The village arrived before Emma was ready for it.

She'd been on the train from Lyon for four hours, Sister Priya Patel asleep against the window beside her, and Emma had sat with her scriptures open on her lap and read the same verse eleven times without it landing. Outside, France kept happening — stone farmhouses and poppies and the particular blue of a sky that felt wider than Idaho's, if that was possible, and apparently it was.

Saint-Loup-de-la-Vallée sat on a hill like something painted on a postcard and forgotten there. Stone-colored houses climbing stone-colored lanes, a church spire at the crown, lavender fields spreading below in every direction in long purple rows. The taxi from Apt deposited them at a corner and drove away before Emma had her bags fully off the seat.

"Oh," Priya said, looking up at the village. "Oh, it's so — "

"Quiet," Emma said.

"I was going to say beautiful."

It was both. They hauled their rolling suitcases over the cobblestones toward the apartment address the mission office had given them — two small rooms above a bakery whose owner, according to their information sheet, was a nonmember but sympathetic. The key was under a terracotta pot. The rooms smelled like flour and lavender and something older underneath.

Emma opened the shutters on the window that looked out over the main square. The ancient Catholic church squatted on the opposite side of the square, its door propped open, its stone so worn it looked like erosion rather than architecture. A café had three tables on the cobblestones. An elderly man walked a small dog.

And on the far side of the square, emerging from the lane that led toward the other side of the village, two figures in white shirts and ties. Name tags catching the afternoon light.

Elders.

Emma told herself the flutter in her sternum was nerves about the assignment.

She watched the taller one — dark hair, good posture, the confident walk of someone comfortable in his body — stop at the café and say something to the owner that made her laugh. He had a good face. She could tell even from here. She was not supposed to be noticing this. She was not supposed to be noticing anything except the harvest white fields around her and the spiritual needs of the local members.

He looked up.

From across the square, four months into a mission where she was not supposed to make eye contact with Elders beyond what the work required, Emma Langley met the gaze of Elder Caleb Whitaker and felt something she could not find a word for in English or French.

She stepped back from the window.

"Are you unpacking?" Priya called from the other room.

"Yes," Emma said. "Right now."