First snow at the guesthouse
Winter comes earlier than usual in Provence.
As Ah Yu knelt before the fireplace, black ash from repairing the chimney the night before was still stuck between his fingers. The pine wood crackled softly in the firebox, sparks flying onto the back of his hands, but he seemed oblivious, preoccupied with using an iron skewer to spread the half-burnt wood more evenly. The snow outside the window had started falling in the latter half of the night, initially just scattered specks of white, but by dawn it had blanketed the withered lavender stems in front of the guesthouse, turning the entire valley into a sugary white.
"Be careful, it's hot."
Zhong Hua's voice drifted over, mingling with the soft thud of wool slippers on the wooden floor. When Ah Yu turned her head, she saw her standing in the kitchen doorway, holding two round-bellied glasses. The wine shimmered with an amber light on the glass, and the aromas of cinnamon and citrus wafted in through the crack in the door, mingling with the pine resin from the fireplace.
"Is it fixed?" She knelt down beside him and handed him one of the glasses. There was still a faint red ring around the rim of the glass, the lip print she had left when she tested the temperature earlier, and some wine stains that hadn't been wiped off, like a crumpled maple leaf.
When Ah Yu took the camera, his fingertips touched hers, and they both paused for a moment. He remembered three months ago in Montmartre, when she turned around with her camera in hand, and the first image reflected in the lens was of himself—she looked just like that then, with raindrops still clinging to her eyelashes, yet she smiled and held the camera close to him, saying that the sunset held the unfinished blue of Monet's painting.
“There’s only one baffle left.” He bent down to tighten the screws on the side of the fireplace, his voice muffled by the sound of the firewood. “I just tested it, and the smoke isn’t backflowing.”
Zhong Hua didn't speak, but simply moved her cup closer to him. Ah Yu followed her movement and looked over, only to find that her cup also had a blurry stain on the rim. When it overlapped with the red stain on the rim of her cup, they looked like two stamps soaked in snow water, as if sending the warmth of this room somewhere.
"Want to try it?" When she looked up, the scar on her forehead, from being jostled by reporters at the truth-clarification press conference, was almost invisible in the firelight. Ah Yu remembered that when she first had her stitches removed, she always liked to cover them with her bangs. It wasn't until one day on a prayer wheel in Tibet, when he secretly tied his red string to the prayer wheel she had tied, that she suddenly said, "Actually, the scar isn't anything. It's like a river that shines."
The mulled wine slid down her throat, carrying a slightly hot, sweet taste. Ah Yu's Adam's apple bobbed, and she heard Zhong Hua suddenly chuckle. "Look," she said, raising her glass, the lip print on the rim glistening in the firelight, "I didn't wipe the glass clean enough when I washed it yesterday, it looks like..."
“It’s like we shared a cup,” Ah Yu said, the iron skewer slipping from her hand and tapping crisply on the stone floor. He remembered those nights he spent watching over her outside the ICU, her lying in bed, the green light of the monitor clinging to her eyelashes. When he read the line from her interview transcript about “the person I’m most grateful to,” her knuckles suddenly curled under the sheets. At that moment, he thought that if he could wait until she woke up, he would definitely take her somewhere without flashing lights, to see something slower than a press conference.
Zhong Hua suddenly got up and walked to the window. She was wearing Ah Yu's dark gray wool sweater, the hem reaching her knees, the cuffs bunched up on the back of her hands, revealing half of her wrist—where a light pink mark still remained, a scratch from last year's mudslide where she had been cut by rubble. Back then, when he carried her unconscious as he crawled out of the ravine, his fingertips trembled as he touched the ginkgo leaf specimen in her hair. It was the first gift he had given her, when she was still a reporter covering social news, and he was still an insignificant assistant at the Gu Group. He had slipped it to her at the entrance to the break room, saying, "Your reports, like this leaf, can preserve autumn."
"The snow seems to be getting heavier." She drew circles on the fogged glass with her fingertip, and the fog dispersed with her movement, revealing olive branches bent under the weight of snow. "I saw a car at the valley entrance just now, probably the guests who booked yesterday?"
When Ah Yu walked to her side, the fire in the fireplace was burning brightly, casting their shadows on the wall like elongated silhouettes. He remembered the postcard Lin Wanqing had sent, with a drawing on the back depicting three small figures standing at the foot of a snow-capped mountain, two close together, and the third holding a camera. In the distance, prayer flags fluttered in the wind like ellipses. The letter had arrived last month, sent from a refugee camp in Africa. The postmark was faded, but the handwriting was still the same as before, with a deliberately practiced ease: "The snow in Provence is softer than in Paris; remember to keep plenty of firewood in the fireplace."
“It’s an elderly couple,” Ah Yu said, looking out the window. “They called yesterday and said they wanted to stay until spring.” He paused, then added, “They said they came here to see the lavender when they were young and stayed in this guesthouse back then.”
When Zhong Hua turned to look at him, the light in her eyes was brighter than the sparks in the fireplace. "Will they remember..." She stopped mid-sentence, her fingertips unconsciously tracing the rim of the glass. Ah Yu knew what she wanted to say—this guesthouse originally belonged to the Gu Group. Back then, Gu Yanting, in order to please Lin Wanqing, renovated it into a French country style according to her preferences. Later, the Gu Group went bankrupt, and when the court awarded the property to them, he and Zhong Hua stood in the dusty living room, feeling as if they had stumbled into someone else's old dream.
It wasn't until last month, when he changed the brass key his father left him into a house number and Zhong Hua engraved the three initials on the back, that he suddenly felt that the house was finally starting to feel like their home.
“Maybe she remembers.” Ah Yu reached out and tucked a stray strand of hair, ruffled by the wind, behind her ear. When her fingertips brushed against her earlobe, she flinched as if burned, but didn't pull away. “While cleaning the guest room, I found an old photo album in the bedside table drawer. There was an old photo inside, three people standing in a lavender field, their backs looking very similar…”
“Does it resemble the three of us?” Zhong Hua interjected, her voice as soft as snow falling on a rooftop.
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