Beautiful Secret Read online

  Zio tilted his head to the side and faced Tate, a confused suspicion coating his eyes. “You said Michel told you.”

  “He told me his wife died.” And that she’d been crazy. “That was all. He never mentioned a child.”

  Zio seemed to shrivel then, his head sinking into his hands, his shoulders folding in. He sat that way for a spell and then straightened. “It was the most terrible of times, Tatiana.” When he raised his face, Tate saw that her uncle’s eyes were wet, his cheeks red. “Lilliane’s family had a history of mental illness. After Amelie came, Lilliane was not the same.”

  “Did she have postpartum depression?” Tate asked, taking the liberty of placing her hand on Zio’s knee.

  “Yes, she did.” Zio stared directly at Tate then. “Lilliane took her own life, bella.” Zio’s body quaked silently in the small space of the portico. “And, in the same way, she took away our Amelie, too.”

  “Jesus,” Tate whispered, at a complete loss for words. Wiping away the tears that blurred in her own eyes, she leaned into Zio.

  “Amelie was nearly three years old when they died,” Zio muttered. “And, as you can imagine, Michel has never recovered.” He wiped his face on his sleeve and exhaled. “None of us has, really.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Tate breathed, folding beneath the weight of Michel’s loss, her tears coming faster now. She vaguely remembered Aunt Mimi, years ago, talking about the death of a child, a cousin, in France. She remembered thinking how sad it was and then moving on to the next thing. Now that she knew Michel, Zio, and Zia, the horror of it surrounded her so completely, she couldn’t veer from it.

  Zio placed his chubby hands flat on his thighs and sighed, releasing a final burst of grief. “Like I said, it was the most terrible of times. The worst tragedy of our lives, but we must go on, Tatiana. Michel,” he said, pausing to take Tate’s chin into his hands and forcing her eyes to meet his. “My Michel…he must go on.”

  Tatiana nodded and watched her uncle stretch his stiff legs, then stand. He took his glasses from his face and wiped his eyes with a wrinkled handkerchief.

  “I must walk home now, bella,” Zio told her.

  And, as he rounded the corner of the terrace and disappeared from Tate’s view, he didn’t look back.

  Once Zio was gone, Tate let her head fall into her own lap and wept for what seemed like forever. She cried for sweet, beautiful Michel and the catastrophic losses he’d endured. She cried for her own loved ones, gone to some invisible place she couldn’t reach. She cried for the aloneness she felt in a marriage that was all but dead and for how alive she’d felt in the arms of a man she shouldn’t want. The tears rushed from her eyes, washing through their rarely-opened floodgates.

  When her soul finally seemed emptied of emotion, Tate reached to tighten the laces of her running shoes. She broke into a jog, but before her feet found a pace that was rigorous enough to stop her mind from spinning, Tate’s thoughts rested again on Michel. Not only had he lost his wife to the depths of depression, he’d lost his innocent child. His Amelie.

  Tate wondered if she’d had his eyes.

  Chapter 17

  Tate

  You’ve got to be kidding me, Tate thought.

  Still clad in her running clothes from that morning’s revelatory walk with Zio, she stood in the kitchen, hearing but not believing Colette’s news.

  “Dear cousin, I am so sorry,” Colette said as she busied herself at the espresso machine, dumping wet, caked grinds and repacking the cylinder with luxurious powder. “It just cannot be helped.”

  Not be helped? This could not be happening. Mustering a brave face to hide her horror, she waved away her cousin’s concerns. “No, Colette, I’ll be…okay.” But all of her plans to experience Calabria with Luisa, to travel through Nana’s past with an experienced tour guide…

  As feared, the airline union workers had headed for the picket lines that morning. The airport had descended into chaos. Airlines were cutting flights left and right. Her trip would at least be postponed if not canceled altogether. She was stuck in France. Indefinitely.

  “The doctors tell my mother she need to rest, and driving to Italy…it is a lot of stress for her,” Colette told Tate.

  Who said anything about driving?

  “But my father and Michel go with you. They drive the coast to Reggio a lot of years.” She turned to face Tate, wearing her usual elfin grin. “Do not preoccupy yourself, Tatiana. My father and Michel, they know the road.”

  Colette’s plan descended upon Tate like a shadow, creeping into her mind space until it was fully present.

  Zio and Michel.

  Were going to drive her to Italy.

  Dear, sweet Jesus…

  Hot chills washed over her, coursing over her breasts and down her sides, until they’d all but numbed every inch of her. She tried to shake the feeling but found that the thought of a twenty-some hour car ride with Michel wasn’t something she could just evaporate from her mind.

  Before Tate said another word, she filled a Mason jar with tap water and drank it down slowly, relishing the cool wetness in her throat.

  “I don’t think I can go alone, Colette,” Tate said, meaning without Zia Luisa. She didn’t want to go without her grandmother’s best friend.

  “Tatiana, I am trying to explain. My father and Michel will accompany you.” Colette downed her coffee and set her demitasse in the silver sink. “It is no problem for them.”

  Yes, but it is a problem for me, Tate thought, reaching for a good excuse—any excuse.

  “I can’t expect Michel to take so much time off of work, Colette, and Zio certainly can’t drive all that way at his age,” Tate told her cousin, waving her arms in the air to further drive her point home. Her trip to Italy would just have to wait.

  Colette raised one eyebrow at Tate and shook her head. “Michel volunteered, Tatiana, and he has the time.”

  Michel had volunteered. Of course he had.

  “He just finished a project and will deliver it today after work at the shop,” Colette said.

  “What kind of project?” Amid the ruin of her plans, Tate was still curious as to what Michel did every day, other than run the shop in town.

  “A, umm…how do I say it,” Colette snapped her fingers, trying to find the right English word. She pointed at Tate. “You know, it is part of a bed, Tatiana, the place at the top of the bed, where you have your head in the night.”

  “A headboard?” Tate guessed.

  “Yes, yes, a headboard,” Colette said. “He just finish a headboard. Very beautiful, too. He start with the bark of a maple tree. Very particular here in the Ardennes.”

  “Michel does woodwork?” Tate asked, surprised.

  In her mind, Tatiana’s fingers grazed the ornately carved furniture in the guest room. How very curious that the bed on which she’d experienced some of the most restful nights of her life was one that, most probably, had been designed by Michel’s own hands. “I didn’t know he was an artist,” she said to Colette.

  “Yes, yes, Tatiana. He is very talented, our Michel,” Colette said, as she wiped the counter and placed the sugar bowl back inside a pine cupboard. “So, after this delivery, he has only the shop. And Chanson and Maxime can take his place for some time.”

  Colette turned to face her and leaned back against the counter. She held a coffee out to Tate, one she’d prepared with just a smidge of sugar, the way Tate liked it.

  “So, you leave tomorrow then,” Colette said. “Tonight we have the farewell, and in the morning, of six o’clock, you go.”

  “Thanks.” Tate accepted the espresso with forced graciousness. She downed the coffee in one swift swallow, wishing it were a shot of something much, much stronger.

  Chapter 18

  Tate

  “We need more wine, Maman,” Maxime told Zia, who swatted him away as if he were one of the many flies she shooed daily in her own kitchen.

  “You drink too much, Max. Ubriacone,” she teased, us
ing the Italian slang word for drunkard and waving a tea towel at her son. Tate laughed, remembering her grandmother using the same term to joke with her own sons.

  “Bullshit,” Luisa’s son said, his face lighting with devilish laughter at his use of dirty English.

  “Bon pronunciation,” Tate teased. “Bravo, Maxime.” Earlier, he’d pestered her for more than an hour to teach him English curse words.

  As she cleared the table in Chanson’s expansive kitchen, Tate watched Maxime swirl the last swallow of his Cabernet. Her jovial cousin was more clown than charmer, she thought as she saw him stand and snatch his wife from her dishwashing job at the sink. Spinning Chanson around the room, dipping and twirling, Maxime sang along with the song on the radio.

  “Dancing Queen…” he belted out in broken English, and Tate belly-laughed. Maxime knew every word to the old Abba song. Chanson followed his lead with a quiet smile, and when the music stopped, she laughed and curtsied to him. Maxime planted a kiss on his wife’s forehead and then patted her backside before she resumed her station, washing dishes.

  How comfortable they were together. A flicker of envy surged in Tate’s chest, but she quickly extinguished it and walked over to embrace Maxime’s wife.

  “Chanson,” she said, leaning into the serenely beautiful woman who’d opened up her home for tonight’s bon voyage dinner. “Merci beaucoup pour tout.” Thank you for everything, Tate said, knowing no words could come close to the gratitude she felt toward this family.

  “C’est rien, Tatiana.” It’s nothing, she said and dried her hands to return the hug.

  Tate squeezed Chanson’s hands, gazing into the warm brown eyes of Michel’s mother, wondering if her intuition had been at work over these last days.

  “As tu aimé ce dîner, Tatiana?” Did you like dinner? Chanson asked Tate.

  “Tout étaient délicieux, Chanson, merci,” Tate answered, assuring her that everything was delicious.

  Chanson and Colette had prepared an amazing five-course dinner, complete with a different wine for each stage of the meal. This was not the first evening meal she’d enjoyed at Maxime and Chanson’s sprawling stone home in the picturesque town of Vieilles Forge. That it would be her last was something Tate chose not to think about at the moment. As she returned to the table, her gaze tripped into the sunken living room, where Michel and Zio Nino sat on dark leather chairs in front of an antique wood-burning stove. The two were smoking cigars and appeared to be sharing a heated discussion. Perhaps they were arguing over travel routes, Tate thought, a sick excitement roiling around in her belly.

  Tate tipped her wine glass forward, relishing the last few drops of red on the back of her tongue.

  “Oh, Tatiana!” Maxime bellowed in his typical caveman yell. Proximity didn’t seem to matter to Maxime. He only spoke in one volume: loud. “Fetch me more wine, ma quette.”

  Tate smiled and threw a hunk of baguette at Maxime’s head.

  “Now you speak English, Maxime,” Colette said, giggling at her older brother. “Tatiana, you know the word he say to you? It is a typical Ardennais word.”

  “Oui, Colette. Je comprends ma quette,” Tate said, pleased that she’d been accepted into the fold. Maxime had used a derogatory yet endearing term for her; his way, Tate thought, of showing that he liked her.

  “Oh, Maxime!” Tate yelled, attempting to mimic her cousin’s deep voice. “I will happily fetch more wine if your Maman says it’s okay for you to drink more.”

  Zia Luisa and Colette simultaneously applauded, their laughter spilling over Tate.

  “Brava, Tatiana,” Zia said.

  “Yes, yes,” Maxime said, feigning sourness. “Brava, Tatiana, brava. Now, really, go to the cellar and get some more wine.” Biting off a chunk of the baguette she’d beaned him with, he laughed gruffly. “Va va!” Maxime shooed her away, toward the door to the basement.

  “Does anyone else want more wine?” Tate asked in French.

  A slew of hands went up, and Maxime grinned at her.

  “But of course we want more wine, Tatiana.” His red cheeks looked like they were about to burst with amusement. “This is France,” he bellowed, and collapsed into laughter.

  With an entertained shake of her head and a smile on her lips, Tate made her way down the basement steps and into the cold wine cellar, where Maxime stored his special homemade vintage. The musty smells of dank basement and fermented grapes filled Tate’s nose in the dimness. A bare white bulb attached to a tangle of wires in the ceiling was Maxime’s rustic solution to lighting in his favorite room. She reached up to yank the string that would turn on the light, but the bulb remained dark.

  “Shit,” Tate whispered. Must be burned out.

  Deciding that she could see well enough with the light coming in from the storm windows, she edged forward, toward the stacks of wood crates that housed bottles upon bottles of wine. Before she could reach out to grab a few, Tate felt a hand at her waist.

  She straightened and sucked in her breath. Without turning to look at him, she imagined Michel’s smoky concentration on her skin, saw the shadow of his chapped woodworker’s hand grazing her side.

  Warm, wet lips landed on the side of her neck, and she found herself leaning into them, half-closing her eyes to the dark that no longer concerned her.

  “Michel,” she said, reaching through the deep sea of her desire to locate her senses.

  “Mmm,” he murmured, a sigh tickling the sensitive spot behind her earlobe.

  “Michel…I can’t,” she whispered, hardly able to form the words on her lips.

  Without removing his hand from her side, Michel stopped kissing her neck.

  “I’m a married woman,” Tate said, nearly choking on her own sentence. How foolish it sounded—as if she were reading from a script in which she’d been poorly cast. “I…I just can’t do this,” she repeated.

  “Yes,” Michel said tightly, his hand moving from her waist to the length of her hair, twirling it thoughtfully into a messy bun.

  Gently, she pulled her head away and turned to face him. The moment Tate’s eyes met Michel’s, her stomach lurched. She hated herself for this decision. “Michel, I…”

  And she stopped, slayed at the thought of hurting him, torn between what she craved and what she knew was right.

  “Shh, Tatiana,” he said, bearing the weight of her choice. He let his hands slip through her auburn curls and down her shoulder, never breaking eye contact.

  A soft moan escaped Tate’s lips the moment his skin stopped touching hers.

  “Give me two bottles to carry up,” he told her, nodding to the wooden crates of wine.

  Tate’s chest heaved once before she did as she was told, choosing two dusty bottles from Michel’s father’s collection. “Here,” she said, her hands shaking as she passed them to him.

  Michel took the bottles but held onto Tate’s hand a moment, squeezing it lightly.

  “Thanks,” Tate said to him.

  Michel gave her a small smile. “Whatever you need, cousine, just tell me,” he said before pivoting on one foot and heading back upstairs.

  Paralyzed with a need she knew she could never express, Tate watched him go, then let herself sink into the dark, the memory of his lips leaving an invisible imprint on her heart.

  Chapter 19

  Tate

  “Tatiana, cherie, come,” Zia said as she waited for Tate at the top of the narrow staircase back at Rue Gavotte. “I have something to give to you before you leave for Italy, and tomorrow will be too early for me. I must say good-bye to you tonight.”

  If Tate’s heart hadn’t already been wrung dry of emotion, she would surely have teared up at the mention of saying good-bye to her precious Zia Luisa. As it were, she’d spent the last three hours involved in a heated farewell marathon with Chanson, Maxime, Zia, and Colette. They’d toasted to each other, sang Ardennais folk songs off-key, and toasted again.

  The bottles that Tate and Michel had produced from the cellar had been
drained quickly. Everyone, Tate included, had seemed more than able to mask his or her sadness beneath a constant wine buzz. The night had ended with Maxime, his teeth stained purple, his breath pungent, kissing Tate’s cheeks for the hundredth time and then stumbling into his bedroom. Fully dressed, he’d passed out cold on the bed. Tate had watched Chanson remove her husband’s shoes and lovingly pull the blankets over his unconscious body, taking obvious care to tuck the sides in around him.

  Now, at Zia and Zio’s home for one last night, Tate was too exhausted to wander around in her anguish any longer. Leaving this part of her family behind was just too hard. In a week’s time, she’d become more than fond of all of them. The distress of saying good-bye was even trumping her ravenous desire for the history that only Zia Luisa could tell.

  “Zia,” she said, reaching the top of the steps and taking her aunt’s softly wrinkled hand in her own. “You should get some sleep now. It’s two thirty.”

  “Yes, Tatiana, but I must speak with you first.” Zia opened the door to her bedroom and motioned for Tate to follow her inside. She sat down on the bed and pulled open the nightstand drawer to reveal a muss of papers, rosary beads, photographs, and other miscellany. “Sit down, cherie,” she said, and Tate obeyed.

  What was her aunt looking for? Tate watched Zia dig around amongst the seemingly unrelated items in the drawer. When the old woman’s hands finally stopped their rustling, Tate’s interest was thoroughly piqued.

  “I need you to deliver something for me, love,” Zia said, holding up a padded envelope the color of butter.

  “Oh,” Tate replied, confused as to why Zia had waited until nearly three o’clock in the morning on the night before her departure to assign her this task. She watched as Zia carefully penned an address on a separate sheet of blank paper she’d garnered from the drawer.