The worst part was that Provence still smelled exactly the same.
That was what hit Wren Callahan first - before the sight of it, before the sound of it, even before the heat that pressed against her skin like a palm the moment she stepped off the train at Apt-Luberon station. The smell: lavender and sun-baked stone and something resinous she'd never been able to name, warm and dry and unmistakably itself. It rose off the limestone hills and settled in the back of her throat like a memory she didn't know she'd been carrying.
She'd been away thirteen months.
She set her backpack on the station platform and stood there for a moment with her violin case in one hand and her phone in the other, just breathing. Around her, the station was practically deserted - a Wednesday afternoon in late July, the serious tourist rush still days away, the village of Ménerbes drowsing in the heat. A single cafe across the square had three tables occupied outside, men with pastis and newspapers, not moving fast. A dog lay in the shade of a fig tree.
She called a taxi.
And then she called three more taxi companies.
On her fourth try, a recording informed her that most local transportation services in the Apt-en-Provence district were temporarily unavailable due to a private engagement requiring their full complement of vehicles. She stood in the ninety-five-degree heat outside the station and stared at her phone screen for a good five seconds before realizing what this meant.
A wedding.
Of course. It was July in Provence. Someone was getting married, which in a small Luberon village meant practically everyone you could conceivably hire to drive a car was either part of the party, serving the party, or attending the party as a local civic obligation.
"Great," she said, to no one.
She shouldered the backpack. It weighed approximately forty-five pounds, which was light by the standards of the past year - she'd carried sixty through the Annapurna Circuit and a full week's supplies through Torres del Paine - but she'd been on the road since Kathmandu four days ago and her feet were doing their best impression of someone else's feet. The violin case added another eight pounds.
The cottage was four kilometers up the D36, two of them on a mountain road with no shade.
"Great," she said again, and started walking.
She'd first come to Provence when she was twenty-one, as part of a summer language immersion program out of Northwestern, where she'd been halfway through a degree in comparative literature that she would ultimately complete three years late, having spent most of the intervening time elsewhere. Her professor had arranged homestays with families in the Luberon valley, and Wren had ended up with an elderly widow named Madame Pelletier who kept three cats, made her own cheese, and spoke approximately no English, which was, the professor had explained, exactly the point.
She'd fallen in love with it the way you fall in love with things at twenty-one: instantaneously, completely, and with no particular plan about what to do next.
The lavender was part of it - obviously. You can't stand in a Luberon hillside in late July and not be arrested by it. A thousand acres of purple stretching away from you in every direction, wavering slightly in the heat shimmer, smelling like the distilled essence of every good thing in the world. The light was different here, too: it had a particular quality in the early morning and late afternoon, golden and saturate, that made even the gas stations look like paintings.
But it was more than the visual. It was the pace, the stone, the fact that everything here had been here for hundreds of years and wasn't apologizing for it. The villages were ancient. The wine was serious. The food was a form of local devotion. People who had been born here had mostly died here too, generation after generation, and the land carried all of it.
She came back the next summer, and the one after that.
And then Callie Morgan, her college roommate and closest friend, had tracked her down via a frantic series of text messages to wherever she was in the Balkans - Wren had been spending a summer teaching English in Sarajevo and playing violin in a local bar - to say that she'd found a small stone farmhouse for sale on the Luberon hillside, twenty minutes from Apt, and if they didn't buy it immediately she would personally travel to Bosnia and drag Wren home.
The house was beautiful. Wren had seen the photographs on her phone screen in a cramped Sarajevo internet cafe and known immediately: yes. A small seventeenth-century stone cottage with a slate roof, east-facing windows, and a walled kitchen garden. Two bedrooms. A fireplace big enough to walk into. A terrace off the back with a view down the lavender hillside to the valley floor.
It was cheap by any reasonable standard, because it needed work: the electrical was outdated, one load-bearing wall was questionable, the kitchen was 1962. Callie flew from Chicago to meet the agent. They made an offer on the phone. They both signed the deed as co-owners and paid for it in roughly equal portions - Wren with her savings from two years of odd jobs and one very lucrative stint as a stunt violinist for a London production, Callie with money from her parents and a loan from her brother.
They'd spent two weeks that autumn whitewashing the walls and painting the shutters a dusty blue-green. They'd replaced the kitchen floor in terracotta tile. They'd planted lavender along the stone wall and put a climbing rose on the east side and hung a small iron gate that Wren had found at a brocante for twelve euros. Callie had sewn curtains from fabric she'd found at a Lyon market. They'd lain on the terrace the last evening in sleeping bags, with wine and a wedge of local cheese, and decided that when they were old they would come here together and spend their winters arguing about books and pressing their own olive oil.
