I will not cook. I will not read her stories. I do not live here.

This is Nice, and the peak of Mont Boron looks down on me. The relentless gradient makes walking hard work.

I check my watch. I have time, and I must keep reminding myself.

This morning, I spoke to my daughter, Aurélie. She lives here with her father. She knew about the van and asked if I was staying. My answer did not reassure her. It had a beginning and an end. I will stay until she is settled at school. My conscience requires it.

Again, my hands will not calm themselves. I pause to rub them and catch my breath.

I must continue.

I have an appointment to keep.

-=- 62 -=-

Hélène's gallery is an expanse of glass, three white walls and a grey slate floor. A scent of jasmine and vanilla soothes me, and I am grateful. I need this money for winter, or I must return to Paris.

“Elodie! Someone has been outside a lot.”

Her arms are extended, and we greet each other cheek to cheek.

We are similar ages, but worlds apart. She knew me as the dispossessed wife, and my timid early works. Divorcing her husband, she established a new life here. Dressed in pressed linen, with a pencil in her hair, she carries herself with an air of confidence I admire.

“You look radiant, too, Hélène.”

“And the van. You are still being brave?”

“It’s a harsh critic. Temperamental at times.”

She smiles, and briefly, I am the woman who drove into Nice yesterday.

We talk as friends, and she asks about my travels. I do not make a speech.

Hélène lays out my paintings on the long table and does not hurry. They are all there, from the Luberon ochres to the Le Brusc turquoise. Her eyes do not linger on the orchard sketch I should have burned. She does not mention it. I feel the heat in my face anyway. She does not hurry through the Camargue. At Collioure, she lingers and peers up at me through the top of her glasses.

“You tried to master this palette?” she asks.

I fumble my smile. “You can decide that.”

She rummages and pulls it out. I swore it was in another folio. My stomach lurches.

Manon sits on the coastal wall with her knees drawn up, dreamy-eyed because we spent all morning in bed.

“This.” She points at it. “This has a pulse and life. The colours are magnificent.”

I nod, and wring my hands.  

I should take that picture back. It is not for sale. But I will have to explain why, and… and…

I feel ashamed.

“I’ll take the Collioure set.” She taps at the picture of Manon. “And this one especially.”

Motionless, I do nothing.

“Bravo, Elodie. The Camargue is wonderfully observed. I will take those, and the Luberon, too, if you can spare them. The others are good, excellent in fact, but I cannot hold so much stock.”

She names a figure, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes,” I reply, too quickly.

I sign the invoice, and initial her green cloth book at the right page. My hand is steady. Of course it is.

I watch as Manon goes into a drawer that smells of tissue and old glue. Strangers will stand in front of her on one of these white walls and decide if she matches their settee.

The perforated paper tears, and she hands it to me.

I glance at the numbers and put it into my pocket. I keep my hand there to quieten it for a moment.

“Thank you.”

“You were so reserved back then,” Hélène adds, kindly. “I am glad you are less so.”

“I have my moments.” I force the correct smile.

Outside, around the corner, I tremble and sit on a step in the shade. I sold the proof that I had been brave, and I was glad of the price. I have money in the bank. I can be near Aurélie for the whole term.

My hands are flat and pressed together. I hold them to my lips in relief.

Or as the penitent do at the chapel in Avignon.

I move my hands, unsure where to put them. The careful woman did not leave in Florac. She stowed away with me to Nice. I stand up, and my legs feel weak, but I walk slowly, carrying my folios.

Ahead, where Rue Droite meets the sunlight, a man waits to cross.

I notice his shoulders and their particulars. I stop suddenly. He is the right height and has the right muscular breadth. My heart leaps at the way he holds himself, inconvenienced by having to wait. His dark hair is a little longer than neat. He wears a shirt in his favourite colour.

Martin.

My folios are heavy. I set them down against a tall shop window to gather my composure.

The man turns, glancing at the traffic. His mouth is too young, and his eyes are wrong. He is a stranger with a borrowed outline.

I look at the empty corner where he was, and then at the dark shop glass. In my reflection, I look back with an expression. I am back in the family home, still married. Composed, and about to say I am fine.

I look away from the lie.

I pick up my folios and continue.

-=- 63 -=-

I lock the van door and roll my shoulders, glad to lose their burden. I see a café that does not care who sits in it. Taking a table, I sit close to the corner wall and order a coffee.

The cup arrives, and I hold it so my hands are occupied.

Martin, and not Martin, stood at a street corner. I am still shaken.

It is years after our kiss at Sacré-Cœur, when loving Martin was easy. I wore his engagement ring with pride. We lived together with that smug contentment of two people who fitted perfectly together. I finished his sentences; I let him finish mine.

It was late that evening. We ate dubious food and drank too much wine with one of his friends. He told stories badly, but he was kind and thoughtful. We walked home, my hand clutched Martin’s arm. Paris was illuminated at her best for a Saturday night, and I had to stop and kiss him to celebrate how alive I felt.

The key zipped into the lock, and he bundled me in. Our apartment trapped the summer heat. The lounge window remained open onto a courtyard that collected the smells of cooking dinners.

In the moonlight, Martin spun me around and claimed me. I melted. His mouth opened mine, and I whimpered with a need I concealed all night. It was one of those nights when I looked at him, and my panties were wet. His hand was in my hair, tipping my head back so he could kiss my neck. A rush of heat washed through me. I laughed because it was the only thing standing between me and dragging him down onto the hallway floor.

“At least let me put the keys down.”

“I can’t wait,” he replied, against my mouth. “It would take too long.”

The keys hit the floor.

He had my dress at my waist before we reached the table. I fumbled two shirt buttons open and gave up. I pulled hard, sending them pinging to the floor.

His lips on my neck made another whimper escape. He lifted me onto the table. The wood was cool through the back of my dress, then against my bare ass when he shoved the fabric up. I hooked a heel behind his thigh and drew him in hard enough to make him brace against me. He dragged my underwear aside and pushed two fingers into me. I was soaked, from the kiss, from the evening, just because I always needed him. The stretch made me moan.

“Fuck…” I gasped, “I needed you in me all night. That casserole he served was terrible.”

Martin snorted. “It was ambitious.”

He twisted his fingers inside me. “Fuck!”

“Eat me instead,” I commanded.

He went to his knees. He knew me. That is the fact I have spent years trying to unlearn. He knew all those intimate details. He flattened his tongue against my clit and held my hips so I could not escape. He sucked. He used the edge of his teeth just enough to make my thighs jump. Two crooked fingers inside found that swollen place, and he goaded it until I could not speak. He showed no mercy while his tongue made me sing.

One hand held his hair. The other gripped the table's edge. When I came, it tore through me with frantic cries. I heard myself. The courtyard, through an open window, heard us. Plates paused from being stacked. France Musique carried on playing a waltz. None of it reached me. I was clinging to him and the table, still shaking.

I pulled him up by his ruined shirt.

“Inside me. Now,” I growled. “I have been polite all evening.”

“You have not been polite a day in your life.”

“Stop flattering me and do it.”

He shoved his trousers down and pushed into me in one slow, complete stroke.

The sound I made was the relief I craved, loud, and I knew it carried. I did not care. He was thick enough to steal my breath. He held still because he liked to feel me take him and the wet, hot friction. He enjoyed how my cunt had to open and adapt. I liked that he liked it. We were vain about each other in this useful way. I locked my legs around him and pulled him deeper still, until there was no argument left in either of us. I was full. I was trembling. I wanted him meaner still.

“Look at me,” he said.

I did.

He looked at me like I was the meaning of his life. I gave him the same look.

“Fuck me,” I demanded.

He thrust hard, halting my breath.

I wanted him to ruin me, and I wanted to ruin him back. This was our spontaneous intensity; tomorrow was for hugs and tender kisses.

He did me hard enough that the table began to walk toward the wall. He found the place that unravelled me, and pounded at me long enough to make me swear. My noises were obscene, wet and audible.

“Harder,” I hissed.

He gave it to me. My nails went through his shirt into his back. He went at me as if he rehearsed this during dinner.

“The chair,” I managed.

“If we break it,” he panted, “Madame will have her excuse. She hates us.”

He pushed himself deep inside me.

“Fuck Madame,” I groaned.

“Kinky.”

He did not slow. I knew he would fuck her just to please me. I pushed back firmly, because I would watch and enjoy every minute of it.

We did not reach the chair.

He turned me and took me from behind against the window, one hand flat on the glass to the courtyard. I peered down to see a lit kitchen on the ground floor. I could see a figure in the window below. He kicked my feet wider and drove up into me at an angle that made my mouth slack. I was so wet it ran down my thigh.

“Not so hard,” I pleaded. “There's a woman down there.”

My voice faltered into a groan.

He went deeper. “So?”

“Don't do...” I whimpered. “Oh fuck. There. Martin. There.”

He reached around and used his fingers on my clit in time with his hips. Rough, precise, it matched the drive of him. I came hard with my forehead on my wrist and his name in my mouth. I shouted it without realising, and my legs shook until standing felt precarious.

Martin did not stop.

He kept moving through it, slower, deeper, crueller, until I was nothing but ragged gasps that marked the glass. I pushed back because I could not bear to stop.

“Take me to bed.” He fucked the words out of me. “Or I will fall through the window.”

I turned and pulled him close. My lips smothered his, my tongue deep in his mouth. Holding his soaked erection, I controlled him until we made it to the mattress. I pushed him onto his back and climbed on top of him while he sat. With one drop of my hips, I watched his mouth open. I suffocated him with a deep, intense kiss. I took him deep to the edge of me. I rode him without kindness or shame.

One hand clasped the back of his neck, the other rested on his chest. My engagement ring caught the cheap lamp and threw a small spark. The room filled with the wet slap of us.

I would not let him come until he said please. I wanted him to feel owned. I wanted to feel owned. I ground down on him with that snaking twist he could never endure. I did not ease from it.

“Please, Elodie.”

“You always ask so nicely.”

Quick hips delivered my mercy. I watched his face change. I told him that I loved him; he said it back instantly. He held my face while I moved. Our eyes never left each other. I wanted us to go together, and the thought alone brought a potent release. I shook and bit my lower lip to stop it leaking into the courtyard.

He followed with his hand clasping my waist, dragging me onto him. When he did, it came from the deep and boomed through me as a sound no other man made. So primal, wanton, and I kept him there. I would not let him leave until the last of it had shuddered through us. I felt every pulse as my aftershocks took him for more.

We stayed locked, breathing into each other's mouths, wrecked and grinning.

I thought that would be the night.

It was not.

-=- 64 -=-

My body says yes. My mind is determined and fights. I stare at the cup and the deep, dark black liquid. Around me, life continues in this tiny slice of Nice. Last week, I thought this place was a mere date in the diary. I thought I could walk into this city as the woman I rediscovered.

I gaze at my hands. I have worn the rings from two men.

My mind objects, but I can see the light in Martin’s eyes. I put that there. My ex-husband never had it.

I thought it would never go out. I was not careful. I did not know how to be.

I did not want to be.

My hands begin to shake again.

A silence settled over us in those fretful weeks. Martin stopped finishing my sentences and his own. He sat in the chair by the window, looking out at the courtyard as if it riddled an impossible question.

He was gentle. That made it much worse.

I cooked. I put my hand on the back of his neck. I asked about work in that light tone that used to open him up. He gave me answers and all the right words, but with no soul in them.

One evening I sat with him at the window. I needed to ask the question I had been avoiding for days.

“Martin. Name a date.”

He turned his head slowly to face me. “A date?”

“For our wedding.”

What started as a breezy question slowly chilled me. Then frost, until I felt nothing but ice.

“Martin?”

He looked blank-faced at me. “I can't.”

“You can. It is a word and a number. October. January. I do not care if it rains.”

Nothing.

“Martin, look at me.”

He did.

That light was not there. Not dimmed. Not tired. He was the earnest man who was shy and wanted to kiss me so much. He conquered his fear of rejection and told me he loved me. My bold, brave man proposed with a confident romantic gesture. I knew I would have a dazzling, happy life with him.

Gone.

“Talk to me, Martin. Say anything so I know it’s you in there.”

He shook his head once.

“I can't,” he whispered. “I can't see it.”

“See what?”

He looked through me. “Any of it.”

I took his hand. He let me take it. It was warm, limp flesh.

“Please.” I never liked saying that word. I used it anyway.

He said my name as if it were a place he used to live.

“I can't.”

I pulled at the ring. It came off easily. It had always been a little loose. I threw it. Not far. A short, performative throw, and it tinkled on the parquet floor. He looked at it and did not flinch. I watched his dark eyes return to my fury.

“If you cannot name a date, name the end. Do not leave me in this halfway house where I love a ghost.”

He said nothing.

I said worse things. I accused him of cowardice. I accused him of his motives for our threesome after that night beyond the blue door. That was a lie. I needed him to fight me. I needed to know he cared. He sat there and took it in silence.

When I had no anger left, I stood in the bedroom doorway and looked back.

He was still in the chair, gazing out to the dark courtyard.

-=- 65 -=-

The next morning, I assumed he had gone to work after sleeping on the settee. I picked up his ring and put it back on.

He did not come home. I called his phone and left a message.

He did not come home the next day. In the morning, I went to his office, and then the café where he read the newspaper. I called his mother and hung up before it rang twice. I was still proud.

I left more messages, called his office every day. I sickened with worry. The greasy sleepless nights worsened until I could not eat.

On the eighth day, his mother called me. With fractured sentences, he was found at St Pancras Station. He made it as far as London, sleeping rough, and in distress. My throat choked. I heard the words “severe depression”. Her voice broke too when she said his name, and that was how I knew it was true.

His mother met me there and embraced me. We held each other tight.

The hospital ward was pale in a ghostly white, with cruel windows too high to look out of.

Martin looked smaller as a shape under a blanket. Unshaven and gaunt. He wore a shirt that did not belong to him. Someone else had arranged his hands.

I took his hand, with mine, and I wore our engagement ring.

“It's me,” I offered. “I’m sorry I was angry with you. Just let me sit here. Please.”

“It's over.”

He said it to the blanket. There was nothing else.

“Look at me, Martin. I can wait for you to get better.”

He did, properly, for one second.

“It's over,” he whispered it again. “I can't. It's over.”

I sat with him until visiting time finished.

His mother walked me to the street outside. She said thank you, and we embraced again.

Standing on a London pavement, I waited to cry. The world around me carried on, uncaring.

For six months I visited. I got the same answer. I would not get Martin back by loving him harder. After that there was the abyss. A mistaken decision, a cheating husband, and I wallowed in an unhappy marriage.

As a careful woman.

Aurélie is worth all of it. If all that heartache was the price of her, I would pay it twice over without haggling.

My cup of coffee has gone cold.

My hands are calm.

-=- 66 -=-

Out of breath, I have a bottle of wine and some food. The van takes pity on me, and the back doors yield at the first attempt.

I lock myself in, take off my clothes, and pull on one of my oversized T-shirts. I uncork it, but I have no energy to find a cup. I swig it straight from the bottle. It is reasonable for how little I paid. With my back cushioned against the side, I pick at fresh crudités. I have no appetite.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see my diary.

I flick through its pages. From the Luberon to Aigues-Mortes, then to Florac and Avignon, Collioure is in it, and the lie I told. I place my finger on the tear, dry, but not forgotten.

Finding a pen, I add today. I admit I sold out Manon to stay here during winter. The careful woman made me leave her. I mocked her piety in Florac and worse in Avignon. Her revenge is complete.

I write about Martin, and my eternal regret. How much I loved him, and why I threw my ring. My hand shakes as I relive the silent distress of the times I visited him. I admit what I did to myself to hide the hurt.

The page blurs.

It rises from somewhere I bricked up years ago, and it does not stop. I cry the way I do when I have nothing left except the comfort of my own privacy. Floods of it, until I taste salt. The diary rests open, the pen rests in its crease. These ugly tears hit the page that describes my deepest, most secret admission.

I let them fall.

A storm can only rage for so long. I close the diary and put it under the spare blanket. It will live there until I am stupid enough to confess again.

That careful woman knows how to be a mother without making a mess.

I let her win.

Outside, the trees rustle as the sun wanes toward twilight.

I cork the bottle, pull the blanket over me, and close my eyes.

-=- 67 -=-

The echoes of those memories with Martin still ring through my mind. I want to be there with him before I made my pact, before I traded my freedom away so cheaply.

In the small hours, we rested half-slumbering, half-awake, our evening of eating a bad casserole forgotten. Sated or not, my sex soaked at the sight of his arrogant smile. Martin always delivered on its promise. He rolled me onto my back and kissed down the curves of me, worshipping them. He needed every pore of me. When he ventured to put his mouth on me, I told him I could not.

“You always say that,” he growled. “And then you do.”

He was unbearable when he was right. He used his tongue for a different kind of profanity. I came until I was oversensitive. I bucked and writhed. With two fingers inside me, he exploited the swollen place he had made. This time the courtyard heard me. Pulling on his hair, I croaked and shook as if close to death, swearing at the ceiling.

That feeling of his body on mine, and that deep, invasive sweep reminding me that I am his woman. In harmony, back and forth: the taste of salt on his skin, the endless stare into his eyes, and that passion. That longing, deep, whole and infinite, with the certainty that he loved me.

Knowing that one day I will be his wife.

There were endless ways I could show him. As a song from a lark made me look at the window blinds. I saw the optimistic whites and greys of first light.

A new dawn.

I pushed him onto his back before he could be pleased with himself. I took him in my mouth, determined, batting his hands away. He swore as if he had forgotten every word in the English language. I liked him like that. I knew he was mine like that. I liked the taste of both of us. I loved my ring against his hip when my hands held him steady. I adored how he warned me, and I ignored it anyway.

Wrapping my fingers around him, I looked into his eyes until the inevitable came. He always shook before that plosive, rumbling groan. I wanted him to see me take it in my mouth. I took his seed and all the air in his lungs.

“You will ruin me,” he murmured when he could speak.

“That’s the idea.”

We talked and laughed, drinking water in the interlude. When he was hard enough, I straddled him and feigned that he was too much. Then, I laughed, and I was not slow at all. His hands found my hips. My arms gave out, and my forehead found his. The bed complained. I chased another climax, greedy, and not sorry.

Then, he rolled me. He thrust into me, wounded, but still fighting. Clinging to him, I cried out as the tension took me, and soon afterwards, I felt him go.

Deep and hard, and mine.

We succumbed to the morning chorus, serenading us to sleep. I carried the ache of him the next day with pride.

My breath hitches. I shudder and spasm hard. My fingers are wet under the blanket's warmth, and the night consumes the twilight.

I am tired, so very tired.

-=- 68 -=-

I glance back at the van and walk down the hill in the cooler morning air. I will swim first, and shower, so I do not arrive smelling of turpentine.

Hélène will hang Manon on a white wall.

The number on that cheque is only money.

And Martin… or not Martin, I have cried a river for him.

I have remembered him.

I found that courage.

I walk. My hands swing free, calm and collected.

Reaching the promenade, the light on the water is sufficient. The crescent of land meets the dazzling sea, fading in strength as summer rests and autumn takes over.

I am heading to my ex-husband’s house. It is time to be a mother.

My daughter expects me.