The Winemaker's Wife(103)

And then she was above the clouds, and Michel was there, looking just as he had on the day she married him all those years ago, when they still loved each other with innocent and open hearts, before the war and the world and the choices they made changed everything. “You’re here at last,” he said, coming toward her, washed in white light.

She was weightless, floating, but still, her heart was heavy with the guilt she had carried with her for decades. “Michel, I’m so sorry. For everything.”

“Oh, Inès, we were young and foolish, all of us. I forgave you long ago.”

Inès looked around for Céline, the woman who had replaced her, the woman who had always deserved the heart of Inès’s husband. Inès had imagined they were spending eternity together, but it was only Michel here waiting for her. She felt a surge of grief, a knot twisting inside her. “Michel, where is Céline?”

But he only shook his head in silence as he took her hand. As they walked together toward the rising sun, toward the light that welcomed them home, Inès wept, for Céline’s absence—the fact that she, too, wasn’t waiting to greet Inès—could only mean that Inès would never be forgiven.

But then, in the center of the welcoming light, she saw David, and he was somehow both the child she had raised and the adult he had become all at the same time. “Mom!” he cried, and she forgot everything else—her sins, her guilt, the world she’d finally left behind—and ran to him. He had been reunited with his father, waiting for her all this time.





thirty-five


JUNE 2019





LIV


It took Julien and Liv twenty minutes to get to Ville-Dommange, and when they finally pulled the car up outside the main building of the Maison Chauveau, an hour before the place would open to visitors, Liv spotted her grandmother sitting on a bench overlooking the rolling vineyards to the right of the main house. She was leaning into an old man with wispy white hair, who must have been Julien’s grandfather.

Liv and Julien jumped from the car at the same time and ran to the bench. Grandma Edith’s eyes were closed, and when Julien’s grandfather looked up, his eyes were red, his cheeks wet.

“She was a good woman,” he said to Liv. “She never believed it, but she really was.”

Liv looked from him to her grandmother, who was unnaturally still, a faint smile on her lips, and suddenly she understood what he was saying.

“No,” Liv whispered, kneeling beside her grandmother and grasping her hands, which were still so warm. “Grandma Edith, come back.” She could feel tears rolling down her face, and she choked on the sob in her throat. “Oh God, no.”

“My dear,” Samuel said, reaching for Liv, his touch gentle and soothing. “Do not cry for her. After all these years, she has finally found her peace.”

? ? ?

The following weeks went by in a blur. Grandma Edith was buried at a small cemetery on the south side of Ville-Dommange, just on the edge of the vineyards, with the name Edith Thierry engraved on her tombstone, the name Inès Chauveau beneath it just as prominently. Surely it would confuse a passerby or two, but after reading Grandma Edith’s notebook of stories—confessions, really—Liv understood that her grandmother had never really stopped being the naive girl from Lille who had married a man she hoped would give her the world. For all her years of trying, she hadn’t fully buried the ghost of Inès in the disguise of Edith.

Samuel spoke at her small memorial service, and in his words, Liv met a grandmother she had never known, a brave and sad woman who had sheltered refugees and fought Nazis in the forests of France, a woman who had found her way to America all alone to give her son a better life, a woman who had been nearly toppled by the force of her grief after her son’s death.

“She was a hero, though she never saw herself that way,” Samuel said to the crowd of a dozen mourners, most of them strangers to Liv. “But it is how I will always remember her, and I hope that all of you do, too. Especially you, her dear granddaughter, Olivia.” He smiled at Liv, and she covered her face with her hands. “She loved you so very much, even if she sometimes had a rather difficult way of showing it.”

A day after the funeral, Liv met with Samuel and Julien in their office and spent a day going over all the legal documents assigning ownership of the Maison Chauveau to her. There were accounts and investments she’d never known about that totaled more than twenty million dollars, and that was in addition to the millions tied up in the day-to-day operations of champagne production.

“You can do whatever you’d like, Liv,” Julien said, handing her a batch of papers to sign. “You can stay here and have a hand in the business, or you can go home to New York, and the Maison Chauveau will continue to be run by a trust controlled by this law firm, which is what has happened for the past seventy years. Either way, it is yours.”

“What do you think I should do?” she asked.

Julien held her gaze. “It is not my decision to make, Liv. But if you go, I hope you will allow me to visit you. I think I would miss you very much.”

“And if I stay?”

His expression softened. “If you stay, I think you would make me the happiest man in France.”

She smiled. “I’ll take that under advisement, Counselor.”