“Oh, God.” Layla cried harder.
Matt made a little rumble and pulled her closer, so that her face was pressed against his chest.
“Your grandfather and I,” Colette said to Matt, “we took a lot of risks. We killed people. We saved people. And if we survived, it wasn’t always because we were as smart and wily as we thought we were. Sometimes it was the tiny thing someone did to help us, the shepherd who let his flock spill into the path of a car full of SS who might, if they had been five minutes faster on the road, come upon us. The man who spotted a message that had fallen out of someone’s pocket and used it to roll a cigarette and smoke it while he told the police he hadn’t seen any sign of anyone. Or that tiny, tiny thing—a cyanide capsule that a mother took, abandoning her right to see her own child grow up because it was the only way she could save all those other kids whose parents weren’t going to see them grow up either.”
Layla fisted both hands into Matt’s T-shirt and sobbed.
“When you’re as old as I am,” Colette said. “You start giving a lot of thought to what parts of your life you want to leave to whom. I thought Élise’s great-grandchild deserved something from me. If she hadn’t done what she did, we wouldn’t have that valley. We wouldn’t even have lived long enough for your grandfather to have those five sons of his, of whom he’s so proud. We adopted her son and tried to raise him, but we never really managed to heal him from the war and the loss of his parents, and he ran away when he was sixteen. We tried for him, and we failed. But I think we can share a little bit of this valley with his descendants. My adoptive great-grandchild, if you will.” She inclined her head to Layla.
Under her cheek and clinging fists, Matt’s chest lifted and fell in a great sigh. His arms tightened on Layla. But he didn’t say anything.
“Besides, Matthieu, you can’t be a valley,” Colette said, with a quiet firmness, as if she’d said that the Earth was not the center of the universe. “You’ve got to be bigger than that. There are more ways of growing bigger than a valley than escaping from it. One way might be to crack it open, so that even while you’re here, it has room to let the whole world in.”
Layla lifted her head enough to check Matt’s expression. His jaw was set, his gaze locked with his great aunt’s. She peeked at Colette Delatour, warily, afraid of how much learning more of her family history might hurt.
Colette held Matt’s gaze, lifting her two hands closed together in a capsule of age-spotted wrinkles. “Kind of like, oh, a heart,” she said. “When you do this.” She spread her fingers and let her palms follow, until those tightly-clasped hands were wide open, free to move through the whole world. Then she smoothed them over her skirt and rose.
Matt stared after her for a moment before he lifted a hand to sink it into Layla’s hair. “Sorry about that,” he murmured to the top of Layla’s head. “I forgot to warn you that my aunt has no idea of her own strength.”
Colette gave them a curious, perplexed look as she stood sideways by the pot, stirring it. “She’s as soft-hearted as you are,” she told Matt, as if hearts that soft were an intriguing mystery to her.
Matt stiffened. “I’m not soft-hearted.”
“Oh, that’s right.” Colette ladled the soup into bowls. “I don’t know why I keep forgetting that.” She carried the bowls to the table to set before them. “Although I’m not sure why you worry about it so much. I thought I was just telling you how soft hearts can be great strength.”
Chapter 12
Matt scraped mortar over the crack in the wall, that steady, reassuring scent of cement and earth and gravel mixing with the rosemary that brushed his arms and the lemon thyme he tried to crush as little as possible under his feet while he worked.
At the weatherworn picnic table—he needed to sand that table down and re-stain it—the two women sat over more photo albums from when Tante Colette was young, Layla touching a finger to a page here and there, asking questions. Her exuberantly curly head brushed Tante Colette’s shoulder as she bent, her expression giving every evidence of fascination in an old woman’s stories.
It twisted his stomach up, how nice she was. This strange, giddy, frantic feeling, like that time he was in the school play when he was nine. He’d been so excited to play the big, bad monster instead of the idiot prince—he had, he really had, it was a much funner role—and then he’d looked out from the wings to find what seemed like thousands of faces staring and Raoul and Lucien had had to grab his arms and shove him to get him to go on.