The cicadas had fallen silent in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, something that happened only in the deepest hours of night. Pierre walked along the ancient stone walls that lined the road to Domain Milan, his weathered hands trailing against the cool limestone. The scent of lavender still lingered in the air, though the fields had been harvested weeks ago.
Three dogs followed him—a gold-coated retriever, a white shepherd, and a small terrier. Nobody in town seemed to notice that the dogs had appeared the same day as the accident on the D99, exactly two years ago. They simply became part of the landscape, like the plane trees lining the village squares or the worn cobblestones of the old town.
“Marie would have loved this evening,” Pierre whispered to the golden retriever, who pressed closer to his leg. The dogs exchanged glances in the darkness, their eyes reflecting something more than mere lamplight. When Pierre spoke to them, they listened with an intensity that went beyond animal comprehension, especially when he talked about his daily visits to the small roadside shrine near the curve where the D99 meets the olive groves.
That night, dark and windy almost like a storm was coming up, a couple strolled back to their bed and breakfast at the nearby winery, crossing the place where Pierre decided to make his temporary home for the night. It was across a small river near the road, raging unusually strong. The dogs began barking—not their usual bark, but something urgent and almost human. The couple was startled, afraid, not understanding what was going on. The woman holding on stronger than ever before to her partner, taking a few steps back.
“Arrête!” Pierre commanded the dogs, but his voice cracked. After what felt like an eterntiy for the couple, the river and the dogs seemed to calm down. Pierre said down, exhausted by the interaction. Seeing the fear in the couples eyes, lit up by the moon light in the night, triggered memories he was trying to burry deep from the night that changed everything.
The terrier whimpered, pawing at his legs as if trying to speak. In the distance, the silhouette of Mont Ventoux stood guardian against the star-strewn sky, the same mountain that had witnessed countless cycles of life and death in this ancient landscape. “The world isn’t fair,” Pierre broke down, sitting on the ground, his words echoing the sentiment he’d read in a tattered diary he’d found in a monastery. “Why should I go on when they cannot?”
The golden retriever pressed its head against his chest, exactly where Marie used to rest hers. The white shepherd nuzzled his hand, gentle as Lucas had been. The terrier curled in his lap, small and fierce like little Sophie. And then, in the strange clarity of that moment, Pierre saw them truly for the first time.
As the moon rose over the Alpilles, casting silver light across the limestone cliffs, Pierre starting noticed something he’d missed before. The dogs’ eyes held more than just familiar colors—Marie’s hazel, Lucas’s blue, Sophie’s warm brown. They held entire universes, memories swimming in their depths like fish in ancient pools. In the retriever’s gaze, he saw Marie’s last morning, not in the crash, but in their garden, laughing as she hung laundry in the sunshine. In the shepherd’s eyes, he found Lucas running through lavender fields, whole and happy, forever young. The terrier’s gaze held Sophie’s final drawing, not the one crushed in the car, but one that had never existed—a family portrait that stretched into a future that would never be.
It had been two years since the night of the crash. Pierre had never left. Endlessly, he had wandered the streets around the small village, not able to leave or move on. Each night, visiting the crash site, where he had build a little shrine. In it, always three candles, lighting up for the night, a small bundle of dried lavender from the nearby fields and a man, frozen in time.
The night air shimmered like heat waves rising from summer stones. The dogs’ forms seemed to blur at the edges, as if they were made of starlight and memory rather than flesh and fur. And in that moment, Pierre understood what they had been trying to tell him all along—that love doesn’t end with death, it simply changes form, like water turning to mist, like caterpillars emerging as butterflies, like the endless cycle of seasons that painted the landscape of Saint-Rémy.
And for the first time in two years, Pierre allowed himself to be led away from the D99. With each step, the weight of grief seemed to transform, not lessening exactly, but changing, like heavy clay being shaped into something new. The dogs guided him through the ancient streets of Saint-Rémy, past windows where the scent of herbs drifted out from evening kitchens, under archways where generations of lovers had carved their initials, toward the lights of the village center.
The evening market was setting up, vendors arranging their stalls in the pre-dawn quiet. An old woman selling lavender bundles looked up as they passed, and for a moment, her eyes widened as if she saw not just a man and three dogs, but something more—perhaps the shimmer of other forms walking beside him, translucent as morning mist but just as real as the cobblestones beneath their feet.
Behind them, the first hints of dawn touched the fields outside of the village. Light crept across the landscape like water filling a bowl, and as it reached the shrine by the D99, the three candles flickered and went out, their work complete. Somewhere in the distance, the cicadas began their song again, but this time Pierre heard it differently—not as the soundtrack to his solitary vigil, but as nature’s constant reminder that every ending contains within it the seeds of a new beginning.
The dogs walked beside him into the growing light, their forms sometimes solid, sometimes seeming to ripple like heat waves above summer stones. And Pierre understood finally that moving forward didn’t mean leaving his family behind—it meant carrying them differently, like the limestone walls of Saint-Rémy carried centuries of stories in their silent, sturdy embrace.