Will had a feeling that whoever was buried there was someone who had been special to Tristan, and was part of the reason why Tristan had wanted to be buried in Corsica as opposed to being buried wherever it was the initial plans had been to bury him.
No one immediately came to Will’s mind as a possible person reposing in the adjacent grave, however. Tristan had rarely talked about his family aside from his mother and sister, as well as the odd very bitter comment about his father, whom Will knew was still alive.
There were, as far as Will knew, no siblings who had died, nor were there any grandparents or anyone else that Will had heard about from Tristan, or from anyone else who’d known Tristan longer. Many people had described Tristan as a private man, and even though Will had been able to form a close friendship with him in the span of just two years, he had to agree that it was true. Tristan was a very private man. He had never disclosed much about himself except when it came to football, and the few disclosures about his personal life Will had received he was sure had been expressed only to him because of the closeness of relationship they’d developed in the brief time they’d had together.
Will startled slightly upon feeling his wheelchair move.
“I don’t want to stand out here,” Enka said. “We’re going inside.”
“No,” Will said.
“Everyone else is going inside,” Enka said. “I don’t want to stay out here.”
“I want to look at that first,” Will said, pointing to the headstone. “Then I don’t care if we go inside.”
“Really?” Enka asked complainingly. “That’s morbid.”
“No it isn’t,” Will snapped. “I just want to know who it is because it was obviously someone Tristan cared about enough to want to be buried beside, but I don’t know of anyone.”
“Fine,” Enka said, her displeasure with the whole idea being quite evident.
She pushed Will around the opening and around the far side of the shrub so that he could get close to the headstone and read the words engraved on it.
A tiny handprint was engraved in a circle at the top, followed by the name Maël Jules Servaas Giroux-Lévêque, and a single date from a little more than two years ago. No epitaph was given.
Based on the surname — which was Tristan’s legal surname, although Will had reason to believe that contempt for his father was the reason why he didn’t use Giroux, his father’s surname, outside of legal contexts — and the presence of one single date, Will wondered if this Maël had been a son of Tristan who had died shortly after birth.
Will felt like that made the most logical sense, but, at the same time, he had to admit that he was a little bit surprised. Even if he was sure that Tristan and Chloë had loved one another once upon a time, and he’d even wondered if repeated failed attempts at parenthood together, or even the loss of a child, had caused the subtle coolness he’d observed between the two of them, he’d certainly not expected that failure to have come a scant two years ago.
Pronunciation:
Giroux: zhihrhooh
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