It was the best thing Wren owned in the world.

She'd been out of contact for almost six months by the time she started the walk up the D36. Nepal had done that to her - she'd gone in planning to spend three weeks in Kathmandu and then been lured north by the mountains, as she always was, ending up high in the Khumbu region for weeks at a stretch with unreliable WiFi and no particular desire to check her email. She'd sent Callie a postcard from Namche Bazaar saying she was alive and happy and not to worry. She'd sent two more from progressively higher elevations. She'd tried to reach Callie by email in early spring and gotten a bounce-back that suggested the account might be inactive, which she'd dismissed as a server issue.

She'd tried again from a guesthouse in Pokhara in May.

Nothing.

She'd tried Callie's mother's number and gotten a disconnected tone, which was odd but not alarming.

She'd told herself Callie was fine. Callie was always fine. She was in Morocco with her new man, who Wren knew very little about except that he was Moroccan, worked in hospitality, and had apparently swept Callie off her feet with a thoroughness that had rendered her mute to all other forms of communication. Wren had found this mildly irritating and decided she'd get the full story when they were back in the same room.

The cottage had sustained her through every hard stretch of the past year. Not the physical building, which she hadn't seen in over a year, but the knowledge of it: the cold stone underfoot in the morning, the way the light fell through the east window in early spring, the smell of bread from the Dubois kitchen below. Knowing it was there meant there was somewhere to return to. Knowing it was hers meant the world had a fixed point.

She thought about it on the long walks. She thought about it in the cold guesthouses and the cheap hostel bunks and the dusty bus seats. She thought: I am a person who has a place in the world. The place is in Provence, and it smells like lavender and old stone, and when I get back I am going to sleep for approximately a thousand years.

The D36 wound upward through a stand of oak trees and then emerged onto the open hillside, where there was no shade and the full weight of the afternoon sun landed on her without ceremony. She drank from her water bottle and kept moving. The valley below was absurdly beautiful, the kind of view that made people stop their rental cars and take photographs without getting out. Fields of red clover. A medieval village on the far hillside. A church tower emerging from the cypresses like a pointing finger.

Above her, through the heat shimmer, she could see the pale roof of the Dubois farmhouse: Madame Dubois and her vineyard, the cottage's nearest neighbor, three hundred meters up the road. And beyond it -

She slowed.

Something was wrong with the light up there. Or wrong with the shape of the hillside. There was something angular where there shouldn't have been something angular: a mechanical silhouette, a crane arm or -

She stopped walking.

"Wren! Oh, mon Dieu - Wren, chérie!"

Madame Dubois was already hurrying toward her from the vineyard gate, sixty-two years old and moving faster than the heat warranted. She was a small, broad woman with silver hair and permanently sun-browned skin and an expression that cycled rapidly through surprise, concern, and an emotion Wren couldn't immediately identify.

Wren was standing at the edge of what had been her cottage.

It was rubble. Precise rubble - a controlled demolition, already tidied to a degree, the stones sorted into neat piles, the timber stacked, the foundation visible as a dark rectangle against the pale limestone soil. A yellow crawler crane sat at the edge of the site, dormant in the afternoon heat. Two men in work boots sat on a stone wall eating lunch and did not look up when she arrived.

She could see where the kitchen garden had been. The terrace. The east wall, which had faced into the morning sun and hosted the climbing rose - the rose was gone, obviously, but the marks where the iron anchors had been driven into the stone were still visible.

Her throat had closed completely.

"Chérie," Madame Dubois said, reaching her and taking both her hands. "I am so sorry. I thought - we all thought you knew. That your friend had told you."

"She told me nothing." Her voice was coming from somewhere very far away. "When did this happen?"

"It has been - two months now, perhaps a little more. Your friend Callie came back. She was not well - she looked terrible, I thought, very thin and tired, and there was something wrong, she would not say what. She asked me did I know anyone who was looking to buy land in the area." Madame Dubois shook her head. "I knew that Monsieur Avery had been looking, he had spoken to several people in the village. I introduced them. I thought - but Wren, I thought you had agreed! Callie said you had both decided together!"

Wren looked at the rubble. The rose was definitely gone. She had a memory - very specific, very sharp - of hanging the iron gate, Callie steadying the post while Wren used a mallet, both of them laughing because the post kept leaning five degrees to the left no matter what they did.

She still had the mallet in her storage unit in Chicago.

"Wren," Madame Dubois said carefully. "I have something for you. Callie - she left it with me. She said if you came back, I should give it to you."

The letter was in a cream-colored envelope, written in Callie's handwriting on the hotel stationery of a place in Marrakech.