Page 29 of The Vines Between Us

Chapter Twenty-One

ALEXANDRE

T hree days later, Hugo and I boarded the early morning TGV to Lyon for the funeral. The countryside blurred past the window as we sat side by side, our fingers loosely intertwined on the armrest between us.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Hugo asked, his voice low enough that other passengers couldn't hear. "No one would blame you for staying away."

I shook my head, watching vineyards give way to industrial outskirts. "I need to see it end. To know it's really over."

The train rocked gently as we curved around a bend. Hugo squeezed my hand. "I'll be right beside you the whole time."

"Thank you," I whispered. "For coming with me. For... everything."

We arrived in Lyon by mid-morning. The city of my childhood nightmares looked different somehow—less oppressive, as if my father's death had lifted a shadow from the architecture itself.

The funeral home was quiet when we arrived, an hour before the service. My mother had arranged for me to have a private moment with the body. Hugo waited in the hallway while I entered the viewing room alone.

My father looked smaller in death than he had in life. The casket was open, his face waxy and unfamiliar in repose. The hands that had struck my mother, that had beaten me bloody when he'd caught me with Hugo that last summer, were folded peacefully over his chest.

I stood there for a long moment, waiting for the fear to rise. It didn't come.

Instead, a wave of pure, molten rage crashed through me, so intense my vision blurred at the edges.

"You bastard," I hissed, my hands curling into fists at my sides. "You miserable, pathetic bastard."

My whole body trembled. Thirty-two years of suppressed fury surged up from somewhere deep inside me.

"Do you know what you took from us? From Mother? From me?" My voice rose despite my efforts to control it. "Every summer when I left for Henri's, I prayed you'd be dead when I came back. Every. Single. Summer."

I leaned over the casket, close enough to see the mortician's makeup covering the broken capillaries of a lifetime alcoholic.

"You made her life hell. You made my life hell. And for what? To feel powerful? To prove you were a man?" I laughed, a harsh sound in the quiet room. "You were never half the man Henri was. Never half the man Hugo is."

I placed my palms flat on the edge of the casket, lowering my voice to a whisper.

"Hugo and I are together now. We're going to build something beautiful at the vineyard. We're going to be happy—so goddamn happy it would make you sick. And Mother? She's free. She's finally free of you."

I straightened up, suddenly calm.

"I don't forgive you. I will never forgive you. But you don't matter anymore. You're nothing now."

I turned and walked out without looking back .

Hugo was waiting, concern etched across his face. "Are you alright?"

"Better than I expected," I said, and meant it.

HUGO

Alexandre's mother asked me to walk with her in the church garden while Alexandre spoke with relatives.

Her request surprised me—we'd barely exchanged more than polite greetings since arriving in Lyon.

She looked different than I remembered from that last summer.

Smaller, perhaps, but somehow more present.

"Hugo," she said when we reached a stone bench beneath a flowering tree. "I've waited so long to speak with you properly."

She gestured for me to sit beside her. Her hands were like Alexandre's—long-fingered and elegant, though hers showed signs of age that his did not yet bear.

"Madame Moreau—"

"Marie," she corrected gently. "Please."

"Marie," I amended. "I'm not sure what to say. I'm sorry for your loss seems... inadequate."

A smile flickered across her face, surprisingly genuine. "It's no loss, Hugo. It's a liberation."

She turned slightly to face me, her eyes—so like Alexandre's—searching mine.

"I knew about you and Alexandre that last summer," she said quietly. "I saw how he looked at you. How you looked at him. It was the happiest I'd ever seen my son."

My heart stuttered in my chest. "You never said anything."

"I couldn't." Her voice dropped to nearly a whisper. "Pierre would have... well, you know about his threats now." She looked down at her hands. "He said he'd hurt me if Alexandre continued seeing you. That he'd make my life even more unbearable than it already was."

I swallowed hard, remembering what Alexandre had told me about his father's manipulations.

"He used me as leverage," she continued.

"Always. Alexandre stayed away to protect me.

" She reached out and took my hands in hers.

"Every night after Alexandre left for Paris, I prayed he would find his way back to you someday.

When he would call, I could hear the emptiness in his voice.

The loneliness. I knew what was missing. "

Tears welled in her eyes, but they seemed like tears of release, not sorrow.

"Thank you," she said, squeezing my hands. "For being patient with him. For giving him time to find his way back to himself."

I had to clear my throat before I could speak. "Thank you for giving him life. For protecting him as much as you could."

"He has my heart," she whispered. "But my heart was always too soft for this world." Her grip on my hands tightened. "Promise me you'll take care of my boy, Hugo. Promise me you'll love him the way he deserves to be loved."

"I promise," I said without hesitation. "I'll love him every day for the rest of our lives. You don't have to worry anymore."

She nodded once, releasing my hands to wipe away her tears. "Good. That's good." She stood, smoothing her black dress. "We should go back. He'll be wondering where we've gone."

As we walked back toward the church, she added quietly, "Be patient with him still. He's learning how to be happy without waiting for the blow to fall."

"I know," I said. "I have all the patience in the world for him."

She smiled then, a real smile that transformed her face. "Yes," she said. "I believe you do."

ALEXANDRE

The church was half-full for the service.

We sat in the back while my mother received condolences from people who'd known my father as a respected businessman, not the monster he'd been at home.

His brother, my uncle Bernard, delivered a eulogy full of platitudes about family values and moral character that made me dig my fingernails into my palms.

I watched my father's relatives—the aunts who'd seen my mother's bruises and said nothing, the cousins who'd witnessed his drunken rages at family gatherings and looked the other way.

They all wore appropriately somber expressions, maintaining the charade they'd participated in for decades.

The great conspiracy of silence that had protected him and imprisoned us.

"His side of the family knows," I whispered to Hugo. "They've always known what he was. Look at them—not one genuine tear in the place."

Hugo's hand found mine between us on the pew. "They have to live with that knowledge," he murmured back. "You don't, not anymore."

He was right. The tension that had lived in my mother's shoulders for decades was gone.

She stood straighter, spoke more clearly, even smiled—something I hadn't seen her do in my father's presence since childhood.

Her black dress was simple but elegant, and for the first time I noticed how much she resembled the photographs of her youth, before my father had diminished her.

After the service, when the last mourners had filed past the casket, my mother approached us. She embraced me first, then turned to Hugo.

"Thank you both for coming," she said. "Would you join me for dinner? There's a little bistro near my apartment that Pierre would never take me to. Too bohemian for his tastes."

The way she said it—with a small, defiant smile—made my heart ache for all the simple pleasures she'd denied herself to keep the peace.

"We'd love to," I said.

The bistro was exactly as she'd described—warm, intimate, with mismatched chairs and local art on the walls. We ordered wine, and my mother raised her glass.

"To new beginnings," she said.

Hugo and I echoed the toast. For a while, we ate and talked of inconsequential things—the unseasonable warmth, the quality of the wine, the pianist playing softly in the corner.

Then, as our plates were cleared, my mother set down her napkin with a decisive gesture.

"I'm going to Italy," she announced. "There's a little art school in Florence I've always dreamed of attending. I think it's time, don't you?"

I reached across and took her hand. "More than time, Maman."

She smiled, a real smile that reached her eyes. "And you two will be alright at the vineyard?"

Hugo and I exchanged a glance. "We will," I assured her.

"Good." She took a sip of her wine. "I've accepted an offer on the house—it's been standing for months.

Pierre refused to even consider it, but I called the buyers yesterday and they're still interested.

I never want to see that place again. The money will be more than enough for the art school and a small apartment in Florence. "

"When will you go?" I asked.

"Next week, if all goes well with the paperwork." She looked almost girlish in her excitement. "I've already enrolled. Classes start in a fortnight."

We walked her back to her apartment after dinner. At the door, she embraced us both, holding on a moment longer than usual.

"Be happy," she whispered. "Both of you. Be so very happy."

That night, in the hotel room we shared, Hugo held me while I finally grieved—not for my father, but for the years we'd lost, the fear that had shaped us, the love we'd been forced to hide.

"I want to take you to see the secret room, you still haven’t seen it,” I whispered against his chest. "Where Henri and Claude loved each other despite everything. I want to love you there, in the open, without hiding."

"We don't have to hide anymore," Hugo murmured, his lips against my hair. "Ever again."

And for the first time in my life, I believed it might be true.