This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2023 by Bernadette MacDougall

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781662513534 (digital)

  Cover design by Faceout Studio, Jeff Miller

  Cover image: © Ole Schwander / Arcangel; © Here, © Ivan Popovych, © Reddavebatcave / Shutterstock

  The dawn light filtering through the slats in the shutters brought welcome relief to Michael. Soon, he would be able to open the windows and let the cool morning air into his stifling room.

  He hadn’t slept at all, for many reasons. The first two were physical. He was in a strange house in a strange bed, and since nightfall, he’d been plagued by a mosquito buzzing in his ear.

  Michael was a kind man. He hated confrontation, and one of his biggest fears was hurting people’s feelings. He treated the animal world with the same respect; if he found a spider or insect crawling around his house back in England, he would move it carefully to safety. But last night, he had wanted to kill that mosquito, badly. The tiny winged insect, however, had proved elusive, and after several failed attempts to swipe it into oblivion with a rolled-up newspaper, Michael had conceded defeat. As he lay in bed, waiting impatiently for morning to come, with his sheets tangled around him—testament to his heroic efforts to stop the mosquito from landing on him—he could feel the hives and itches of at least twenty burgeoning lumps. He scanned the room, wondering where it was hiding. He hoped his night of torment wasn’t an omen for how the rest of his holiday would be.

  The third reason Michael hadn’t slept was emotional. When he had been offered this holiday four months ago, there were meant to be eight of them going. Four couples: him and Julie; his sister, Kate, and her husband, Simon; their friends Saskia and Nathan; and Rupert and Angelica, whom Michael had never met. Then, three months ago, Julie had left him, and Angelica had died.

  “Please come,” Kate had implored him when Michael, in the grip of depression, had told her that he didn’t feel up to going. “The change of scene will do you good. And it will be awful for Rupert to be stuck on his own with two couples so soon after his wife died.”

  So Michael had agreed because he couldn’t see what he had to lose by going. Who wouldn’t want to spend two weeks in a beautiful converted farmhouse in the South of France, even if their wife had recently walked out on them? He and Kate were close, and he got on well with his quiet, bespectacled brother-in-law. He was also swayed by the knowledge that Julie had gone away for three weeks with a group of her girlfriends; like him, she was a teacher and had long summer holidays. She wasn’t sitting around moping about the end of their marriage, and he needed to do the same.

  The house was Saskia and Nathan’s holiday home, but Nathan had recently been made redundant from his job in advertising, and they were having to sell. Before they put it on the market, they’d wanted one last summer there.

  Kate and Saskia were old school friends and had known each other for twenty years. Michael had met Saskia and Nathan several times over the years at various parties hosted by his sister and Simon and had always gotten on well with them. Saskia was warmhearted and Nathan a good-natured, larger-than-life figure. They had mentioned, on more than one occasion, that he and Julie should one day join them at their house in France, so he’d been touched when they had kept their word with their invitation to join Kate and Simon and Rupert and Angelica for the last two weeks of August. When Kate told him that Angelica had died suddenly, two months after being diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of cancer, he had really felt for Rupert.

  Michael had been the last to arrive yesterday. He had flown from Southampton to Bergerac and had hired a car to get him to the farmhouse, set in a little hamlet in the Dordogne. Saskia and Nathan had just had time to show him around before it was time for dinner. He’d been enchanted by the old stone walls of the farmhouse glowing in the evening sun, the beautiful views over endless fields, and the surprisingly comfortable accommodation. As well as the main house where Saskia, Nathan, and Rupert were staying, there was also a guesthouse for him, Kate, and Simon.

  “We were really sorry to hear about you and Julie,” Saskia said, placing a hand on Michael’s arm as they made their way to the terrace at the back of their house.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I have to admit, it came as a bit of a shock.”

  While Saskia nodded sympathetically, Michael cast his mind back to the fateful day when Julie had told him she was leaving because he deserved someone better. Confused, he’d told her that he wanted only her, that he was happy with her. So she had tried to explain.

  “You’re too nice, Michael,” she’d said, pleading with him to understand. “I need someone who can stand up to me.”

  But he hadn’t understood. He’d tried replacing the word nice with boring, but he didn’t think he was boring. He had plenty of interests and was a good talker and a good listener. If nice meant that he indulged his wife, then yes, he was nice. He liked buying her presents, and if she wanted to go away on holiday with her friends, why would he prevent her from going, if it made her happy?

  “So you’re leaving me because I like to make you happy?” he’d asked.

  “No, I’m leaving because you never stand up for yourself. If you say you want Chinese for dinner and I say I want pizza, you’ll say, ‘OK, we’ll have pizza.’ If you say you think we should paint the sitting room blue, and I say I was thinking of green, you’ll say, ‘OK, let’s paint it green.’”

  “Because I really don’t mind what I have for dinner or what color we paint the sitting room,” Michael had said, genuinely puzzled.

  “That’s the point. You should mind.”

  Her reasons for leaving seemed so poor that Michael thought she must have met someone else.

  “No,” she’d said when he asked. “I would have told you if I had.”

  Michael had believed her. But for the last three months, he’d been smothering an unusual and unexpected spark of anger at being rejected for being too nice.

  So it had been with determination to make the most of his time in France that he’d sat down to dinner on the covered terrace last night. He’d still been basking in the glow of Saskia and Nathan’s warm welcome when Rupert—the person he’d expected to bond with, because they were both there without partners—made a joke about his late arrival, insinuating that Michael had timed it so that he could sit down to dinner without having to help in its preparation. Michael had laughed along with everyone else, but when Rupert made the same observation several times during the evening, it had ended up annoying him. He’d told himself not to be so sensitive; Rupert was recently bereaved and was probably still trying to come to terms with the death of his wife. Unfortunately, at the end of the meal, in his haste to show that of course he was prepared to help, Michael had begun clearing the plates before Kate had finished eating, which had led to a good-humored outcry. But the smirk on Rupert’s face had annoyed Michael further. And Michael didn’t often get annoyed, which stood him in good stead when dealing with students.

  “It’s just as well you have a slow fuse,” Julie had said on more than one occasion, when he’d told her about something that had happened in the classroom.

  “If you lose your temper, you lose control,” he’d replied. And she had kissed him and told him it was why he was an excellent teacher.

  Now, as he lay in bed, he replayed the scene at dinner in his mind. Maybe Rupert was directing the understandable anger he felt at losing his wife toward him, for not losing his wife to cancer but to carelessness. There wasn’t a lot he could do, Michael reasoned, except be more sympathetic toward Rupert.

  Nobody had mentioned to Michael what time breakfast would be. He checked his watch; it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, too early for breakfast when people were on holiday.

  After getting out of bed, Michael opened the windows, then the shutters. The wood creaked like elderly bones as he pushed them back against the outside wall and secured them with metal hooks. Warm sunshine filtered into the bedroom, and he stood a moment, absorbing its heat. The view below, over the shimmering swimming pool, was magnificent; patchwork squares of lush green fields were interspersed with pops of yellow where row after row of sunflowers had been planted among the crops. A feeling of well-being came over him; two weeks here would do wonders for his bruised heart before he started work again. Here, he might be able to appreciate the solitude that had been his companion since Julie had left.

  After leaving the bedroom, he explored the rest of the house more fully. His bedroom and bathroom were at one end of the corridor, Kate and Simon’s at the other end, with the stairs in between. Downstairs, there was a kitchen and a sitting room with an old bread oven under the huge stone chimney.

  “I always meant to get it working again,” Nathan had said regretfully when he’d pointed out this quir ky feature to Michael yesterday. “You should have a look inside. It’s an amazing feat of engineering, considering it was built nearly two hundred years ago.”

  “Another time,” Saskia had pleaded. “The others are waiting for us to sit down.”

  Now, after walking over to the chimney, Michael unlatched the iron door of the ancient bread oven and, bending his head, looked inside. He let out a low whistle. The oven was enormous, about two meters in diameter, with a domed ceiling and rounded walls. Simon had explained how it would have been used, and Michael imagined the farmer’s wife building a fire at one side of the oven, then, using the flat, wooden-handled shovel—which still hung on a hook by the chimney—placing freshly made dough on the other side and leaving it to bake in the circulating heat. It was a shame Nathan had never managed to get it working, Michael thought. If he owned the farmhouse, it would be the first thing on his list.

  In the kitchen, he found a coffee machine and various capsules and made himself an espresso. He carried it back upstairs and drank it standing by the open window, letting the morning sun wrap itself around him. Impatient to be outside, he decided to start his day with a swim. His mood dipped slightly when he looked in the bathroom mirror and saw three large mosquito bites on his forehead and two more on his cheeks. Scowling at the memory of the night spent chasing the mosquito around the bedroom, he examined the rest of his body. There were more bites on his neck and shoulders and some on his right arm. Seeing them made him itch. He ducked into the shower quickly, hoping the cool water would take away the incessant urge to scratch.

  The gravel on the driveway crunched under Michael’s feet as he made his way to the pool. As he passed the main house, he glanced up at Rupert’s bedroom window and saw that the shutters were still closed. There was no sound from the terrace, no clatter of the table being laid for breakfast, so he draped his towel over a chair and dived into the pool. Moving through the cool water, he swam length after unhurried length and found himself thinking, once again, what Julie had said about him being too nice. Maybe he should take it as a compliment.

  “After all,” he said to the empty pool, “it made me who I am today, someone who gets on well with my family, my friends, my colleagues, my—” He’d been about to say students, but the word colleagues had hit him with such force that he hadn’t been able to utter it. Julie wasn’t just his wife; she was also his colleague. His heart plummeted. Once the holidays were over, he would be seeing her every day at the school where they worked.

  “You do know that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness, don’t you?”

  Michael, still reeling from his sudden realization, stopped swimming and looked up at Rupert.

  “Sorry?” he asked, treading water.

  “You were talking to yourself.”

  Michael flushed. “Did you want something?”

  “I just wondered where you were, that’s all. I thought you would be helping get breakfast ready. But you’re swimming.”

  “I didn’t think anyone was up. I’ll get out now.”

  “No, carry on, enjoy your swim. We can manage.”

  Michael got out of the pool anyway. The way Rupert had said that they could manage made it sound as if it was a difficult task to set the table for six people and carry bread, butter, and jam from the kitchen. After going to his room, he pulled shorts and a polo shirt from his case, dressed quickly, and made his way to the terrace. Only Rupert was there, placing plates and knives on the rectangular wooden table.

  “Where is everyone?” Michael asked.

  “Still in bed, I presume.”

  “Right.” He wanted to ask why Rupert had made it seem as if he should get out of the pool but remained silent.

  “I thought you might want to give a hand with breakfast, as you weren’t around to help for dinner last night,” Rupert said, as if he’d done him a favor. “We all need to muck in, you know.”

  Michael frowned. “I have every intention of helping.” He reached toward the remaining three plates and knives in Rupert’s hand. “Would you like me to take those for you?”

  “No, but you can fetch mugs and spoons and the rest of the breakfast things.”

  There was the clunk of a shutter being opened above. Michael stepped back from the terrace and, looking up, saw Saskia at the window, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulder.

  “Goodness, Michael, you’re up early. Didn’t you sleep?”

  “Not much. I was plagued by mosquitoes. Sorry if we’ve woken you.” He nodded toward the terrace. “Rupert was keen to get everything ready for breakfast.”

  Saskia leaned farther out the window.

  “Rupert, we said nine o’clock for breakfast! It’s barely eight.”

  “And it’s a beautiful day!” Rupert called back. “Why waste it?”

  Saskia shrugged good-naturedly. “OK, we’ll come down. Maybe you can give Kate and Simon a shout.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were all gathered on the terrace.

  “It’s too early.” Kate groaned, yawning and tugging her silk wrap around her. Her chestnut curls gleamed in the sunlight. “I thought we agreed nine for breakfast?”

  “You all agreed,” Rupert said pointedly. “Michael and I didn’t.”

  “I’m perfectly happy with breakfast at nine,” Michael said.

  Rupert, sitting next to him, twisted in his chair. “Those mosquito bites are quite something. Not just the ones on your face but also the ones on your neck. They’re impressive.”

  Michael self-consciously raised his hand to his neck. Rupert was right; the bites were enormous.

  “I can give you something for those,” Saskia said, smiling sympathetically at him. She turned to the others. “Right, what’s the plan for the day?”

  As Saskia and Kate began talking about the local markets, Rupert leaned toward him. “Well, at least the mosquitoes like you,” he murmured in Michael’s ear.

  Michael moved his head away. “What do you mean?”

  “She left you, didn’t she? Your wife?”

  He stared at Rupert. Was he insinuating that the mosquitoes liked him better than Julie had? “Yes,” he said. “She did.”

  “Why?”

  He was saved from answering by Kate. “What are you two talking about? We’re trying to decide which of the markets we should go to this morning.”

  Michael was glad to be able to change the subject. “The one in Bergerac is meant to be good.”

  “Michael was just telling me why his wife left him,” Rupert said.

  “Oh, sorry,” Kate said hurriedly. “I shouldn’t have interrupted.”

  “I wasn’t actually,” Michael explained. “Rupert asked me why Julie had left, but that’s as far as we’d got.”

  “Was that her name, Julie?” Rupert again.

  “Yes.”

  “So why did Julie leave you?”

  Michael bristled at the sound of Julie’s name on Rupert’s tongue.

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  Rupert clapped him on the shoulder. “What was his name?”

  “Who?”

  “The man Julie left you for.”

  Michael couldn’t believe Rupert’s lack of sensitivity. “She didn’t leave me for anyone.”

  Rupert’s eyes—set a little too close together—widened.

  “What, she left you for no good reason?”

  Simon gave Michael a look of solidarity, then pushed his glasses farther back up his nose. “If we’re going to the market, we should leave soon,” he said, breaking the silence that had descended on the table.

  Nathan stood up. “At the cars in fifteen minutes. Simon and I will drive.”

  “Fifteen minutes!” Saskia squawked. “I need to shower.” She gathered up the plates and left the terrace.

  Kate picked up the butter and jams. “I’ll put these in the fridge.”

  “I’ll do that,” Michael offered. “You go and get ready.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I know how long it takes you,” he teased.

  They were interrupted by a sigh so loud that Rupert must have trawled it from the depths of his stomach. “Angelica and I were so happy together,” he said wistfully. And before Michael and Kate could think how to respond, he sauntered off.

  Kate looked at her brother. “What was all that about?”

 

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