What-Opened
It opened on a Sunday, just after the bells.
Henri saw it from his doorway and crossed the street without his jacket, which he had not done in years. The bud had loosened overnight and was easing apart petal by petal, slow as a hand uncurling, and the colour inside was not one colour but many, shifting as the morning light moved across it — the grey of a particular winter sky, the gold of a kitchen at supper, a green that was unmistakably the green of one particular dress.
People came out onto their steps. Madame Lacroix came, and the young couple from number nine, and the children who were usually shooed from other people's windows and who, this once, no one shooed. They stood on the pavement of the Rue Bertaut and looked up at Adèle's window, where the impossible flower finished opening, and the strangest thing was that no one was uneasy. A grief no one could name should have frightened them. Instead they found they could not look away, the way you cannot look away from a fire or from someone else's child laughing.
Adèle came down to her door with her hands still wet from the watering can.
"What is it?" Madame Lacroix asked, and there was no fear in it, only a kind of hunger. "None of us has ever grown that. What is it?"
Adèle looked up at her own window for a long moment.
"He was happy," she said at last, and her voice was not the voice of the drooping-fern weeks.