“He doesn’t like me.”
“He doesn’t like anybody,” Cady pointed out.
“True, but hereallydoesn’t like me.”
“Why not?”
He gave her a look. “You’re very direct.”
“Sorry. No guiles.”
There was a long pause as they drove past acres of vineyards and olive orchards. Cady rolled down her window and inhaled deeply of wild thyme and rosemary.
“In the summer there are fields here of sunflowers, strawberries, and cherries,” Jean-Paul said. “And soon that whole hill, there, will be covered with almond blossoms.”
“It’s a lovely region,” Cady said. “So different from Paris. I suppose that’s why people speak so fondly of Provence.”
Jean-Paul nodded. After another long silence, he said, “As I told you, there’s a long-standing rift in the family. Yves and Josephine Clement lived at Château Clement from the turn of the twentieth century until after World War I. They had one son, Marc-Antoine.”
“Marc-Antoine was Fabrice’s father, right?”
He nodded. “Yves inherited the estate from his own father, which meant Yves’s two brothers—not to mention his three sisters—did not.”
“It doesn’t seem fair that they wouldn’t get anything.”
“It is not fair, of course. But it is necessary. Otherwise a large estate would be divided up among the children, and then their children....”
“Until there’s no estate left.”
“Exactly. The right of primogeniture, under which the firstborn inherits the family property, isn’t fair, but it makes a certain amount of sense to property holders—not just the aristocracy, but wealthy farmers as well.”
“So that’s what caused the rift? They were jealous of Yves? It wasn’t his fault he was the firstborn.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“The woman at the grocery store said something about rumors concerning Josephine...?”
He swore under his breath and shook his head. “That is the problem with living in a small town.”
“She didn’t tell me what the rumorswere,” Cady added. “Just that there were some.”
“That’s in the past, long gone.”
“Probably easy to say that, since you’re the next in line to inherit the château.”
“Actually it goes first to my mother, but she doesn’t want it. I’ll share any proceeds with the family. There’s no one else in my generation who wants to take it on, anyway. It’s part of a bygone way of life, in some ways more burden than gift.”
“So, what were the rumors?”
“You are very curious about my family. I thought you were looking for a carousel.”
“I am. I just... I never knew my family, and I find convoluted intergenerational stories fascinating.”
“From my perspective, they’re less fascinating than tedious. But how is it that you never knew your family?”
“I’m an orphan,” Cady said. The punch to her gut was still there, and she supposed it always would be. But she forced herself to say the unvarnished truth: no softening, no beating around the bush. She was an orphan with no family. Still, she didn’t look at Jean-Paul at that moment, preferring to be spared the sympathy or morbid curiosity she so often saw in people’s eyes when she told them about her upbringing.
“You were raised in an orphanage?”
