After Rebirth, I Became My Ex's Aunt-in-Law

Ken arrived at 9:41 p.m.

Aria heard the car first. Headlights swept across the foyer windows, crawled up the wall, and went dark. A door slammed. Footsteps crunched across the gravel.

She was halfway across the foyer when something small shot past her knees.

Théo had refused to go to bed. He had spent the whole evening on the third step of the staircase in a sweater that reached his shins, guarding the front door. Margaux had tried to carry him upstairs twice. Both times he had gone limp like a sack of flour and slid out of her arms.

Now he hit the door at a run, dragged it open with both hands, and charged into the dark.

On the porch stood a tall man in a charcoal suit.

In the rain, with the porch light dead, he looked exactly like Damien.

Théo kicked him in the shin.

”Ow!” The man hopped backward, clutching a hard-shell case to his chest. ”Sir? Sir, there’s a child—”

”He thought you were me,” Damien said from the staircase.

Ken looked down at Théo. Then up at Damien. Then down at his own suit.

”That keeps happening to me,” he said.

Théo looked at Ken. He turned and looked at Damien. He looked back at Ken.

Aria watched him do the math. All the color left his face.

”Il y en a deux,” he whispered.

(There are two of them.)

He fled up the stairs so fast he lost a sock on the landing.

Aria bit the inside of her cheek and went out onto the porch. ”Ken. Hi. Welcome to France.”

Up close, Ken looked like a man who had been shipped there in a crate. His tie was gone. One cuff was stained with what she hoped was coffee. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his hair stood up on one side where it had been pressed against an airplane window.

He held the case in one hand. In the other he held four enormous shopping bags.

”Mrs. Sinclair,” he said. ”I have not slept.”

”I know. It’s been noted.”

”I would like it noted again.”

”Noted again.”

Ken nodded, satisfied, and limped inside.

Damien took the case from him. He didn’t take the bags. Ken set them down on the floor under the half-bald chandelier, and one tipped over. A shoebox slid out. Then another. Small sneakers. A pair of rain boots with frogs on the toes.

Aria stared at them. ”What is all this?”

”I landed at four,” Ken said. ”Mr. Sinclair sent me a photograph of a shoe rack and one word.”

Aria looked at Damien.

”’All,’” Ken said. ”The word was ’all.’ I have been to three stores. I did not know what size a French six-year-old wears. I know now.”

Aria barely heard him. She was looking at her husband.

He stood at the foot of the stairs with the case under his arm, looking at the shoes like a line item he was checking off.

”When did you do that?” she asked.

”After breakfast.”

”Why?”

”I saw his feet.”

Something in Aria’s chest gave way. She crossed the foyer, wrapped both arms around his waist, and pressed her face into his sweater. He smelled like woodsmoke and the cheap soap from the guest bathroom.

His free hand settled on the back of her head.

”You’re a good man,” she said into his chest.

A floorboard creaked.

Séverine stood on the first landing in a grey cardigan, one hand on the banister, looking down at the shoes spilled across her floor.

Nobody moved.

”Je ne peux pas te payer,” Séverine said.

(I can’t pay you.)

”Je n’ai rien demandé,” Damien replied.

(I didn’t ask for anything.)

Séverine came down the stairs. She crouched beside the bags and went through the boxes one at a time, reading the sizes printed on the ends. Ken edged out of her way.

She stopped at a pair of navy sneakers with a white stripe and turned the box over in her rough hands.

”Trente-et-un,” she said. ”Le petit aux chaussures coupées.”

”Thirty-one,” Damien told Aria. ”For the boy with the cut shoes.”

Séverine stood with the box held against her chest. She looked at Damien for a long moment.

Then she went back upstairs.

”Was that a thank-you?” Ken whispered.

”That was a thank-you,” Aria said.

Ten minutes later, the kitchen was empty except for the three of them and the stove ticking as it cooled.

Ken set the case on the oak table, spun the combination locks, and opened it. Inside, nested in grey foam, sat her mother’s wooden box.

”It has not left my sight in twenty hours,” Ken said. ”I even took it into the airplane bathroom.”

”Thank you, Ken,” Aria said, and meant it.

”Go to the inn,” Damien said.

Ken blinked. ”Which room, sir?”

”Any of them.”

Ken looked at him with such naked gratitude that Aria thought he might cry. He gathered his coat and limped to the back door. He stopped with his hand on the latch.

”Mrs. Sinclair. The boy. Will he be at breakfast?”

”Probably.”

Ken nodded grimly and went out into the rain.

Then it was quiet.

Aria checked her phone out of habit. Forty-five hours.

She pulled the box toward her. Plain dark wood, brass corners gone green. The last time she had opened it, she had been sitting on a guest bed in the penthouse, married to a man she barely knew, with no idea who her mother had been.

She lifted the lid.

Cedar and old paper. The journals were stacked on the left, their leather covers soft as gloves. A bundle of photographs was tied with a ribbon. Underneath everything, tucked in the corner, lay the velvet pouch.

She went for the photographs first. It was easier.

Most of them she had seen a hundred times. Her parents on a beach. Her father with a mustache he never should have grown. A Christmas tree with too much tinsel.

The last one she didn’t remember at all.

A garden in summer. A little girl of about six sat in the dirt with a plastic trowel and a smear of mud across her forehead, scowling at the camera. Beside her, a woman knelt with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, laughing at something out of frame.

Aria turned it over. Faded blue ink, in her mother’s handwriting.

[Aria, 6 ans. Ma petite jardinière.]

She held it out without a word.

”Aria, six,” Damien read. ”My little gardener.”

Aria looked at the photo for a long time. She still made that face.

”I don’t remember this day,” she said. ℯℯ𝑙.

Damien moved his chair closer until his knee pressed against hers.

She set the photograph face-up on the table where she could see it, and reached into the corner of the box for the pouch.

The velvet had faded from wine to the color of an old bruise. The drawstring was stiff. She worked it loose and tipped the pouch over her palm.

The key slid out.

It was longer than her hand, black with rust, its teeth worn blunt. Cold from the flight. Heavier than something its size had any right to be.

Her fingers closed around it.

Damien was watching her face. ”Aria?”

”I’ve held this before,” she said.