Inside the cave, it smelled like fresh earth, the way I imagined it would smell if you were buried alive. The very thought made me breathless. “Hallo!” I shouted back into the dark. Not even a flutter of bat wings answered.

I walked back into the cave as far as the light went. It bled into little galleries off the main one, but I couldn’t see a thing. I turned into the first and walked with my hands outstretched until I felt cold, damp stone. Counting steps, it didn’t seem very big. Maybe the size of the dining room at Mille Mots.

“Clare!” I heard Luc call. “Be careful!”

I was careful. More than he knew. If for a moment I stopped being careful, everyone would see how un-grown-up I was. How, every night, I cried into my pillow. My heart ached with missing my father. It had never stopped aching with missing my mother. If for a moment I stopped being careful, everyone would see that I wasn’t as strong as I wished I was.

I leaned against the wall. Limestone crumbled in my hair. Something about all of this darkness pressing in around me was comforting. It was the gray and the black that I missed in all the color of France. In the cave, the dark embraced me.

A tear dripped out, then another, then I was turning my face to the wall. The limestone caught my tears, but echoed back an errant little sob.

“Clare?” Luc called.

With a fingernail, I scratched C.R. in the soft limestone. Then thought about how he taught me to taste France, how he wrote me letters from Paris, how he stood outside right now, worrying about me when no one else did, and added L.C.

When I emerged back into the bright, Luc hadn’t moved from where I’d left him. Terrified of caves, then.

His face grew sober. “It’s so dark in there. I shouldn’t have let you go in alone.”

How could I explain that was exactly what I needed? How that moment alone in the wild dark somehow made me feel less alone? “But it was lovely,” I said. “It is lovely.”

He shifted on his spot on the leaves and violets. “You never said, why did you follow me today?”

His eyes, I noticed, were brown like almonds. “Because I didn’t want to be quietly ignored.”

He didn’t quietly ignore me after that.

As summer stretched, we were outside as often as we could be. Sometimes the light-speckled chapel courtyard, sometimes the bank of the river, sometimes the woods or the caves. But most often it was the chestnut tree on the back lawn, within sight of Mille Mots. I’d sit, drawing, Luc would lie, reading. When the shadows swung to afternoon, he’d sneak into the kitchen past the dozing Marthe and bring me pilfered pastries or bread and jam or bowls of almost-ripe apricots. He gave me my first taste of coffee and, when his mother wasn’t looking, my first taste of coffee with brandy. I fell asleep each night full of dreams, and Luc, he didn’t miss a weekend home.

I never saw him draw again, though. It was one of the few secrets he had from me. “I’m not very good,” he always said. “You should see me play tennis.” Though I never did, I begged him to show me. “Come and watch when I play in the Olympics,” he’d tease.

But I wondered where his drawing pad was, the one he’d closed so quickly when I caught him at the Brindeau caves. I wondered if he’d ever sketched me again.

“Why should I say?” he asked one Saturday morning as we sat beneath the chestnut tree. “You won’t tell me what you sketch.”

“Yes, I did. The château.”

“But that was weeks ago.”

“And it’s still the château. Again.”

“Surely there is no shortage of other subjects. The Aisne? The chestnut tree? Marthe and her birds?” He winked. “Or are you waiting for the subject to choose you?”

I ignored that. “Your papa, he gave me some lessons.”

“Let me guess.” He poked his pencil in his book to mark his page. “Fruit?”

“Far too much fruit.” I frowned down at the page. Monsieur Crépet’s slow, patient lessons were about shapes, lines, shadows, highlights. The little table in the rose garden was always set out with fruit bowls overflowing. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look an orange in the eye again.”

“Well, then.” He took an apricot from the fruit dish. “Here.” He tossed it. “Draw that.”

“Really?” I gave him a flat stare. “More fruit?”

“You must be an expert by now.” He leaned back on his elbows, his book forgotten. “Show me.”

“This is ridiculous. I already told you, I’m tired of—”

He waved off the rest of my complaint. “Clare, just try.”

It was only a circle; it shouldn’t have been too hard. If there was one thing Monsieur Crépet was insistent on, it was circles.

Yet Luc was not as patient as his father, not nearly as forgiving. For every one I drew, he found some fault. “Too lopsided.” “Too regular.” “Too shadowed.” “Clare, where is the fuzz? Where is the stem? Look closer.” For ages I drew sphere after sphere, shading and stumping. “Try the cross-hatching,” he’d say or “Use the flat of your pencil.”

Finally I threw my pencil across the grass in disgust. “I don’t want to draw an apricot. I want to draw an orchard full of apricots. I want to draw wagons and ladders and girls in striped skirts filling baskets with them.”

He retrieved my pencil. “Monsieur Monet didn’t wake up one morning to paint Fontainebleau Forest.”

I rolled my shoulders. “He might have.”

Luc recited with the air of someone who had heard it all before. “Monsieur Monet studied for many years to learn how to hold his brush, how to turn his hand to make a leaf, how to blend colors to dapple a forest floor.” He sat back down and stretched out his legs. “And he never threw his pencil.”

I crossed my eyes at him.

He ignored that. “Papa started me on fruit, too. You learn so much about shape.”

“Now I can see why you decided to be a tennis player instead,” I grumbled. “There’s no passion in shape.”

“Then tell me.” He held up a finger. “What do you want to draw?”

“I told you, I only know how to—”

“Not ‘can.’ ” He sat up. “Want to.” He leaned forward. The sunshine filtering through the leaves sent shards of gold across his face. “If you could draw anything in the world right now, what would it be?”

The cicadas sang.

“You,” I said softly.

He froze. I wondered what answer he’d been expecting.

But of course it was him. Though I knew he was older, a man to my mere decade and a half, I couldn’t help but think of him when I fell asleep each night and when I woke in the morning. I’d look out my window as the sun exploded over the horizon, just on the chance that he was down there playing tennis. I wanted to begin my day with a glimpse of his face.

I wouldn’t be at Mille Mots forever. Soon someone would come to get me, I knew it. Mother, I hoped, or maybe Grandfather. When I left, I wanted a reminder of Luc to take with me.

But here he sat, frozen, almost fearful.

I read once that in some corners of the world, where tribes lived untouched by modern life, it was forbidden to take someone’s likeness. Either drawing or photographing, to capture someone’s face, you might accidentally capture their soul.