The rocks glow red above the sea, embers of the day’s heat below our balcony at the Hotel Marie.
Down here on the southern rim of the country, out of the mistral’s slipstream, the evening drops viscous as liquid: slow and heavy and silent. When we first arrived, the stifling sultriness made sleep impossible; night closed in like the lid of a tomb.
Now, in the few hours I do sleep, I dream of all we have left behind: the hamlet on the hill and the whispering trees. Then, with a start, I’m awake again, remembering.
Until it happens to you, you don’t know how it will feel to stay with a man who has done a terrible thing. Not to know whether the worst has happened or is yet to come; wanting so badly to trust him now.
These are the opening seven lines of The Lantern, as the narrator Eve looks out at the distinctive coastal rocks near Cassis, hardly daring to contemplate the hamlet on the hill inland where she has been so happy. But each night she returns in dreams, to a place that is, and is not, itself.
I’ve posted this today by invitation of romantic suspense writer Anne K Albert (here), author of The Piedmont Island Trilogy among other novels.
Each Sunday, Anne and other novelists in an online community of mystery and romantic suspense writers post seven enticing sentences from one of their published books, or from a work in progress. The list and links can be found over at Suspenseful Seven Sentence Sunday (here).
