the very, very good sex.”
“Lali!”
“You told me it was very, very good! Am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong.” They laughed again.
“What is the funny?!” demanded Yakiv, now exasperated.
“If I could keep the house,” said Marlow, “be debt-free, earn my living here, and sleep with both men with no consequences whatsoever, I would totally stay.”
“I love your ambition.”
“Although sex with two men,” said Marlow. “So many sleepless nights.”
“I will make you food to keep up your energy. And I will live your dream by hearing your stories. Do you think you might stay?”
Marlow gazed at the cows in the valley, lazily swishing their tails. “I don’t know.”
“When you picture going back to Toronto, are you happy?”
Marlow shook her head. “I’ve felt more alive and interested here than I have in a long time. I feel somehow part of Mirabelle. Back in Toronto, I have friends and colleagues, I have my brother, and my parents—but here, even in such a short time, I feel like I belong. And I can make a difference. I know it’s corny.”
“Corny? As in the food?”
“No,” said Marlow, chuckling, “as in sentimental. I don’t want to perpetuate the cycle that’s happened with these tiny towns. And I don’t want to abandon you.”
They watched Yakiv, standing on a rock, holding his now somewhat droopy cardboard sword to the sky in a valiant knight stance. So certain of himself. So proud.
“So, what will you do?” asked Lali.
Sabine was putting leftover lunch from the trip home into the fridge when her mum came in.
“Hey,” she said, hoping the moment didn’t explode.
“Hey,” said Marlow.
“What’s up around here?”
“Ruth didn’t buy the house in the end, so I still own it—and I now have a twenty-thousand-euro back-tax problem. Tell you more later, but yeah. You?”
“I’m really sorry,” said Sabine, trying to figure out what part of Paris to share in return. She hated this version of them—the lying, keeping stuff from each other.
