At long last I sensed her great force in the room, like I had when I was cooking on opening night, and I snapped open my eyes.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want it to come to this.”

It began to rain outside.

Mallory was partly in shadow, but I could see the outline of her bun, the muscular arms, the trademark wicker basket from earlier in the day. This was, I realized, the first time we had ever talked with one another.

“Why do you hate us?”

I heard the sharp intake of her breath. But she did not reply. Instead, she moved over to the window and looked out into the dark. Sheets of water poured down the black glass.

“Your hands are all right. They were not damaged.”

“No.”

“You’ll still have the same sensitivity in your hands. You can still cook.”

I didn’t say anything. My emotions were too jumbled and in my throat. I was grateful that I could still cook, yes, but all my family’s troubles were because of this woman, and I could not forgive her. At least not yet.

Madame Mallory pulled a package out of her basket, almond and apricot pastries. “Please, try one of my pastries,” she said. I sat up and she leaned over to fluff the pillows behind my back. “Tell me,” she said, turning her back on me and again looking out the window, “what do you taste?”

“Apricot and almond filling.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, there’s also a thin layer of nutmeg and pistachio paste, and the glaze is a lacquer made from egg yolks and honey. And you’ve—let me think—is it almond? No. I know. It’s vanilla. You’ve crushed vanilla pods and worked the powder right into the puff pastry.”

Madame Mallory could not find words. She continued to look out the window, rain pouring down the pane as if some goddess up above were weeping with a broken heart.

And when she did turn around, her eyes glistened like Spanish olives, a single eyebrow arched up, and she stared fiercely at me like that in the dusk until I realized, for the first time, I had the culinary equivalent of perfect pitch.

Mallory finally placed the wax paper and pastries on the portable hospital tray. “Good night,” she said. “I wish you well.”

A few moments later she was out the door again, and I immediately let out a sigh, as the air rushed from the room. Only after she was well and truly gone did I realize how incredibly tense and sur mes gardes I had been in her presence.

But she was gone, a great weight was lifted, and I sank back into my bed and closed my eyes.

Well, that’s that, I thought.

The dining room was full when Mallory arrived back at Le Saule Pleureur late that night. Monsieur Leblanc stood at his spot at the reception desk, greeting the guests and taking them to their tables. The white jackets of the junior waiters quickly flashed by the window, silver domes glinting as they were borne aloft among the maze of starched linen tables.

Mallory saw all this from outside, as she stood up to her ankles in snow and looked in silently through the brightly lit windows above her rock garden. She saw the wine steward warming a brandy while Le Comte de Nancy Selière laughed, his gold-capped tooth sparkling in the light. And she watched the count as he lifted a piece of pineapple spice bread to his lips, his aging face suddenly filled with a hedonistic pleasure.

Mallory brought a hand to her throat, moved beyond words at the sight of her life’s work elegantly, effortlessly turning over in the night. And she stood like that in the cold dark for some time, silently observing her staff devoting themselves to the restaurant and its customers, until the exhausting events of the day at long last settled into her weary joints. It was shortly before St. Augustine chimed midnight that Mallory took the back stairs to her attic, finally surrendering body and soul to the rhythms of the night.

“You had me worried,” Monsieur Leblanc scolded the next morning. “We couldn’t find you. I thought, My God, what have I done? What have I done?”

“Ah, cher Henri.”

But that was all the emotion Mallory could express, and she busied herself with the buttons on her cardigan. “You have done nothing wrong,” she said lightly. “Come, let us get back to work. Christmas will be on us soon. It’s time we collected the foie gras.”

Madame Degeneret, the Weeping Willow’s foie gras supplier, lived on the slopes above Clairvaux-les-Lacs. Degeneret was a feisty old woman in her eighties who kept her dilapidated farm ticking over with the income she earned force-feeding a hundred Moulard ducks. And as Leblanc pulled the Citroën into the potholed drive of the old farm, brown ducks, heads held high and quacking, waddled briskly back and forth across the courtyard.

Old Degeneret, in her gray wool tights and tatty sweaters, barely acknowledged their arrival while she fussed over a bag of feed, and Mallory was relieved to see the gnarled old woman still standing, still in hot pursuit of her ducks. Mallory impulsively told Leblanc he should pick the foie gras while she waited outside with Madame Degeneret.

This, of course, was highly unusual. Mallory always insisted on judging the livers herself, as no one else was ever competent enough. But before Leblanc could object, Mallory had taken a milking stool and was sitting alongside Madame Degeneret, watching the old woman’s arthritic, knobby hands gently slide a feeding funnel down a duck’s gullet. So—what else was there to say?—Leblanc disappeared into the barn, where the young work hand was plucking and bleeding a dozen ducks before removing the prized foie gras and the magret.

“Are you well, Madame Degeneret?” Mallory asked, pulling a tissue from under her cardigan sleeve and discreetly wiping her nose.

“Can’t complain.”

The old woman pulled the funnel out of the duck’s crop and grabbed another squawking bird. But she suddenly stopped, looked at the mark on the bird’s leg, and let the bird go.

“Not you. Shoo. Get away.”

The bird flapped across the courtyard and a half-dozen ducklings waddled energetically after her. Mallory’s hands were calmly clasped on her lap, and the wintry sun felt good upon her face.

“Why not that one?” she asked mildly.

“Can’t.”

“But why?”

“A few weeks ago,” Degeneret said with a snort of contempt, “a no-brains tourist drove into the farm too quickly and killed the mother of those six ducklings. Usually that’s the end for the little ones. The others peck them to death. But that old bird took care of the motherless chicks. Let them join her brood.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Non, non, madame. That duck will live a full life. I will not kill her. For what? A liver? I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. Imagine. A duck showing more kindness than a human being. I can’t have that.”

Just then Leblanc emerged from the barn with two plastic bags of foie gras, and Madame Mallory rose from her stool, unable to utter a word.

Papa picked me up from the hospital in the Maison Mumbai van, and before long we were pulling into the open gates of the Dufour estate, the crêpe-lined banners stretched across the courtyard welcoming me home. A crowd of well-wishers, not just my family but some fifty citizens of Lumière, stood under the banners and broke into raucous clapping and roars and piercing whistles at our arrival. And I, getting into the mood of it all, quite liking all this attention, opened the van door and waved like a returning war hero.

It was such a lovely homecoming. There was Monsieur Iten and his wife. And Madame Picard. And there, too, the mayor and his son, my new friend, Marcus.

And Madame Mallory.

She had come directly from Madame Degeneret’s farm, with urgent purpose.

Papa and I spotted her at the same moment, loitering as she was in the back of the crowd, and you could feel the mood of the homecoming change instantly. Papa was furious and he scowled, the crowd turning their heads to see what he was staring at. There were gasps. Whispers.