La Soif

Chapter 1: The Letter

The envelope arrived on a Tuesday, which Sylvie would later consider cosmically appropriate. Tuesdays were the days she worked double shifts at Maison Verre, the Michelin-starred restaurant on West Randolph where she'd spent five years building a reputation as one of Chicago's finest sommeliers. Tuesdays were unglamorous. Tuesdays were when she restocked the cellar, reconciled invoices, and reminded herself that discipline was its own reward.

She found it wedged between a gas bill and a Pottery Barn catalog in the mailbox of her Logan Square apartment. The paper was heavy, cream-colored, European. The return address was a law firm in Aix-en-Provence. She opened it standing in the hallway, still wearing her black service apron, and read it twice before the words arranged themselves into meaning.

Her great-uncle, Henri Kendall—born Henri Renault, before he'd anglicized the name for reasons no one in her family had ever satisfactorily explained—was dead. He had been dead for three years, in fact. The letter was not a death notice but a resolution: his estate had finally cleared probate, and as his sole surviving blood relative, Sylvie was the beneficiary.

The estate was a vineyard. In Provence. Called Les Ombres.

Sylvie set the letter on her kitchen counter and stared at it while the kettle boiled. She knew almost nothing about Henri. Her father, Tom Kendall—a retired electrician from Cicero who considered a glass of Chianti the height of sophistication—had mentioned his uncle exactly three times in Sylvie's memory. Once to say he'd moved to France. Once to say he was "eccentric, in the way rich people get to be." And once, at Thanksgiving, after too much beer, to say that Henri had "chosen a different kind of life" with a tone that foreclosed all follow-up questions.

Sylvie had never met him. She'd seen one photograph: a tall man with silver hair and sharp cheekbones standing in front of a stone building draped in wisteria, squinting into the sun like he was daring it to look away first. He'd looked nothing like her father.

She poured her tea and sat down at the small table where she and Greg usually ate dinner. Greg—her fiancé, technically. Gregory Walsh, CPA, thirty-two years old, steady as a metronome and roughly as exciting. He'd proposed eight months ago with a half-carat diamond and a speech about partnership and shared values that had sounded, even in the moment, more like a pitch deck than a declaration of love. She'd said yes because saying no would have required a reason, and she didn't have one. Greg was kind. Greg was reliable. Greg would never leave her standing in a doorway wondering what had happened.

The problem was that Sylvie had begun to suspect she was the kind of woman who needed to wonder.

She picked up the letter again. The law firm—Beaufort & Laroche, Avocats—requested her presence in Aix-en-Provence at her earliest convenience to complete the transfer of the property. There were details about taxes, maintenance arrears, and the condition of the estate ("requiring significant renovation"), but Sylvie's eyes kept returning to the name.

Les Ombres. The Shadows.

She said it aloud in the empty kitchen, and the French felt good in her mouth, like the first sip of a wine that was going to be extraordinary.

---

She told Greg that evening over takeout pad thai. He listened with the careful, neutral expression he used when clients brought him receipts they'd clearly fabricated.

"A vineyard," he repeated.

"In Provence. Near a town called Bonnieux."

"And you want to—what? Go look at it?"

"I want to go claim it."

Greg set down his chopsticks. He had a way of making even small gestures feel deliberate, like he was always building a case. "Sylvie, you don't know anything about running a vineyard."

"I know wine."

"You know how to sell wine. That's not the same as growing grapes in a foreign country where you barely speak the language."

"My French is decent."

"Your French is restaurant French. You can describe tasting notes and ask where the restroom is."

She almost laughed, because he wasn't wrong. But something about the precision of his objections—the way he was already drawing a perimeter around the possible—made her chest tighten.

"Greg, I'm going."

He studied her face the way he studied spreadsheets: looking for the error, the line that didn't add up. "For how long?"

"I don't know."

"What about your job?"

"I'll take a leave."

"What about us?"

The question hung in the air between them, and Sylvie realized with a clarity that was almost physical—like a cork releasing from a bottle, the sudden exhale of pressure—that she'd been waiting for this question. Not to answer it, but to hear it asked in exactly this way: as an item on a checklist, a problem to be managed.

"I think," she said carefully, "that us is something we should talk about."

The conversation that followed was the most honest they'd had in two years. It was also the last real conversation they would ever have. Greg did not yell. Greg did not cry. Greg sat very still and said, "I see," and then, "I suppose I've known for a while," and then, "You should take the ring to a jeweler. You'll get more for it than you'd think."

She packed a suitcase that night. She booked a flight the next morning. She called her manager at Maison Verre and explained, and because Pierre was French and understood that sometimes a person must do something unreasonable, he told her the position would be waiting if she came back within three months.

"And if I don't come back?" she asked.

"Then you will have found something better than a wine list, and I will be happy for you."

She sublet the apartment to a friend of a friend, a graduate student who was thrilled by the exposed brick and the proximity to the Blue Line. She put her furniture in storage. She told her parents she was going to France to "handle the inheritance," and her mother said, "Be careful over there," as if Provence were a war zone, and her father said nothing at all.

On the plane, somewhere over the Atlantic, Sylvie opened the letter again and traced the address of Les Ombres with her fingertip. She didn't know what she was looking for. She only knew that for the first time in years, she was thirsty for something she couldn't name.