Free The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted by Bridget Asher

heart. Aunt Giselle wore her hair in a thick gray bob and wore deep red lipstick. She’d come to visit her sister as a young woman and, once here, married an American botanist, who’d died young.
    “How are things going with you?” she asked. She’d never lost her accent. It was still thick, her red lips puckering to speak.
    “Oh, I’m doing fine. It was a beautiful ceremony.”
    “Yes,” she said, in that bored way the French sometimes have. “Of course.”
    “I heard that there was a fire,” I said.
    “I heard this, too. The news has deranged your mother.”
    “I think it’s the lack of information that’s upset her. No details.”
    “Yes, maybe this is true,” she said. “But this house, it will not burn completely. The fires on the mountain in 1989, they came to the doorstep, but not a centimeter more.”
    “I know that story, yes,” I said. I thought of how Henry had always loved the lore of the house. I’d told him all of the stories. He especially loved the story of my mother and sister and me getting lost in the swirl of the fluttering wings of Bath whites. He loved that my mother raised us to be French-proud. His father had been the type to wear KISS ME, I’M ITALIAN shirts on the beach and so we had this in common. My mother played Jacques Brel albums, read Babarbooks to us in French, had us put shoes out for Santa on Christmas Eve. She made us take French lessons with a strange woman who lived down the street and had parrots in cages. The parrots spoke French, too—dirty words that the old woman told us never to repeat. Henry had always wanted to go to his family’s hometown in Italy and to the house in Provence, but we either had no time or no money. If Henry was here, would he have insisted that we go and pay our respects?
    “This house, it cannot burn,” Aunt Giselle told me. “It only desires something. It is being like a child. It wants attention.” I’d heard this kind of talk before among my mother’s relatives—the house as having a will of its own. The house’s mythology was not just my mother’s. It was passed down through the generations—how else could it have survived and thrived?—mostly down the line of women. Giselle had used the house herself when she was younger, my mother had told me. After her husband died, she lived there for a few years to “reinvent herself,” as my mother put it.
    “I guess we all just want some attention now and then,” I said lightly.
    “I know,” she said. “I am sorry about your husband.” She then fit her hand over mine. It was bony with thick knuckles, but soft. She had taken good care of her skin. “I suffered a loss young,” she told me. “The war took my first, but I went on. Back then, we all had to. We had no choice.”
    “I didn’t know you were married before you came to the States,” I said.
    She shook her head and smiled at me. “It wasn’t a marriage. It was a love. Some people get one and the other. Some people get both at the same time,” she said. “You understand.”
    “I do,” I said, and then my throat felt tight; my cheeks flushed. I started coughing. I slipped my shoes back on, stood up, and walked away without excusing myself.
I went on … we all had to. We had no choice
. I walked quickly back in to Elysius’s house, my heels pushing divots into the earth. I moved through the caterer-clogged kitchen and into the bathroom.
    I locked the door and looked in the mirror. I thought of my aunt. I was jealous of her. She was on the other side of it, looking back. I thought that I should have told her, right then, what I’d never told anyone. I’d heard about the traffic accident on the radio after I’d dropped Abbot off at school. I heard about the accident, that there were multiple fatalities, an oil tanker ablaze, and the backed-up traffic on the interstate, and I had one simple thought: I would take an alternate route.
    That was it. I would take an alternate route. Worse, I felt lucky—not