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.