Chapter 15: Solène's Wound

The beach below the house was empty at six, and the light had gone the color of weak tea.

Solène stood at the waterline in a camel coat with her arms folded.

She had not slept either, and her hair was not perfect for the first time since I had known her.

I stopped ten feet away on the packed sand.

"You came," she said, in English.

"You asked me alone."

"I wasn't sure you would."

"I wasn't sure either."

She looked out at the water for a while. A gull came down near her feet and went away again.

"I want to say something," she said, "and I would like you not to interrupt me."

"Then say it in French," I said. "It's the only language you've ever been honest in."

Something almost like humor crossed her face.

"D'accord," she said.

She switched, and the words came easier in her own tongue.

"Eight years ago, in Lyon, in my mother's house, Preston told me he would marry me."

"We were twenty-five. He had a ring picked out, and I had told my mother."

I said nothing.

"He went home to Boston for a month."

"He came back with a photograph of a girl holding a spoon in a restaurant kitchen, and he told me he was sorry."

She laughed once, dry.

"He said he was sorry. In front of my mother, and my father, at my own table."

"I didn't know that," I said.

"No. He doesn't tell you the ugly things. He tells people the ugly things happened to him."

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