Epilogue
Cat sat in a second-class compartment of a high-speed train bound from Paris to Brussels, sipping coffee from a paper cup and turning over her new camera in her hands, a Canon 5D she’d purchased on her walk from the hotel to the Gare du Nord.
In under an hour she would be back home. Though it had been a decade, she knew it would be the same: the farm, with its damp ground, was a place of unshakable rhythm. While she was home, Cat and her mother would wake at dawn every morning to feed, water, and groom the horses before completing endless farm chores until nightfall, when they would eat bread and cheese and meat. When the sun rose, Cat would meet her mother in the barn with a thermos full of coffee and everything would start again. That was farm life. It was rigid, but it needed you.
She stared out the window at the passing countryside, absentmindedly circling her wrist with her fingers, and let herself eavesdrop on the French and Flemish conversations happening throughout the train car, realizing, for the first time in years, how hard it had been to go without those sounds, to live without this air. She felt herself diving deep under the surface of her consciousness, swimming away from her American, English-speaking world and, finally, reappearing on the long-forgotten shore of her Flemish self.
She was suddenly so tired of trying to fit in. All she wanted was to lie in the yellow grass of the farm’s fallow fields, to go to sleep without worrying about tomorrow, to feel loved, to feel that she belonged.
For the first time in a very long time, Cat thought that she just might be able to.