Page 11 of Love is a Harmony
“Yes, I only just found out someone had been asking questions about Carson.” His eyes turned sad. “I’m sorry for your loss.” He looked to the door and lifted his voice. “Jess?”
The girl from the desk poked her head in, and he said something to her in French. She nodded and scurried away.
“Jess is cancelling the rest of my afternoon.”
“You don’t have to do that.” Yet, Noah was grateful for it. He needed someone to help him understand everything that had happened. What was Carson doing in this town? What happened to him?
“Of course, I do.” Mathieu sighed. “Your brother was my friend, family. And that means you, by extension, are too. He told me so much about you.”
Noah couldn’t stop the resentment from rising in him. If his brother cared so much for him, why hadn’t he contacted him in so long?
He didn’t voice the awful questions running through his mind, questions he’d never find the answers to.
Mathieu stood. “Will you come with me? I will explain everything, but there is somewhere we need to go first.”
Noah couldn’t stomach the thought of going to the hotel alone right now, so he nodded and followed Mathieu out onto the street and around the corner where a tiny green car waited for them. If Noah were here for a different reason, he’d have laughed at the size, but instead, he threw his bag in the back and slid in.
Melanie would yell at him for going somewhere with a stranger in a foreign country, but was someone who knew his brother really a stranger? There had been real grief in the man’s eyes. Noah recognized it because it matched his own.
As they wound through narrow streets and onto a road that led into the fields outside town, Mathieu wittered on. “I met your brother about three years ago, and I never imagined what he’d come to mean to my family. My kids are completely heartbroken.”
It seemed Carson went out and found himself a new family. Noah tried not to resent them.
“I do know who you are, Noah. Carson took my oldest daughter to a show you did in Paris a couple years ago.”
Noah’s heart stopped beating in his chest. “Carson was there?”
“He was so proud. I’d never seen him quite as excited as when he came home that night.”
“But why…” Noah stopped himself. Why hadn’t Carson contacted him?
“I can practically feel the questions coming off you.” Mathieu sighed. “He tried, Noah. A few years ago, he even contacted your parents to get your number, but they refused to give it. When he emailed your website, a form email was sent back. There were roadblocks to getting to you he couldn’t overcome.”
Noah leaned his head against the window. He’d give every bit of the fame and the roadblocks that came with it to talk to Carson again. “He really tried?”
Mathieu nodded, his eyes still on the road.
And Noah’s parents kept him away. He’d wondered if he made the right decision coming here alone, but now he knew he did. He needed to find out about Carson’s life here before his parents descended to throw an event of a funeral and act like the grieving parents to garner sympathy.
Mathieu pulled up in front of a stone house surrounded by fields and rolling hills. Steam rose from a chimney on the roof. A porch sported a white swing where a teenage boy lounged with a book in his lap.
As soon as Mathieu and Noah closed their doors, the boy sat up. “Da.” He said something in French, and Mathieu sighed.
“Seems his sisters are teasing him.” He turned back to his son. “Go inside and find Stella.”
He left without another word.
Mathieu stopped at the bottom of the porch steps. “I brought you here without warning or explanation. I know you don’t know me, but there are moments when our lives change forever. Are you prepared for yours?”
Noah didn’t know what more could change, but he understood what the man meant. Hearing Carson was dead was such a moment for him.
The boy returned holding the hand of a little girl with long dark hair and even darker, fathomless eyes. There was something familiar about her, something… Noah didn’t understand.
But the sadness in her eyes… that, he understood.
“Stell.” Mathieu held out a hand. She inched forward, and he lifted her off the porch. Her little legs twisted around him, and she held on tightly like she trusted him. “I want you to meet Noah.”
“Bonjour.” She chewed on the ends of her hair.
