“Layla would love this,” Matt said. And he thought, She really would. She wouldn’t dismiss it or be impatient with it. She’d be delighted. Tante Colette was right. Layla had embraced everything he showed her, everything about his land, his family, himself, as if all of it was exactly the nutrient-rich earth she needed, in order to bloom.
Hey. That was…an interesting way to think about it.
She needed him? In order to flourish?
It was probably utterly ridiculous to actually like the idea of being planting soil, but…he’d always been good at that. Solidity. Dirt. Growing things. It made it seem as if she needed him for exactly who he was.
“I do have something I think Layla would like,” Colette murmured, reaching into the folds of clothes. “A good thing to pass on to a great-granddaughter.”
“Is it something of Élise Dubois’s? You made her cry with those stories.”
“She’s got a soft heart.” Colette focused on the chest. “She might need someone else to take care of it for her.”
Matt smiled involuntarily. People rarely remembered this about him, but he was actually pretty good at taking care of soft, delicate things.
Colette glanced up at him, her smile a touch ironic but not in a mean way. “You like it? When she buries her head in your chest?”
“Yeah,” Matt said, embarrassed. It made him feel…strong. As if he could fix her problems just by existing. As if she trusted him with her weaknesses.
Colette shook her head, a little amused, a little rueful, and focused back on the chest. “I do have some things of Élise’s to pass on to her descendants.”
Wait—what? Descendants? Had she just used the plural?
“Humble things, really, that were precious to her. Sentimental value only. Remember, Élise’s father worked in our factories and her mother worked our fields, so hers wasn’t a family of means. She was the first in her family to become a schoolteacher, to ‘make it’, so she didn’t have the kind of accumulation of things and land the Rosiers did.”
“Layla will like them,” Matt said quietly. He knew that about her already. She respected what others offered her. She challenged his grandfather because his grandfather loved the challenge, and she bent her head over photos with Tante Colette, and when a man handed her a rose, she almost cried.
A man could trust a woman like that with what he had to offer. Himself.
It was funny, because she told this story about herself as the wanderer who was hard to hold, who didn’t want any demands on her, and it wasn’t even true. That story was more like her defense mechanism. Her response, maybe, to being the daughter of a father who had wandered off on her when she was two and a mother who had herself fled a war-torn country when she was nine with only what she and her parents could fit in a small suitcase. Hell, maybe her “I am a wandering minstrel” story was like the way he folded his arms and growled so people would quit the hell telling him he had a damn mushy heart.
Which he totally didn’t.
But Layla did. She cared, and she needed someone to hold her—to give her roots. Maybe she was almost starting to trust him for that job.
“But this is something from my side of the family.” Colette withdrew a pair of stockings from the chest—the kind of thing that would have been precious back in the war, when women had had to paint on fake stockings. She unrolled one of the stockings and shook it. Something metal slid out, followed by a chain that slithered down into her palm.
Matt gazed at it. The gold chain had curled on top of some kind of pendant. Through the chain, he could make out enamel on an oval about the size of a small coin. Enamel that seemed to depict a…his breath caught. “Tante Colette. Is that…the seal?” The family seal, the patriarchal seal, the symbol of power over his valley, of the head of the family. “J’y suis, j’y reste?”
“Niccolò didn’t put J’y suis, j’y reste on his seal,” Tante Colette said and slid the pendant into his palm.
“What?” Her words made so little sense that Matt couldn’t even look at the precious pendant yet. He had to stare at her to make sure she wasn’t finally going into dementia.
“Your grandfather really took to that motto, when we were fighting the Germans. Carved it on those cliffs. I am here and here I’ll stay. ‘You can’t budge me.’ But the only place Niccolò himself ever used it, that we know of, was here.”
She shook another stocking, and a gold ring slid into her palm. Real gold, but simple, no jewels, only a twining rose symbol. The wedding ring, Matt thought with a shock. That simple ring that must have been all Niccolò could afford, when he first married Laurianne. “Tante Colette, you did take all those heirlooms. Pépé was right.”