“You know, I’ve never actually seen you drive,” Jane pointed out as Malcolm slid behind the wheel of the rental car. It was Christmas Eve, and their flight had landed in Strasbourg ahead of schedule. From the air, the highways had looked reassuringly clear, but that wouldn’t help them much if Malcolm was as uncomfortable in the driver’s seat as he looked. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?”

“Don’t be silly,” Malcolm insisted, fumbling with the keys. “Just because I have a chauffeur or three doesn’t mean—huh.” He gave the gearshift a dubious look. “Is this a manual transmission?”

“Out,” Jane laughed, giving him a little shove as she hitched up her belted gray coat and slid across the seats. Once he was settled on the passenger side (looking a little chagrined, she thought), she started the car and began making her way to the parking lot’s exit. “It’s still a good two hours away,” she told him, feeling oddly giddy, as though her nerve endings were firing off at random.

“Are you okay?” he asked, buckling his seatbelt and giving it an experimental tug. “You haven’t been yourself since we boarded the plane.”

I’m not really sure, Jane thought, trying to suppress a shiver. “It’s just that when I left home, I really, really didn’t plan to come back,” she explained.

“I thought we were talking ‘quaint French farm village’ here,” Malcolm said. “What could be so bad about that?”

Jane forced a laugh; it came out as a nervous, high-pitched sound. “That’s why I don’t date Americans. You all think Europe is some kind of theme park—as long as you can go back to your glass high-rises with the never-ending supply of hot water, France is just adorable.”

“You object to your hometown on architectural grounds?” Malcolm’s eyebrow was skeptically high.

“Of course! And of course not just that,” she admitted. “My relationship with my grandmother is . . . complicated.”

She frowned and changed lanes abruptly to pass a truck that was struggling on the incline. She knew that “complicated” didn’t really capture the years of conflict and strain between her and Gran, but that part of her life was over now. All she wanted to do was focus on her future with Malcolm. Just have to make it through this one little errand first, and then we’re home free.

“I know a thing or two about complicated families,” Malcolm replied, startling her out of her thoughts.

“Oh yeah? Did your mother ever chase the neighbor kids off with a broom, or read your diary and then yell at you about what you’d written?” At age nine, a precocious and very bored Jane had entertained herself by imagining an illicit affair between their neighbor Monsieur Dupuis (a thin man with an extremely long black beard) and Madame Foucheaux, the butcher’s wife (a round and rosy woman who seemed to have a meat cleaver perpetually in hand). Every time she had seen them together, she’d imagined a whole secret communication happening. The neighbor would say, “Half a kilo,” and Jane would hear: “Meet me at six so I can ravage you again.” When the reply came, “Like this much?” to Jane it would sound like “Make it seven.”

She had written down every last lurid detail. When Gran had found the diary, she’d screamed herself hoarse about the evils of gossip and what happened to little girls who told vicious stories. Jane shuddered as she remembered the thunderstorm that had rolled in while Gran yelled. Although she never would have said so out loud, Jane always thought that Gran had the same kind of luck with the weather as Jane herself did with electronics. Crashing thunder had been the soundtrack to Jane’s in Trouble for her whole life, and even now she couldn’t hear a storm coming without flinching.

Malcolm shook his head. “Well, no. Then again, I didn’t keep a diary, so . . .”

Jane let out a mirthless laugh. “Smart boy.”

“How did your boss take the news that you were leaving?” Malcolm asked, and Jane forced her mind to change gears.

“Much better than I expected, actually.” Elodie had scowled around the office, referring to Malcolm as “that kidnapper,” but as soon as Jane had said, “I’m in love,” the renowned Antoine of Atelier Antoine had squealed with pure French joie. Within moments, he had gone racing through his Treo, e-mailing her contact after contact in Manhattan. Just that morning, she’d spoken to a bubbly-voiced woman named Pamela, who was ecstatic to meet Jane. Apparently, Jane’s overseas experience was crucial to Pamela’s business plan. “I have a promising lead at Conran and Associates; they’re in the Village somewhere,” she told Malcolm. She hoped that sounded right. Didn’t New Yorkers on TV talk about “the Village”?

“That’s great.” She could hear his supportive smile, and she made her lips curve upward in a matching one.

They rode that way for a while, talking about everything and nothing, passing from flat fields into a thick tangle of trees, whose greedy limbs seemed to reach out to swallow the road.

Within moments, the sky was largely invisible. Ten in the morning and it might as well be nighttime. Welcome home. The air felt almost too oppressive to inhale. She opened the window a crack, hoping that it would help, but cold wind whipped around the car, making her ears and fingers numb, and she had to close it again. They rode the rest of the way in strained silence.

When the red, black, and white sign for Saint-Croix-sur-Amaury appeared, Jane gripped the steering wheel tight. Within moments, they would be in the village’s tiny center, where the shops huddled together like old friends along the main route—the only road in the town large enough to rate a name of its own. Farther along, there would be the patchwork clusters of farmhouses, surrounded by amber, green, or brown fields, depending on the season. Gran’s place was even farther beyond that, down a long dirt track that was headed determinedly toward the mountain. Gran’s house, unlike the others, stood completely alone.

“We should bring something,” Jane announced suddenly, trying not to hear how flat her words fell in the car’s silence. As a Christmas present for her grandmother, she’d wrapped a warm wool shawl in metallic green paper, but she suspected that after six years and with no warning, a hostess gift was probably warranted. “She’s big on manners.” Gran may never have been friendly or even neighborly, but she had always insisted that Jane observe proper etiquette.

“There’s a flower shop over there.” Malcolm pointed to a tired-looking building on the right. Dark tracks of a century’s worth of rain snaked down the stone façade, making it seem as though the upper windows were crying.

Jane nodded, and jerked to an unsteady stop by the curb. The road was so narrow that the ancient black Mercedes behind her had barely enough room to squeeze by.

Locking the car doors behind them, Malcolm and Jane entered the store. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The tiny shop was overflowing with flowers—tulips, peonies, delphiniums, and rows and rows of waxy green fronds. The low beams of the ceiling seemed to press down on them, and the air was thick with growth.

“These are fine,” she said randomly, grabbing the first wrapped bunch she passed and handing them to Malcolm. He nodded amiably and carried them to a pitted wooden counter that held an ancient-looking cash register.

“Is strange,” a creaky voice said from behind her. The accent was thick to the point of being unrecognizable, but it was En-glish. Jane spun to see an old man sitting on a stool just inside the doorway, a high-crowned hat shoved down low on his forehead. Tufty eyebrows poked out from under the brim like opportunistic shrubs.

“Strange?” she prompted. “Quelque chose d’étrange, Monsieur?”

“Normal people come one time,” he explained, pressing doggedly on in English in spite of Jane’s native accent. French pride, she thought with a mental eye-roll. Half of them refuse to speak English ever, and you can’t get the other half to cut it out. “They do not again,” the man elaborated. “Saint-Croix is not good for the touring.”

“Do I know you?” she asked, confused. Was he a friend of her grandmother’s? The man didn’t look like he’d remember what he had for breakfast, never mind a face from six years ago. Behind her, Malcolm quietly thanked the shopkeeper for the flowers.

Jane peered a little more closely at the old man’s parchment-skinned face, trying to make out any familiar detail. Malcolm materialized by her elbow, and the man’s watery eyes flicked between their two faces. Malcolm pressed her elbow a little more urgently, and she let him steer her out of the shop.

“Was he bothering you?” Malcolm asked her, an edge of anxiety in his voice. Jane felt a small twinge of satisfaction at his realization that her “quaint French farm village” wasn’t exactly picture-perfect. “What did he say?”

“It was nothing,” she assured him. She turned back once more to look at the old man, but his stool beside the door was empty, and there was no sign of him anywhere.