“With the tournament next week?” Luc bounced the ball. He’d changed into duck trousers and a white shirt like Mr. Bauer, though Luc’s were unpressed. He’d combed back his hair with pomade. He looked far too respectable. “I hardly have time to play schoolteacher.”

Though I hadn’t the slightest interest in learning tennis, at that moment I wanted nothing more. “I didn’t realize I was such an inconvenience.” I stood. “I’ll try.”

Luc glowered but Mr. Bauer grinned. “Fräulein, if you will come and take this racket, I will show you what to do.”

“This is really a waste of time,” Luc said, but I walked out onto the lawn and took the offered racket.

“Now, two hands, please, like this. Hold tight.”

Luc rolled his eyes.

Mr. Bauer was explaining how to keep my back straight, how to extend my elbow, how to keep my arms just like that, when Madame came out of the house with her writing case tucked under an arm.

“Mademoiselle!” Her voice was sharp, and I jumped away from where Mr. Bauer held the racket.

“Madame, I was just…”

She strode across the lawn to me. “Perhaps you’ve been in the sun for long enough.” Madame, who dug in the rose garden until she was as brown as a Gypsy, didn’t worry about the sun. And yet her brow was creased in a worry that I couldn’t explain. “Please gather your things.”

“Fräulein.” Mr. Bauer touched his hat. “I regret your departure.”

Luc, concentrating on his shoelaces, didn’t say a word.

Madame Crépet escorted me upstairs, leaving both me and my sketch pad in my tower room. She nodded, once, and said, “Perhaps it’s best if you stay up here the rest of the afternoon. The day has grown warm.” With no other explanation than that, she left.

The windows were open and I threw myself onto the bench beneath one. The breeze cooled my face. I hadn’t done a thing, and here both Luc and Madame were acting as though I’d done something awful. Why couldn’t they just explain things to me? Why couldn’t Luc just look me straight in the eye and tell me what I’d done? I leaned out and saw the stretch of green lawn and the river, but no sign of him or Mr. Bauer or their tennis match.

I took off my hat and gloves, pushed up my sleeves, and climbed out of my bedroom window.

I could hear the thwap of the tennis ball against rackets, punctuated by the occasional laugh and shout in French. I pressed my back against the wall and inched up the roof towards the ridgepole. The tiles were slick with moss, and my boots were worn on the bottom. I swallowed down any thoughts of how far it was to the ground and edged up, sidestep by sidestep.

But it was worth the climb. I could see clear around the house, from the river to the linden-lined drive in the front. Down the other side of the ridgepole was a window bordered in faded blue drapes. Through the window I could see a burnished tennis racket hanging on the wall. Luc’s room.

Over there, down on the wide back lawn, was the impromptu tennis match. Mr. Bauer moved, loose-limbed and nonchalant. He was the one laughing and calling out French insults. Luc played rigid and intense. Even from my perch on the roof, I could tell that he was silent.

I didn’t know what it was, why, in a breath, Luc had changed. When Madame and the sophisticated Stefan Bauer crossed the lawn, reminding us that the world was bigger than our quiet moment, Luc pushed me away. He acted the way he had that day he’d come home from the train station and saw me in my new white dress.

I didn’t know why I cared so much. He was just a boy, a boy I’d only known for a couple of months. Luc turning away from me wasn’t the same as Mother leaving. It wasn’t at all the same as Father dying. It wasn’t the same as Grandfather never coming home for Christmas. I balanced and let go of the roof. Then why did it feel the same?

I crept back down and into my room. I thought about finding Madame and apologizing for whatever it was that led her to send me there. I wanted to go back outside. I wanted to wait until Luc smiled again.

I hadn’t seen Madame’s blue turban down on the lawn, so I slipped from my room and down the hall to her morning room. Luc said it used to be her studio, back when she still sculpted. Now it was where she wrote letters, kept the books, and managed the business of Claude Crépet, artist.

The door was ajar, but I didn’t knock, not when I heard Monsieur Crépet’s voice within. He spoke softly, but Madame, her voice moving in the room as though she were pacing, did not.

“She’s not mine to worry over, Claude, yet I do. She doesn’t have a mother to do so.”

His reply, I didn’t understand, but I did understand the edge that came to Madame’s voice.

“If you’d seen her with her hands on Luc’s face, on his friend’s tennis racket. So like Maud.”

“Ma minette, you were always too hard on Maud. She had too much of her heart to share.”

“That wasn’t all that she shared.”

He made a soothing noise. “Come, sit.” He murmured something in French. The sofa creaked. “It was so long ago. You’ve forgiven me, but you haven’t forgiven her?”

“She did it to spite me.”

“She did it to best you. There is a difference.”

“It wasn’t enough that she was one of the most talented in the school. She had to have you, too.”

I thought of the painting of Mother, tucked away up in Monsieur’s studio. Only one, but he’d never gotten rid of it.

“She doesn’t have me now.”

Madame must have stood, because I heard her pacing again, quick steps around the edges of the room. “I should have written to John Ross when she showed up on our doorstep. Did you know he hired an investigator?”

“The investigator did not come here.”

“And why would he?” Her heel came down sharply. “Would he go to question all of her old amoureux to see who else she begged to run away with her?”

“Ma minette, I didn’t go.” This was said almost wearily. “I wouldn’t have gone, even if she’d asked me twenty years ago.” He sighed. “Maud always spent more time lamenting the past than changing the future. She wore her regrets like a hair shirt.”

I clenched my fists at my sides. They talked about Mother like they didn’t know her. If she wasn’t looking to the future, she wouldn’t have left Perthshire, would she have?

“She said she’d paint her way across the world and not care what anyone else thought,” Madame said, the words rolled up in scorn. “I don’t know why I do.”

“Because she was and always will be your friend, despite all the rest. You worry about her like the mademoiselle does.” He patted the sofa softly. “Now sit back down.”

The springs creaked again as she settled in. “Did I tell you, Luc saw a painting? In the Galerie Porte d’Or right along the Quai du Voltaire.”

“Maud?”

I covered my mouth.

“Painted by Arnaud Duguay. Do you remember him from Glasgow?” She made an indelicate noise. “Second rate, even as a student.”

“But the painting, it was in Santi’s gallery?”

“Luc wrote to me. He thought it meant Maud was in Paris.”

I stepped back until I felt the edge of the hall table against my spine. Mother, in Paris? Could she be so near? Luc hadn’t said a word to me. All of those weekend afternoons together, all of those letters, and he hadn’t said a thing about a painting of Mother in a Paris gallery.

I inched back to the door in time to hear Madame say, “The girl needs a place, Claude. Is this really the best one?”

I ran back up to my room and out to the roof. At the top of the ridgepole, I could see over to the front of the house, at Mr. Bauer wheeling his motorbike down the linden-lined drive. I ducked into Luc’s bedroom window.