The South Field (The Loire Valley)
THE SOUTH FIELD Book Three of The Loire Valley Series
The south field has not been properly accounted for since 1944.
When Adrien Marchetti opens a sealed cabinet in the estate library, the key hidden there by a great-uncle who died in 1988 without explanation he finds a letter his grandfather Henri wrote in 1947 and then locked away. The letter describes two graves in the south field's eastern corner. A four-year-old child named Anna. A woman named Greta Bauer, shot in February of 1944.
Henri believed he had no choice.
He was wrong. But he would not learn how wrong until 1966, when a retired intelligence officer arrived at the estate to tell him what Greta had actually been trying to do that night in the library and why she had deliberately misled him. Henri carried that information alone for six years until his death. The cabinet stayed sealed for another fifty-five years after that.
Now Victor Bauer - Greta's great-grandson - has arrived in the Loire Valley. He is sixty years old, steady-eyed, and not prepared to leave without answers. He does not yet know that the answers will change what he believed about his own family. He does not yet know that the woman who can give him those answers has, across the past year, been assembling the most improbable family reunion the valley has seen in a hundred and forty years.
He does not yet know that one of those answers will undo everything he came looking for.
Vivienne Marchetti has been, since her surgery in 2025, paying a different quality of attention to the people who appear at her kitchen counter. The Romanian cousin with her grandmother's face. The German man who came to take something back and ended up giving something away. The ethnomusicologist who drives from Zurich to sit at the counter and listen to a nineteen-month-old child hum a lullaby that has not been heard outside the Banat since 1944. The gatekeeper, who has been running the estate for forty-three years and who has, in the locked official ledger he has never shared with the family, three entries he has never shown anyone.
The shelf above Mathilde's sink now holds eight objects.
In April 2029, a young woman named Sofia Andreeva travels from Moldova by plane and train and arrives at Vivienne's studio door with a suitcase, an envelope sealed in wax, and the face of someone Vivienne has never met but recognizes anyway.
The envelope is from Victor Bauer.
It has been sealed since November 2028.
Nobody in the family knows what is in it.
Sofia does not open it on the journey.
She has been waiting, she says, to open it with the right person present.
The South Field is the third novel in the Loire Valley Series, a story about inheritance, repair, and what we owe to the people our ancestors wronged without knowing it. About a child who completes a song that was left unfinished in 1944. About a ghost who has been setting two cups on a kitchen table on Tuesday mornings for three years, waiting for someone to ask the right question. About the difference between what a family thinks it has lost and what it has, in fact, been quietly keeping all along.
The shelf will hold nine objects before this is over.
But first: the envelope.
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