The Riviera House by Natasha Lester

Author:Natasha Lester [LESTER, NATASHA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2021-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Inside, Remy showered quickly and threw on a one-shouldered Tina Leser jumpsuit in the most beautiful shade of duck-egg blue, cinched a tan belt around her waist, and shoved a couple of gold bangles on her arms. When she looked in the mirror to do her hair, she saw that she looked different to the Remy of just two weeks before: skin tanned, hair blonder than ever, eyes reflecting the blue of the jumpsuit, her face less tightly drawn.

Everything changed. Except Emily and Toby. They were frozen forever just as they had been on that fateful day almost two years ago, smiling maybe, as Emily recounted what she’d done at school and Toby asked, as he always did, What was the one thing you liked best of all? To which the answer was supposed to be—Seeing you.

Another ordinary moment whose preciousness was only apparent now that the possibility of it ever happening again had vanished.

Don’t, she told herself. Don’t remember any of it.

She turned away from the mirror and went out to meet Adam before her memories made her crawl back into bed.

“Where are we going?” was all he asked.

“Èze.”

In the car, she turned up the radio and French songs swirled around them as they crawled through the chaos that was Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in summer, then headed a little inland, away from the coast, before driving east, in the direction of Monaco. Finally, the car wound upward until they could see it in the distance: the town perched on top of a hill.

Adam finally spoke, a note of interest in his voice. “Are we going there?”

“Yep.”

By some miracle, she arrived in the carpark as someone was leaving and snagged a spot. “It’s pedestrian-only up there,” she said to Adam. “And it’ll be busy. But it’s stunning. Worth the crowds.”

They strolled up the hill. All that was visible atop the sheer rock was the church towering above them. The cliff face was marked with shutters, concealing windows that lived like troglodytes in the walls. Then they reached the poterne, the archway cut through the medieval fortifications, and passed through.

All at once they were in fairy-tale France, surrounded by blue shutters, ivy-covered walls, doors hiding like secrets in unexpected places, jasmine and bougainvillea sprawling immoderately everywhere, narrow cobblestone streets: everything small and secret and beckoning explorers into dead-end lanes and alleyways that might take you somewhere magical.

Adam stared at the mazelike passages, at the trompe l’oeil shutters and doorways that tried to surprise the ingenuous, and she knew he’d forgotten everything that had happened on the beach that morning.

“When I came to France after the funeral,” she told him, “I used to go out driving every day, with no destination. I’d just follow signs to any place. One day, I came here and I stood in this very spot and decided on a whim if I would go right, left, or straight ahead, and then every time I reached a turning or an ending, I’d do the same thing; just choose a direction before I could see what lay ahead.

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