The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

I

New York City

March 10, 2014

The girl wakes up in someone else’s bed.

She lies there, perfectly still, tries to hold time like a breath in her chest; as if she can keep the clock from ticking forward, keep the boy beside her from waking, keep the memory of their night alive through sheer force of will.

She knows, of course, that she can’t. Knows that he’ll forget. They always do.

It isn’t his fault—it is never their faults.

The boy is still asleep, and she watches the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, the place where his dark hair curls against the nape of his neck, the scar along his ribs. Details long memorized.

His name is Toby.

Last night, she told him hers was Jess. She lied, but only because she can’t say her real name—one of the vicious little details tucked like nettles in the grass. Hidden barbs designed to sting. What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.

In the last month, she has been Claire, Zoe, Michelle—but two nights ago, when she was Elle, and they were closing down a late-night café after one of his gigs, Toby said that he was in love with a girl named Jess—he simply hadn’t met her yet.

So now, she is Jess.

Toby begins to stir, and she feels the old familiar ache in her chest as he stretches, rolls toward her—but doesn’t wake, not yet. His face is now inches from her, his lips parted in sleep, black curls shadowing his eyes, dark lashes against fair cheeks.

Once, the darkness teased the girl as they strolled along the Seine, told her that she had a “type,” insinuating that most of the men she chose—and even a few of the women—looked an awful lot like him.

The same dark hair, the same sharp eyes, the same etched features.

But that wasn’t fair.

After all, the darkness only looked the way he did because of her. She’d given him that shape, chosen what to make of him, what to see.

Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke?

Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.

Now it is morning, in another city, another century, the bright sunlight cutting through the curtains, and Toby shifts again, rising up through the surface of sleep. And the girl who is—was—Jess holds her breath again as she tries to imagine a version of this day where he wakes, and sees her, and remembers.

Where he smiles, and strokes her cheek, and says, “Good morning.”

But it won’t happen like that, and she doesn’t want to see the familiar vacant expression, doesn’t want to watch as the boy tries to fill in the gaps where memories of her should be, witness as he pulls together his composure into practiced nonchalance. The girl has seen that performance often enough, knows the motions by heart, so instead she slides from the bed and pads barefoot out into the living room.

She catches her reflection in the hall mirror and notices what everyone notices: the seven freckles, scattered like a band of stars across her nose and cheeks.

Her own private constellation.

She leans forward and fogs the glass with her breath. Draws her fingertip through the cloud as she tries to write her name. A—d—

But she only gets as far as that before the letters dissolve. It’s not the medium—no matter how she tries to say her name, no matter how she tries to tell her story. And she has tried, in pencil, in ink, in paint, in blood.

Adeline.

Addie.

LaRue.

It is no use.

The letters crumble, or fade. The sounds die in her throat.

Her fingers fall away from the glass and she turns, surveying the living room.

Toby is a musician, and the signs of his art are everywhere.

In the instruments that lean against the walls. In the scribbled lines and notes scattered on tables—bars of half-remembered melodies mixed in with grocery lists and weekly to-do’s. But here and there, another hand—the flowers he’s started keeping on the kitchen sill, though he can’t remember when the habit started. The book on Rilke he doesn’t remember buying. The things that last, even when memories don’t.

Toby is a slow riser, so Addie makes herself tea—he doesn’t drink it, but it’s already there, in his cupboard, a tin of loose Ceylon, and a box of silk pouches. A relic of a late-night trip to the grocery store, a boy and a girl wandering the aisles, hand in hand, because they couldn’t sleep. Because she hadn’t been willing to let the night end. Wasn’t ready to let go.

She lifts the mug, inhales the scent as memories waft up to meet it.

A park in London. A patio in Prague. A team room in Edinburgh.

The past drawn like a silk sheet over the present.

It’s a cold morning in New York, the windows fogged with frost, so she pulls a blanket from the back of the couch and wraps it around her shoulders. A guitar case takes up one end of the sofa, and Toby’s cat takes up the other, so she perches on the piano bench instead.

The cat, also named Toby (“So I can talk to myself without it being weird…” he explained) looks at her as she blows on her tea.

She wonders if the cat remembers.

Her hands are warmer now, and she sets the mug on top of the piano and slides the cover up off the keys, stretches her fingers, and starts to play as softly as possible. In the bedroom, she can hear Toby-the-human stirring, and every inch of her, from skeleton to skin, tightens in dread.

This is the hardest part.

Addie could have left—should have left—slipped out when he was still asleep, when their morning was still an extension of their night, a moment trapped in amber. But it is too late now, so she closes her eyes and continues to play, keeps her head down as she hears his footsteps underneath the notes, keeps her fingers moving when she feels him in the doorway. He’ll stand there, taking in the scene, trying to piece together the timeline of last night, how it could have gone astray, when he could have met a girl and then taken her home, if he could have had too much drink, why he doesn’t remember any of it.

But she knows that Toby won’t interrupt her as long as she’s playing, so she savors the music for several more seconds before forcing herself to trail off, look up, pretend she doesn’t notice the confusion on his face.

“Morning,” she says, her voice cheerful, and her accent, once country French, now so faint that she hardly hears it.

“Uh, good morning,” he says, running a hand through his loose black curls, and to his credit, Toby looks the way he always does—a little dazed, and surprised to see a pretty girl sitting in his living room wearing nothing but a pair of underwear and his favorite band T-shirt beneath the blanket.

“Jess,” she says, supplying the name he can’t find, because it isn’t there. “It’s okay,” she says, “if you don’t remember.”

Toby blushes, and nudges Toby-the-cat out of the way as he sinks onto the couch cushions. “I’m sorry … this isn’t like me. I’m not that kind of guy.”

She smiles. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

He smiles, too, then, and it’s a line of light breaking the shadows of his face. He nods at the piano, and she wants him to say something like, “I didn’t know you could play,” but instead Toby says, “You’re really good,” and she is—it’s amazing what you can learn when you have the time.

“Thanks,” she says, running her fingertips across the keys.

Toby is restless now, escaping to the kitchen. “Coffee?” he asks, shuffling through the cupboards.

“I found tea.”

She starts to play a different song. Nothing intricate, just a strain of notes. The beginnings of something. She finds the melody, takes it up, lets its slip between her fingers as Toby ducks back into the room, a steaming cup in his hands.

“What was that?” he asks, eyes brightening in that way unique to artists—writers, painters, musicians, anyone prone to moments of inspiration. “It sounded familiar…”

A shrug. “You played it for me last night.”

It isn’t a lie, not exactly. He did play it for her. After she showed him.

“I did?” he says, brow furrowing. He’s already setting the coffee aside, reaching for a pencil and a notepad off the nearest table. “God—I must have been drunk.”

He shakes his head as he says it; Toby’s never been one of those songwriters who prefer to work under the influence.

“Do you remember more?” he asks, turning through the pad. She starts playing again, leading him through the notes. He doesn’t know it, but he’s been working on this song for weeks. Well, they have.

Together.

She smiles a little as she plays on. This is the grass between the nettles. A safe place to step. She can’t leave her own mark, but if she’s careful, she can give the mark to someone else. Nothing concrete, of course, but inspiration rarely is.

Toby’s got the guitar up now, balanced on one knee, and he follows her lead, murmuring to himself. That this is good, this is different, this is something. She stops playing, gets to her feet.

“I should go.”

The melody falls apart on the strings as Toby looks up. “What? But I don’t even know you.”

“Exactly,” she says, heading for the bedroom to collect her clothes.

“But I want to know you,” Toby says, setting down the guitar and trailing her through the apartment, and this is the moment when none of it feels fair, the only time she feels the wave of frustration threatening to break. Because she has spent weeks getting to know him. And he has spent hours forgetting her. “Slow down.”

She hates this part. She shouldn’t have lingered. Should have been out of sight as well as out of mind, but there’s always that nagging hope that this time, it will be different, that this time, they will remember.

I remember, says the darkness in her ear.

She shakes her head, forcing the voice away.

“Where’s the rush?” asks Toby. “At least let me make you breakfast.”

But she’s too tired to play the game again so soon, and so she lies instead, says there’s something she has to do, and doesn’t let herself stop moving, because if she does, she knows she won’t have the strength to start again, and the cycle will spin on, the affair beginning in the morning instead of at night. But it won’t be any easier when it ends, and if she has to start over, she’d rather be a meet-cute at a bar than the unremembered aftermath of a one-night stand.

It won’t matter, in a moment, anyways.

“Jess, wait,” Toby says, catching her hand. He fumbles for the right words, and then gives up, starts again. “I have a gig tonight, at the Alloway. You should come. It’s over on…”

She knows where it is, of course. That is where they met for the first time, and the fifth, and the ninth. And when she agrees to come, his smile is dazzling. It always is.

“Promise?” he asks.

“Promise.”

“I’ll see you there,” he says, the words full of hope as she turns and steps through the door. She looks back, and says, “Don’t forget me in the meantime.”

An old habit. A superstition. A plea.

Toby shakes his head. “How could I?”

She smiles, as if it’s just a joke.

But Addie knows, as she forces herself down the stairs, that it’s already happening—knows that by the time he closes the door, she’ll be gone.

II

March is such a fickle month.

It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.

Estele used to call these the restless days, when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost.

Addie has always been predisposed to both.

It makes sense then, that she was born on the 10th of March, right along the ragged seam, though it has been so long since Addie felt like celebrating.

For twenty-three years, she dreaded the marker of time, what it meant: that she was growing up, growing old. And then, for centuries, a birthday was a rather useless thing, far less important than the night she signed away her soul.

That date a death, and a rebirth, rolled into one.

Still, it is her birthday, and a birthday deserves a gift.

She pauses in front of a boutique, her reflection ghosted in the glass.

In the broad window, a mannequin poses mid-stride, its head tilted ever so slightly to one side, as if listening to some private song. Its long torso is wrapped in a broad-striped sweater, a pair of oil-slick leggings vanishing into knee-high boots. One hand up, fingers hooked in the collar of the jacket that hangs over one shoulder. As Addie studies the mannequin, she finds herself mimicking the pose, shifting her stance, tilting her head. And maybe it’s the day, or the promise of spring in the air, or maybe she’s simply in the mood for something new.

Inside, the boutique smells of unlit candles and unworn clothes, and Addie runs her fingers over cotton and silk before finding the striped knit sweater, which turns out to be cashmere. She throws it over one arm, along with the featured leggings. She knows her sizes.

They haven’t changed.

“Hi there!” The cheerful clerk is a girl in her early twenties, like Addie herself, though one is real and aging and the other is an image trapped in amber. “Can I get a room started for you?”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she says, plucking a pair of boots from a display. “I’ve got everything I need.” She follows the girl to the three curtained stalls at the rear of the shop.

“Just give me a shout if I can help,” says the girl, turning away before the curtain swings shut, and Addie is alone with a pillowed bench, and a full-length mirror, and herself.

She kicks off her boots, and shrugs out of her jacket, tossing it onto the seat. Change rattles in the pocket as it lands, and something tumbles out. It hits the floor with a dull clack and rolls across the narrow changing room, stopping only when it meets the baseboard.

It is a ring.

A small circle carved of ash-gray wood. A familiar band, once loved, now loathsome.

Addie stares at the thing a moment. Her fingers twitch, traitorous, but she doesn’t reach for the ring, doesn’t pick it up, just turns her back on the small wooden circle and continues undressing. She pulls on the sweater, shimmies into the leggings, zips up the boots. The mannequin was thinner, taller, but Addie likes the way the outfit hangs on her, the warmth of the cashmere, the weight of the leggings, the soft embrace of the lining in the boots.

She plucks the price tags off one by one, ignoring the zeroes.

Joyeux anniversaire, she thinks, meeting her reflection. Inclining her head, as if she too hears some private song. The picture of a modern Manhattan woman, even if the face in the mirror is the same one she’s had for centuries.

Addie leaves her old clothes strewn like a shadow across the dressing room floor. The ring, a scorned child in the corner. The only thing she reclaims is the discarded jacket.

It’s soft, made of black leather and worn practically to silk, the kind of thing people pay a fortune for these days and call it vintage. It is the only thing Addie refused to leave behind and feed to the flames in New Orleans, though the smell of him clung to it like smoke, his stain forever on everything. She does not care. She loves the jacket.

It was new then, but it is broken in now, shows its wear in all the ways she can’t. It reminds her of Dorian Gray, time reflected in cowhide instead of human skin.

Addie steps out of the little curtained booth.

Across the boutique, the clerk startles, flustered at the sight of her. “Everything fit?” she asks, too polite to admit she doesn’t remember letting someone into the back. God bless customer service.

Addie shakes her head ruefully. “Some days you’re stuck with what you’ve got,” she says, heading for the door.

By the time the clerk finds the clothes, a ghost of a girl on the changing room floor, she won’t remember whose they are, and Addie will be gone, from sight and mind and memory.

She tosses the jacket over her shoulder, one finger hooked in the collar, and steps out into the sun.

III

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

Summer 1698

Adeline sits on a bench beside her father.

Her father, who is, to her, a mystery, a solemn giant most at home inside his workshop.

Beneath their feet, a pile of woodwares make shapes like small bodies under a blanket, and the cart wheels rattle as Maxime, the sturdy mare, draws them down the lane, away from home.

Away—away—a word that makes her small heart race.

Adeline is seven, the same as the number of freckles on her face. She is bright and small and quick as a sparrow, and has begged for months to go with him to market. Begged until her mother swore she would go mad, until her father finally said yes. He is a woodworker, her father, and three times a year, he makes the trip along the Sarthe, up to the city of Le Mans.

And today, she is with him.

Today, for the first time, Adeline is leaving Villon.

She looks back at her mother, arms crossed beside the old yew tree at the end of the lane, and then they round the bend, and her mother is gone. The village rolls past, here the houses and there the fields, here the church and there the trees, here Monsieur Berger turning soil and there Madame Therault hanging clothes, her daughter Isabelle sitting in the grass nearby, twining flowers into crowns, her tongue between her teeth in concentration.

When Adeline told the girl about her trip, Isabelle had only shrugged, and said, “I like it here.”

As if you couldn’t like one place and want to see another.

Now she looks up at Adeline, and waves as the cart goes by. They reach the edge of the village, the farthest she has ever gone before, and the cart hits a divot in the road, and shakes as if it too has crossed a threshold. Adeline holds her breath, expecting to feel some rope draw tight inside her, binding her to the town.

But there is no tether, no lurch. The cart keeps moving, and Adeline feels a little wild and a little scared as she turns back to look at the shrinking picture of Villon, which was, until now, the sum of her world, and is now only a part, made smaller with the mare’s every step, until the town seems like one of her father’s figurines, small enough to nest within one calloused palm.

It is a day’s ride to Le Mans, the trek made easy with her mother’s basket and her father’s company—one’s bread and cheese to fill her belly, and the other’s easy laugh, and broad shoulders making shade for Adeline beneath the summer sun.

At home he is a quiet man, committed to his work, but on the road he begins to open, to unfold, to speak.

And when he speaks, it is to tell her stories.

Those stories he gathered, the way one gathers wood.

“Il était une fois,” he will say, before sliding into stories of palaces and kings, of gold and glamour, of masquerade balls and cities full of splendor. Once upon a time. This is how the story starts.

She will not remember the stories themselves, but she will recall the way he tells them; the words feel smooth as river stones, and she wonders if he tells these stories when he is alone, if he carries on, talking to Maxime in this easy, gentle way. Wonders if he tells stories to the wood as he is working it. Or if they are just for her.

Adeline wishes she could write them down.

Later, her father will teach her letters. Her mother will have a fit when she finds out, and accuse him of giving her another way to idle, waste the hours of the day, but Adeline will steal away into his workshop nonetheless, and he will let her sit and practice writing her own name in the fine dust that always seems to coat the workshop floor.

But today, she can only listen.

The countryside rolls past around them, a jostling portrait of a world she already knows. The fields are fields, just like her own, the trees arranged in roughly the same order, and when they do come upon a village, it is a watery reflection of Villon, and Adeline begins to wonder if the world outside is as boring as her own.

And then, the walls of Le Mans come into sight.

Stone ridges rising in the distance, a many-patterned spine along the hills. It is a hundred times the size of Villon—or at least, it is that grand in memory—and Adeline holds her breath as they pass through the gates and into the protected city.

Beyond, a maze of crowded streets. Her father guides the cart between houses squeezed tight as stones, until the narrow road opens onto a square.

There is a square back in Villon, of course, but it is little bigger than their yard. This is a giant’s space, the ground lost beneath so many feet, and carts, and stalls. And as her father guides Maxime to a stop, Adeline stands on the bench and marvels at the marketplace, the heady smell of bread and sugar on the air, and people, people, everywhere she looks. She has never seen so many of them, let alone ones she does not know. They are a sea of strangers, unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar clothes, with unfamiliar voices, calling unfamiliar words. It feels as if the doors of her world have been thrown wide, so many rooms added to a house she thought she knew.

Her father leans against the cart, and talks to anyone who passes by, and all the while his hands move over a block of wood, a small knife nested in one palm. He shaves at the surface with all the steady ease of someone peeling an apple, ribbons falling between his fingers. Adeline has always loved to watch him work, to see the figures take shape, as if they were there all along, but hidden, like pits in the center of a peach.

Her father’s work is beautiful, the wood smooth where his hands are rough, delicate where he is large.

And mixed among the bowls and cups, tucked between the tools of his trade, are toys for sale, and wooden figures as small as rolls of bread—a horse, a boy, a house, a bird.

Adeline grew up surrounded by such trinkets, but her favorite is neither animal nor man.

It is a ring.

She wears it on a leather cord around her neck, a delicate band, the wood ash gray, and smooth as polished stone. He carved it when she was born, made for the girl she’d one day be, and Adeline wears it like a talisman, an amulet, a key. Her hand goes to it now and then, thumb running over the surface the way her mother’s runs over a rosary.

She clings to it now, an anchor in the storm, as she perches on the back of the cart, and watches everything. From this angle she is almost tall enough to see the buildings beyond. She stretches up onto her toes, wondering how far they go, until a nearby horse jostles their cart as it goes past, and she nearly falls. Her father’s hand closes around her arm, pulling her back into the safety of his reach.

By the end of the day, the wooden wares are gone, and Adeline’s father gives her a copper sol and says she may buy anything she likes. She goes from stall to stall, eying the pastries and the cakes, the hats and the dresses and the dolls, but in the end, she settles on a journal, parchment bound with waxy thread. It is the blankness of the paper that excites her, the idea that she might fill the space with anything she likes.

She could not afford the pencils to go with it, but her father uses a second coin to buy a bundle of small black sticks, and explains that these are charcoal, shows her how to press the darkened chalk to the paper, smudge the line to turn hard edges into shadow. With a few quick strokes, he draws a bird in the corner of the page, and she spends the next hour copying the lines, far more interesting than the letters he’s written beneath.

Her father packs up the cart as the day gives way to dusk.

They will stay the night in a local inn, and for the first time in her life, Adeline will sleep in a foreign bed, and wake to foreign sounds and smells, and there will be a moment, as brief as a yawn, when she won’t know where she is, and her heart will quicken—first with fear, and then with something else. Something she does not have the words for yet.

And by the time they return home to Villon, she will already be a different version of herself. A room with the windows all thrown wide, eager to let in the fresh air, the sunlight, the spring.

IV

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

Fall 1703

It is a Catholic place, Villon. Certainly the part that shows.

There is a church in the center of town, a solemn stone thing where everyone goes to save their souls. Adeline’s mother and father kneel there twice a week, cross themselves and say their blessings and speak of God.

Adeline is twelve now, so she does, too. But she prays the way her father turns loaves of bread upright, the way her mother licks her thumb to collect stray flakes of salt.

As a matter of habit, more automatic than faith.

The church in town isn’t new, and neither is God, but Adeline has come to think of Him that way, thanks to Estele, who says the greatest danger in change is letting the new replace the old.

Estele, who belongs to everyone, and no one, and herself.

Estele, who grew like a tree at the heart of the village by the river, and has certainly never been young, who sprang up from the ground itself with gnarled hands and woody skin and roots deep enough to tap into her own hidden well.

Estele, who believes that the new God is a filigreed thing. She thinks that He belongs to cities and kings, and that He sits over Paris on a golden pillow, and has no time for peasants, no place among the wood and stone and river water.

Adeline’s father thinks Estele is mad.

Her mother says that the woman is bound for Hell, and once, when Adeline repeated as much, Estele laughed her dry-leaf laugh and said there was no such place, only the cool dark soil and the promise of sleep.

“And what of Heaven?” asked Adeline.

“Heaven is a nice spot in the shade, a broad tree over my bones.”

At twelve, Adeline wonders which god she should pray to now, to make her father change his mind. He has loaded up his cart with wares bound for Le Mans, has harnessed Maxime, but for the first time in six years, she is not going with him.

He has promised to bring her a fresh pad of parchment, new tools with which to sketch. But they both know she would rather go and have no gifts, would rather see the world outside than have another pad to draw on. She is running out of subjects, has memorized the tired lines of the village, and all the familiar faces in it.

But this year, her mother has decided that it isn’t right for her to go to market, it isn’t fitting, even though Adeline knows she can still fit on that wooden bench beside her father.

Her mother wishes she was more like Isabelle Therault, sweet and kind and utterly incurious, content to keep her eyes down upon her knitting instead of looking up at clouds, instead of wondering what’s around the bend, over the hills.

But Adeline does not know how to be like Isabelle.

She does not want to be like Isabelle.

She wants only to go to Le Mans, and once there, to watch the people and see the art all around, and taste the food, and discover things she hasn’t heard of yet.

“Please,” she says, as her father climbs up into the cart. She should have stowed away among the woodworks, hidden safe beneath the tarp. But now it is too late, and when Adeline reaches for the wheel, her mother catches her by the wrist and pulls her back.

“Enough,” she says.

Her father looks at them, and then away. The cart sets out, and when Adeline tries to tear free and run after the cart, her mother’s hand flashes out again, this time finding her cheek.

Tears spring to her eyes, a vivid blush before the rising bruise, and her mother’s voice when it lands is a second blow.

“You are not a child anymore.”

And Adeline understands—and still does not understand at all—feels as if she’s being punished for simply growing up. She is so angry then that she wants to run away. Wants to fling her mother’s needlework into the hearth and break every half-made sculpture in her father’s shop.

Instead, she watches the cart round the bend, and vanish between trees, with one hand clenched around her father’s ring. Adeline waits for her mother to let her go, and send her on to do her chores.

And then she goes to find Estele.

Estele, who still worships the old gods.

Adeline must have been five or six the first time she saw the woman drop her stone cup into the river. It was a pretty thing, with a pattern pressed like lace into its sides, and the old woman just let it fall, admiring the splash. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were moving, and when Adeline ambushed the old woman—she was already old, has always been old—on the path home, Estele said she was praying to the gods.

“What for?”

“Marie’s child isn’t coming as it should,” she said. “I asked the river gods to make things flow smooth. They are good at that.”

“But why did you give them your cup?”

“Because, Addie, the gods are greedy.”

Addie. A pet name, one her mother scorned as boyish. A name her father favored, but only when they were alone. A name that rang like a bell in her bones. A name that suited her far more than Adeline.

Now, she finds Estele in her garden, folded in among the wild vines of squash, the thorny spine of a blackberry bush, bent low as a warping branch.

“Addie.” The old woman says her name without looking up.

It is autumn, and the ground is littered with the stones of fruit that didn’t ripen as it should. Addie nudges them with the toe of her shoe. “How do you talk to them?” she asks. “The old gods. Do you call them by name?”

Estele straightens, joints cracking like dry sticks. If she’s surprised by the question, it doesn’t show. “They have no names.”

“Is there a spell?”

Estele gives her a pointed look. “Spells are for witches, and witches are too often burned.”

“Then how do you pray?”

“With gifts, and praise, and even then, the old gods are fickle. They are not bound to answer.”

“What do you do then?”

“You carry on.”

She chews on the inside of her cheek. “How many gods are there, Estele?”

“As many gods as you have questions,” answers the old woman, but there is no scorn in her voice, and Addie knows to wait her out, to hold her breath until she sees the telltale sign of Estele’s softening. It is like waiting at a neighbor’s door after you’ve knocked, when you know they are home. She can hear the steps, the low rasp of the lock, and knows that it will give.

Estele sighs open.

“The old gods are everywhere,” she says. “They swim in the river, and grow in the field, and sing in the woods. They are in the sunlight on the wheat, and under the saplings in spring, and in the vines that grow up the side of that stone church. They gather at the edges of the day, at dawn, and at dusk.”

Adeline’s eyes narrow. “Will you teach me? How to call on them?”

The old woman sighs, knowing that Adeline LaRue is not only clever, but also stubborn. She begins wading through the garden to the house, and the girl follows, afraid that if Estele reaches her front door before she answers, she might close it on this conversation. But Estele looks back, eyes keen in her wrinkled face.

“There are rules.”

Adeline hates rules, but she knows that sometimes they are necessary.

“Like what?”

“You must humble yourself before them. You must offer them a gift. Something precious to you. And you must be careful what you ask for.”

Adeline considers. “Is that all?”

Estele’s face darkens. “The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.” She leans over Adeline, casting her in shadow. “And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

Two days later, when Adeline’s father returns, he comes bearing a fresh pad of parchment, and a bundle of black lead pencils, bound with string, and the first thing she does is pick the best one, and sink it down into the ground behind their garden, and pray that next time her father leaves, she will be with him.

But if the gods hear, they do not answer.

She never goes to market again.

V

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

Spring 1707

Blink, and the years fall away like leaves.

Adeline is sixteen now, and everyone speaks of her as if she is a summer bloom, something to be plucked, and propped within a vase, intended only to flower and then to rot. Like Isabelle, who dreams of family instead of freedom, and seems content to briefly blossom and then wither.

No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.

She hefts the laundry on her hip and crests the rise, making her way down the weedy slope to the river. When she reaches the banks, she turns the basket out, dumping the soiled clothes into the grass, and there, tucked like a secret between the skirts and aprons and undergarments, is the sketchbook. Not the first—she has gathered them year after year, careful to fill every inch of space, to make the most of each blank page.

But every one is like a taper burning on a moonless night, always running out too fast.

It does not help that she keeps giving bits away.

She kicks off her shoes and slumps back against the slope, her skirts pooling beneath her. She runs her fingers through the weedy grass and finds the fraying edge of the paper, one of her favorite drawings, folded into a square and driven down into the bank last week, just after dawn. A token, buried like a seed, or a promise. An offering.

Adeline still prays to the new God, when she must, but when her parents are not looking she prays to the old ones, too. She can do both: keep one tucked in her cheek like a cherry pit while she whispers to the other.

So far, none of them have answered.

And yet, Adeline is sure that they are listening.

When George Caron began to look at her a certain way last spring, she prayed for him to turn his gaze, and he began to notice Isabelle instead. Isabelle has since become his wife, and is now ripe with her first child, and worn with all the torments that come with it.

When Arnaud Tulle made his intentions clear last fall, Adeline prayed that he would find another girl. He did not, but that winter he took ill and died, and Adeline felt terrible for her relief, even as she fed more trinkets to the stream.

She has prayed, and someone must have heard, for she is still free. Free from courtship, free from marriage, free from everything except Villon. Left alone to grow.

And dream.

Adeline sits back on the slope, the sketchpad balanced on her knees. She pulls the drawstring pouch from her pocket, bits of charcoal and a few worn-down precious pencils rattling like coins on market day.

She used to bind a bit of cloth around the stems to keep her fingers clean, until her father fashioned narrow bands of wood around the blackened sticks, and showed her how to hold the little knife, how to shave away the edges, and trim the casing into points. And now the images are sharper, the edges contoured, the details fine. The pictures bloom like stains across the paper, landscapes of Villon, and everyone in it, too—the lines of her mother’s hair and her father’s eyes and Estele’s hands, and then there, tucked into the seams and edges of each page—

Adeline’s secret.

Her stranger.

Every bit of unused space she fills with him, a face drawn so often that the gestures now feel effortless, the lines unfurling on their own. She can conjure him from memory, even though they have never met.

He is, after all, only a figment of her mind. A companion crafted first from boredom, and then from longing.

A dream, to keep her company.

She doesn’t remember when it started, only that one day she cast her gaze about the village and found every prospect wanting.

Arnaud’s eyes were pleasant, but he had no chin.

Jacques was tall, but dull as dirt.

George was strong, but his hands were rough, his moods rougher still.

And so she stole the pieces she found pleasant, and assembled someone new.

A stranger.

It began as a game—but the more Adeline draws him, the stronger the lines, the more confident the press of her charcoal.

Black curls. Pale eyes. Strong jaw. Sloping shoulders and a cupid’s bow mouth. A man she’d never meet, a life she’d never know, a world she could only dream of.

When she is restless, she returns to the drawings, tracing over the now familiar lines. And when she cannot sleep, she thinks of him. Not the angle of his cheek, or the shade of green she has conjured for his eyes, but his voice, his touch. She lies awake and imagines him beside her, his long fingers tracing absent patterns on her skin. As he does, he tells her stories.

Not the kind her father used to tell, of knights and kingdoms, princesses and thieves. Not fairy tales and warnings of venturing outside the lines, but stories that feel like truths, renditions of the road, cities that sparkle, of the world beyond Villon. And even though the words she puts in his mouth are surely full of errors and lies, her stranger’s conjured voice makes them sound so wonderful, so real.

If only you could see it, he says.

I would give anything, she answers.

One day, he promises. One day, I’ll show you. You’ll see it all.

The words ache, even as she thinks them, the game giving way to want, a thing too genuine, too dangerous. And so, even in her imagination, she guides the conversation back to safer roads.

Tell me about tigers, Adeline says, having heard of the massive cats from Estele, who heard of them from the mason, who was part of a caravan that included a woman who claimed to have seen one.

Her stranger smiles, and gestures with his tapered fingers, and tells her of their silken fur, their teeth, their furious roars.

On the slope, the laundry forgotten beside her, Adeline turns her wooden ring absently with one hand as she draws with the other, sketching out his eyes, his mouth, the line of his bare shoulders. She breathes life into him with every line. And with every stroke, coaxes out another story.

Tell me about dancing in Paris.

Tell me about sailing across the sea.

Tell me everything.

There was no danger in it, no reproach, not when she was young. All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.

The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against it, and suddenly the charcoal beneath her nails is unbecoming, as is the idea that she would choose her own company over Arnaud’s or George’s, or any man who might have her.

She is at odds with everything, she does not fit, an insult to her sex, a stubborn child in a woman’s form, her head bowed and arms wrapped tight around her drawing pad as if it were a door.

And when she does look up, her gaze always goes to the edge of town.

“A dreamer,” scorns her mother.

“A dreamer,” mourns her father.

“A dreamer,” warns Estele.

Still, it does not seem such a bad word.

Until Adeline wakes up.

VI

New York City

March 10, 2014

There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone.

You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.

Addie thinks of her father and his carvings, the way he peeled away the bark, whittled down the wood beneath to find the shapes that lived inside. Michelangelo called it the angel in the marble—though she’d not known that as a child. Her father had called it the secret in the wood. He knew how to reduce a thing, sliver by sliver, piece by piece, until he found its essence; knew, too, when he’d gone too far. One stroke too many, and the wood went from delicate to brittle in his hands.

Addie has had three hundred years to practice her father’s art, to whittle herself down to a few essential truths, to learn the things she cannot do without.

And this is what she’s settled on: she can go without food (she will not wither). She can go without heat (the cold will not kill her). But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.

What she needs are stories.

Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.

Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

Two blocks up Flatbush, she sees the familiar green folding table on the sidewalk, covered in paperbacks, and Fred hunched in his rickety chair behind it, red nose buried in M is for Malice. The old man explained to her once, back when he was on K is for Killer, how he was determined to get through Grafton’s entire alphabet series before he dies. She hopes he makes it. He has a nagging cough, and sitting out here in the cold doesn’t help, but here he is, whenever Addie comes by.

Fred doesn’t smile, or make small talk. What Addie knows of him she has pried out word by word over the last two years, the progress slow and halting. She knows he is a widower who lives upstairs, knows the books belonged to his wife, Candace, knows that when she died, he packed up all her books and brought them down to sell, and it’s like letting her go in pieces. Selling off his grief. Addie knows that he sits down here because he’s afraid of dying in his apartment, of not being found—not being missed.

“I keel over out here,” he says, “at least someone will notice.”

He is a gruff old man, but Addie likes him. Sees the sadness in his anger, the guardedness of grief.

Addie suspects he doesn’t really want the books to sell.

He doesn’t price them, hasn’t read more than a few, and sometimes his mood is so coarse, his tone so cold, he actually scares the customers away. Still, they come, and still, they buy, but every time the selection seems to thin a new box appears, the contents are unpacked to fill the gaps, and in the last few weeks, Addie has once more begun to spot new releases among the old, fresh covers and unbroken spines in with the battered paperbacks. She wonders if he is buying them, or if other people have begun donating to his strange collection.

Addie slows, now, her fingers dancing over the spines.

The selection is always a medley of discordant notes. Thrillers, biographies, romance, battered mass markets, mostly, interrupted by a few glossy hardcovers. She has stopped to study them a hundred times, but today she simply tips the book on the end into her hand, the gesture light and swift as a magician’s. A piece of legerdemain. Practice long given way to perfect. Addie tucks the book under her arm and keeps walking.

The old man never looks up.

VII

New York City

March 10, 2014

The market sits like a cluster of old wives at the edge of the park.

Long thin from winter, the number of white-capped stalls is finally beginning to swell again, drops of color dotting the square where new produce springs up between the root vegetables, meat and bread, and other staples resistant to the cold.

Addie weaves between the people, heading to the little white tent nestled by the front gates of Prospect. Rise and Shine is a coffee and pastry stall run by a pair of sisters that remind Addie of Estele, if the old woman had been two instead of one, divided along the lines of temper. If she had been kinder, softer, or perhaps if she had simply lived another life, another time.

The sisters are here year-round, come snow or sun, a small constant in an ever-changing city.

“Hey, sugar,” says Mel, all broad shoulders, and wild curls, and the kind of sweetness that makes strangers feel like family. Addie loves that, the easy warmth, wants to nestle into it like a well-worn sweater.

“What can we get for you?” asks Maggie, older, leaner, laugh lines around her eyes belying the idea she rarely smiles.

Addie orders a large coffee and two muffins, one blueberry and the other chocolate chip, and then hands over a crumpled ten that she’d found on Toby’s coffee table. She could steal something from the market, of course, but she likes this little stand, and the two women who run it.

“Got a dime?” asks Maggie.

Addie digs the change from her pocket, coming up with a few quarters, a nickel—and there it is again, warm among the cold metal coins. Her fingers graze the wooden ring and she clenches her teeth at the feel of it. Like a nagging thought, impossible to shed. Sifting through the coins, Addie is careful not to touch the wooden band again as she searches her change, resists the urge to fling the ring into the weeds, knows it will not make a difference if she does. It will always find its way back.

The darkness whispers in her ear, arms wrapped like a scarf around her throat.

I am always with you.

Addie plucks out a dime and pockets the rest.

Maggie hands back four dollars.

“Where you from, doll?” asks Mel, noticing the faintest edge of an accent in the corners of Addie’s voice, reduced these days to the vanishing end of an s, the slight softening of a t. It has been so long, and yet, she cannot seem to let it go.

“Here and there,” she says, “but I was born in France.”

“Oh la la,” says Mel in her flat Brooklyn drawl.

“Here you go, sunshine,” says Maggie, passing her a bag of pastries and a tall cup. Addie curls her fingers around the paper, relishing the heat on her cold palms. The coffee is strong, and dark, and when she takes a sip, she feels the warmth all the way down, and she is back in Paris again, in Istanbul, in Naples.

A mouthful of memory.

She starts toward the park gates.

“Au revoir!” calls Mel, landing hard on every letter, and Addie smiles into the steam.

The air is crisp inside the park. The sun is out, fighting for warmth, but the shade still belongs to winter, so Addie follows the light, sinking onto a grassy slope beneath the cloudless sky.

She sits the blueberry muffin on top of the paper bag, and sips her coffee, examining the book she borrowed from Fred’s table. She hadn’t bothered to look at what she was taking, but now her heart sinks a little at the sight of the paperback, the cover soft with wear, the title in German.

Kinder und Hausmärchen it reads, by Brüder Grimm.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Her German is rusty, kept in the back of her mind, in a corner she hasn’t used much since the war. Now she dusts it off, knows that beneath the layer of grime she will find the space intact, undisturbed. The boon of memory. She turns through the fragile old pages, eyes tripping over the words.

Once upon a time, she loved this kind of story.

When she was still a child, and the world was small, and she dreamed of open doors.

But Addie knows too well now, knows that these stories are full of foolish humans doing foolish things, warning tales of gods and monsters and greedy mortals who want too much, and then fail to understand what they’ve lost. Until the price is paid, and it’s too late to claim it back.

A voice rises like smoke inside her chest.

Never pray to the gods who answer after dark.

Addie tosses the book aside and slumps back into the grass, closing her eyes as she tries to savor the sun.

VIII

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

July 29, 1714

Adeline had wanted to be a tree.

To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above, just like Estele. It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself.

But here is the danger of a place like Villon.

Blink—and a year is gone.

Blink—and five more follow.

It is like a gap between stones, this village, just wide enough for things to get lost. The kind of place where time slips and blurs, where a month, a year, a life can go missing. Where everyone is born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.

Adeline was going to be a tree.

But then came Roger, and his wife, Pauline. Grown up together, and then married, and then gone, in the time it took for her to lace up a pair of boots.

A hard pregnancy, a ruinous birth, two deaths instead of one new life.

Three small children left behind, where there should have been four. The earth still fresh over a grave, and Roger looking for another wife, a mother for his children, a second life at the cost of Adeline’s one and only.

Of course, she said no.

Adeline is three and twenty, already too old to wed.

Three and twenty, a third of a life already buried.

Three and twenty—and then gifted like a prize sow to a man she does not love, or want, or even know.

She said no, and learned how much the word was worth. Learned that, like Estele, she had promised herself to the village, and the village had a need.

Her mother said it was duty.

Her father said it was mercy, though Adeline doesn’t know for whom.

Estele said nothing, because she knew it wasn’t fair. Knew this was the risk of being a woman, of giving yourself to a place, instead of a person.

Adeline was going to be a tree, and instead, people have come brandishing an ax.

They have given her away.

She lies awake the night before the wedding, and thinks of freedom. Of fleeing. Of stealing away on her father’s horse, even as she knows the thought is madness.

She feels mad enough to do it.

Instead, she prays.

She has been praying, of course, since the day of her betrothal, given half her possessions to the river and buried the other half in the field or at the slope of dirt and brush where the village meets the woods, and now she is almost out of time, and out of tokens.

She lies there in the dark, twists the old wooden ring on its leather cord, and considers going out and praying again now, in the dead of night, but Adeline remembers Estele’s fearsome warning about the ones who might answer. So instead, she clenches her hands together and prays to her mother’s God instead. Prays for help, for a miracle, for a way out. And then in the darkest part of night, she prays for Roger’s death—anything for her escape.

She feels guilty at once, sucks it back into her chest like an expelled breath, and waits.

Day breaks like an egg yolk, spilling yellow light across the field.

Adeline slips out of the house before dawn, having never slept at all. Now she winds her way through the wild grass beyond the vegetable garden, skirts wicking up the dew. She lets herself sink with the weight of them, her favorite drawing pencil clutched in one hand. Adeline does not want to give it up, but she is running out of time and out of tokens.

She presses the pencil point down into the damp soil of the field.

“Help me,” she whispers to the grass, its edges limned with light. “I know you are there. I know you are listening. Please. Please.”

But the grass is only grass, and the wind is only wind, and neither answers, even when she presses her forehead to the ground and sobs.

There is nothing wrong with Roger.

But there is nothing right, either. His skin is waxy, his blond hair thinning, his voice like a wisp of wind. When his hand lays itself upon her arm, the grip is weak, and when he inclines his head toward hers, his breath is stale.

And Adeline? She is a vegetable left too long in the garden, its skin gone stiff, its insides woody, gone to ground by choice, only to be dug up and made into a meal.

“I do not want to marry him,” she says, fingers tangled in the weedy earth.

“Adeline!” calls her mother, as if she is one of the livestock, gone astray.

She drags herself up, empty with anger and grief, and when she goes inside her mother sees only the dirt caking her hands, and orders her daughter to the basin. Adeline scrubs the soil from beneath her nails, bristles biting her fingers as her mother scolds.

“What will your husband think?”

Husband.

A word like a millstone, all weight and no warmth.

Her mother tuts. “You will not be so restless once you have children to tend.”

Adeline thinks again of Isabelle, two small boys clinging to her skirts, a third in a basket by the hearth. They used to dream together, but she has aged ten years in two, it seems. She is always tired, and there are hollows in her face where once her cheeks were red from laughter.

“It will be good for you,” says her mother, “to be somebody’s wife.”

The day passes like a sentence.

The sun falls like a scythe.

Adeline can almost hear the whistle of the blade as her mother braids her hair into a crown, weaves flowers in the place of jewels. Her dress is simple and light, but it might as well be made of mail for how it weighs on her.

She wants to scream.

Instead, she reaches up and grips the wooden ring around her neck, as if for balance.

“You must take that off before the ceremony,” instructs her mother, and Adeline nods, even as her fingers tighten around it.

Her father comes in from the barn, dusted with wood shavings and smelling of sap. He coughs, a faint rattle, like loose seeds, inside his chest. It has been there for a year, that cough, but he will not let them talk of it.

“You are almost ready?” he asks.

What a foolish question.

Her mother talks about the wedding dinner as if it has already come and gone. Adeline looks out the window at the sinking sun, and doesn’t listen to the words, but she can hear the light in her mother’s voice, the vindication in it. Even in her father’s eyes, there is a measure of relief. Their daughter tried to carve her own road, but now things are being set right, a wayward life dragged back on course, propelled down its proper path.

The house is too warm, the air heavy and still, and Adeline cannot breathe.

Finally the church bell tolls, the same low tone it calls at funerals, and she forces herself to her feet.

Her father touches her arm.

His face is sorry, but his grip is firm.

“You will come to love your husband,” he says, but the words are clearly more wish than promise.

“You will be a good wife,” says her mother, and hers are more command than wish.

And then Estele appears in the doorway, dressed as if she is in mourning. And why shouldn’t she be? This woman who taught her of wild dreams and willful gods, who filled Adeline’s head with thoughts of freedom, blew on the embers of hope and let her believe a life could be her own.

The light has gone watery and thin behind Estele’s gray head. There is still time, Adeline tells herself, but it is fleeting, faster now with every breath.

Time—how often has she heard it described as sand within a glass, steady, constant. But that is a lie, because she can feel it quicken, crashing toward her.

Panic beats a drum inside her chest, and outside, the path is a single dark line, stretched straight and narrow toward the village square. On the other side, the church stands waiting, pale and stiff as a tombstone, and she knows that if she walks in, she will not come out.

Her future will rush by the same as her past, only worse, because there will be no freedom, only a marriage bed and a deathbed and perhaps a childbed between, and when she dies it will be as though she never lived.

There will be no Paris.

No green-eyed lover.

No trips on boats to faraway lands.

No foreign skies.

No life beyond this village.

No life at all, unless—

Adeline pulls free of her father’s grip, drags to a stop on the path.

Her mother turns to look at her, as if she might run, which is exactly what she wants to do, but knows she can’t.

“I made a gift for my husband,” says Adeline, mind spinning. “I’ve left it in the house.”

Her mother softens, approving.

Her father stiffens, suspicious.

Estele’s eyes narrow, knowing.

“I’ll just fetch it,” she continues, already turning back.

“I’ll go with you,” says her father, and her heart lurches and her fingers twitch, but it is Estele who reaches out to stop him.

“Jean,” she says in that sly way, “Adeline cannot be your daughter and his wife. She is a woman grown, not a child to be minded.”

He finds his daughter’s eyes, and says, “Be quick.”

Adeline has already taken flight.

Back up the path, and past the door, into the house, and through, to the other side, to the open window, and the field, and the distant line of trees. The woods standing sentinel at the eastern edge of the village, opposite the sun. The woods, already cloaked in shadow, though she knows there is still light, still time.

“Adeline?” calls her father, but she doesn’t look back.

Instead, she climbs through the window, wood snagging on the wedding dress as she stumbles out, and runs.

“Adeline? Adeline!”

The voices call out after her, but they stretch thinner with every step, and soon she is across the field, and into the woods, breaking the line of trees as she sinks to her knees in the dense summer dirt.

She clutches the wooden ring, feels the loss of it even before she tugs the leather cord over her head. Adeline does not want to sacrifice it, but she has used up all her tokens, given every gift she could spare back to the earth, and none of the gods have answered. Now this is all she has left, and the light is thin, and the village is calling, and she is desperate to escape.

“Please,” she whispers, her voice breaking over the word as she plunges the band down into the mossy earth. “I will do anything.”

The trees murmur overhead, and then go still, as if they too are waiting, and Adeline prays, to every god in the Villon woods, to anyone and anything who will listen. This cannot be her life. This cannot be all there is.

“Answer me,” she pleads as the damp seeps into her wedding dress.

She squeezes her eyes shut, and strains to hear, but the only sound is her own voice on the wind and her name, echoing in her ears like a heartbeat.

“Adeline…”

“Adeline…”

“Adeline…”

She bows her head against the soil and grips the dark earth and screams, “Answer me!”

The silence is mocking.

She has lived here all her life and never heard the woods this quiet. Cold settles over her, and she doesn’t know if it’s coming from the forest or from her own bones, giving up the last of their fight. Her eyes are still shut tight, and perhaps that is why she doesn’t notice that the sun has slipped behind the village at her back, that dusk has given way to dark.

Adeline keeps praying, and doesn’t notice at all.

IX

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

July 29, 1714

The sound, when it comes, is a low rumble, deep and distant as thunder.

Laughter, Adeline thinks, opening her eyes and noticing, finally, how the light has faded.

She looks up, but sees nothing. “Hello?”

The laughter draws itself into a voice, somewhere behind her.

“You need not kneel,” it says. “Let us see you on your feet.”

She scrambles up, and turns, but she is met only by darkness, surrounded by it, a moonless night after the summer sun has fled. And Adeline knows, then, that she has made a mistake. That this is one of the gods she was warned against.

“Adeline? Adeline?” call the voices from the town, as faint and faraway as the wind.

She squints into the shadows between the trees, but there is no shape, no god to be found—only that voice, close as a breath against her cheek.

“Adeline, Adeline,” it says, mocking, “… they are calling for you.”

She turns again, finding nothing but deep shadow. “Show yourself,” she orders, her own voice sharp and brittle as a stick.

Something brushes her shoulder, grazes her wrist, drapes itself around her like a lover. Adeline swallows. “What are you?”

The shadow’s touch withdraws. “What am I?” it asks, an edge of humor in that velvet tone. “That depends on what you believe.”

The voice splits, doubles, rattling through tree limbs and snaking over moss, folding over on itself until it is everywhere.

“So tell me—tell me—tell me,” it echoes. “Am I the devil—the devil—or the dark—dark—dark? Am I a monster—monster—or a god—god—god—or…”

The shadows in the woods begin to pull together, drawn like storm clouds. But when they settle, the edges are no longer wisps of smoke, but hard lines, the shape of a man, made firm by the light of the village lanterns at his back.

“Or am I this?”

The voice spills from a perfect pair of lips, a shadow revealing emerald eyes that dance below black brows, black hair that curls across his forehead, framing a face Adeline knows too well. One that she has conjured up a thousand times, in pencil and charcoal and dream.

It is the stranger.

Her stranger.

She knows it is a trick, a shadow parading as a man, but the sight of him still robs her breath. The darkness looks down at his shape, seeing himself as if for the first time, and seems to approve. “Ah, so the girl believes in something after all.” Those green eyes lift. “Well now,” he says, “you have called, and I have come.”

Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.

Adeline knows—she knows—but this is the only one who answered. The only one who would help.

“Are you prepared to pay?”

Pay.

The price.

The ring.

Adeline drops to her knees, scours the ground until she finds the leather cord, and frees her father’s ring from the soil.

She holds it out to the god, its pale wood now stained with dirt, and he draws closer. He may look like flesh and blood, but he still moves like shadow. A single step, and he is there, filling her vision, folding one hand around the ring, and resting the other on Adeline’s cheek. His thumb brushes the freckle beneath her eye, the edge of her stars.

“My dear,” says the darkness, taking the ring, “I do not deal in trinkets.”

The wooden band crumbles in his hand, and falls away, nothing more than smoke. A strangled sound escapes her lips—it hurt enough to lose the ring, hurts more to see it wiped from the world like a smudge on skin. But if the ring is not enough, then what?

“Please,” she says, “I will give anything.”

The shadow’s other hand still rests against her cheek. “You assume I want anything,” he says, lifting her chin. “But I take only one coin.” He leans closer still, green eyes impossibly bright, his voice soft as silk. “The deals I make, I make for souls.”

Adeline’s heart lurches in her chest.

In her mind, she sees her mother on her knees in church, speaking of God and Heaven, hears her father talking, telling stories of wishes and riddles. She thinks of Estele, who believes in nothing but a tree over her bones. Who would say that a soul is nothing more than a seed returned to soil—though she’s the one who warned against the dark.

“Adeline,” says the darkness, her name sliding like moss between his teeth. “I am here. Now tell me why.”

She has waited so long to be met—to be answered, to be asked—that at first the words all fail her.

“I do not want to marry.”

She feels so small when she says it. Her whole life feels small, and she sees that judgment reflected in the god’s gaze, as if to say, Is that all?

And no, it is more than that. Of course it is more.

“I do not want to belong to someone else,” she says with sudden vehemence. The words are a door flung wide, and now the rest pour out of her. “I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of not having choices, so scared of the years rushing past beneath my feet. I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all. I—”

The shadow cuts her off, impatient. “What use is it, to tell me what you do not want?” His hand slides through her hair, comes to rest against the back of her neck, drawing her close. “Tell me instead what you want most.”

She looks up. “I want a chance to live. I want to be free.” She thinks of the years slipping by.

Blink, and half your life is gone.

“I want more time.”

He considers her, those green eyes changing shade, now spring grass, now summer leaf. “How long?”

Her mind spins. Fifty years. One hundred. Every number feels too small.

“Ah,” says the darkness, reading her silence. “You do not know.” Again, the green eyes shift, darken. “You ask for time without limit. You want freedom without rule. You want to be untethered. You want to live exactly as you please.”

“Yes,” says Adeline, breathless with want, but the shadow’s expression sours. His hand drops from her skin, and then he is no longer there, but leaning against a tree several strides away.

“I decline,” he says.

Adeline draws back as if struck. “What?” She has come this far, has given everything she has—she made her choice. She cannot go back to that world, that life, that present and past without a future. “You cannot decline.”

One dark brow lifts, but there is no amusement in that face.

“I am not some genie, bound to your whim.” He pushes off the tree. “Nor am I some petty forest spirit, content with granting favors for mortal trinkets. I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no.”

Adeline? Adeline? Adeline?

Beyond the edge of the woods, the village lights are closer now. There are torches in the field. They are coming for her.

The shadow looks over his shoulder. “Go home, Adeline. Back to your small life.”

“Why?” she pleads, grabbing his arm. “Why do you refuse me?”

He brushes his hand along her cheek, the gesture soft and warm as hearthsmoke. “I am not in the business of charity. You ask for too much. How many years until you’re sated? How many, until I get my due? No, I make deals with endings, and yours has none.”

She will come back to this moment a thousand times.

In frustration, and regret, in sorrow, and self-pity, and unbridled rage.

She will come to face the fact that she cursed herself before he ever did.

But here, and now, all she can see is the flickering torchlight of Villon, and the green eyes of the stranger she once dreamed of loving, and the chance to escape slipping away with his touch.

“You want an ending,” she says. “Then take my life when I am done with it. You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.”

The shadow tips his head, suddenly intrigued.

A smile—just like the smile in her drawings, askance, and full of secrets—crosses his mouth. And then he pulls her to him. A lover’s embrace. He is smoke and skin, air and bone, and when his mouth presses against hers, the first thing she tastes is the turning of the seasons, the moment when dusk gives way to night. And then his kiss deepens. His teeth skim her bottom lip, and there is pain in the pleasure, followed by the copper taste of blood on her tongue.

“Done,” whispers the god against her lips.

And then the world goes black, and she is falling.

X

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

July 29, 1714

Adeline shivers.

She looks down, and sees that she is sitting on a bed of wet leaves.

A second ago, she was falling—for only a second, barely the length it takes to draw a breath—but time, it seems, has skipped ahead. The stranger is gone, and so are the last dregs of light. The summer sky, where it shows through the canopied trees, is smoothed to a velvet black, marked only by a low-hanging moon.

Adeline rises, studying her hands, looking past the dirt for some sign of transformation.

But she feels … unchanged. A little dizzy, perhaps, as if she’s stood too quickly, or drunk too much wine on an empty stomach, but after a moment even that unsteadiness has passed, and she’s left feeling as if the world has tipped, but not fallen, leaned, and then rebalanced, settled back into the same old groove.

She licks her lips, expecting to taste blood, but the mark left by the stranger’s teeth is gone, swept away with every other trace of him.

How does one know if a spell has worked? She asked for time, for life—will she have to wait a year, or three, or five, to see if age leaves any mark? Or take up a knife and cut into her skin, to see if and how it heals? But no, she had asked for life, not a life unscathed, and if Adeline is being honest, she is afraid to test it, afraid to find her skin still too yielding, afraid to learn that the shadow’s promise was a dream, or worse, a lie.

But she knows one thing—whether or not the deal was real, she will not heed the ringing church bells, will not marry Roger. She will defy her family. She will leave Villon, if she must. She knows she will do whatever it takes now, because she was willing in the dark, and one way or another, from this moment forward, her life will be her own.

The thought is thrilling. Terrifying, but thrilling, as she leaves the forest.

She is halfway across the field before she realizes how quiet the village is.

How dark.

The festive lanterns have been put out, the bells have stopped ringing, there are no voices calling her name.

Adeline makes her way home, the dull dread growing a little sharper with every step. By the time she gets there, her mind is buzzing with worry. The front door hangs open, spilling light onto the path, and she can hear her mother humming in the kitchen, her father chopping wood around the side of the house. A normal night, made wrong by the fact it was not meant to be a normal night.

“Maman!” she says, stepping inside.

A plate shatters to the floor, and her mother yelps, not in pain, but surprise, her face contorted.

“What are you doing here?” she demands, and here is the anger Addie expected. Here is the dismay.

“I’m sorry,” she starts. “I know you must be mad, but I couldn’t—”

“Who are you?”

The words are a hiss, and she realizes then, that fearsome look on her mother’s face is not the anger of a mother scorned, but that of a woman scared.

“Maman—”

Her mother cringes away from the very word. “Get out of my house.”

But Adeline crosses the room, grabs her by the shoulders. “Don’t be absurd. It’s me, A—”

She is about to say Adeline.

Indeed, she tries. Three syllables should not be such a mountain to climb, but she is breathless by the end of the first, unable to manage the second. The air turns to stone inside her throat, and she is left stifled, silent. She tries again, this time attempting Addie, then at last their family name, LaRue, but it is no use. The words meet an impasse between her mind and tongue. And yet, the second she draws breath to say another word, any other word, it is there, lungs filled and throat loose.

“Let go,” pleads her mother.

“What’s this?” demands a voice, low and deep. The voice that soothed Adeline on sick nights, that told her stories as she sat on the floor of his shop.

Her father stands in the doorway, his arms full of wood.

“Papa,” she says, and he draws back, as if the word were sharp.

“The woman is mad,” sobs her mother. “Or cursed.”

“I am your daughter,” she says again.

Her father grimaces. “We have no child.”

Those words, a duller knife. A deeper cut.

“No,” says Adeline, shaking her head at the absurdity. She is three and twenty, has lived every day and every night beneath this roof. “You know me.”

How can they not? The resemblance between them has always been so keen, her father’s eyes, her mother’s chin, one’s brow and the other’s lips, each piece clearly copied from its source.

They see it, too, they must.

But to them, it is only proof of devilry.

Her mother crosses herself, and her father’s hands close around her, and she wants to sink into the strength of his embrace, but there is not warmth in it as he drags her to the door.

“No,” she begs.

Her mother is crying now, one hand to her mouth and the other clutching the wooden cross around her neck, as she calls her own daughter a demon, a monster, a demented thing, and her father says nothing, only grips her arm tighter as he pulls her from the house.

“Be gone,” he says, the words half-pleading.

Sadness sweeps across his face, but not the kind that comes with knowing. No, it is the sadness reserved for lost things, a storm-torn tree, a horse made lame, a carving split one stroke before it’s done.

“Please,” she begs. “Papa—”

His face hardens as he forces her out into the dark and slams the door. The bolt scrapes home. Adeline stumbles back, shaking with shock and horror. And then she turns and runs.

“Estele.”

The name begins as a prayer, soft and private, and grows to a shout as Adeline nears the woman’s cottage.

“Estele!”

A lamp is lit within, and by the time she reaches the edge of the light, the old woman stands in the open doorway, waiting for her caller.

“Are you a stranger or a spirit?” Estele asks warily.

“I am neither,” says Adeline, though she knows how she must look. Her dress tattered, her hair wild, streaming words like witchcraft on the step. “I am flesh and blood and human, and I have known you all my life. You make charms in the shape of children to keep them well in winter. You think peaches are the sweetest fruit, and that church walls are too thick for prayers to get through, and you want to be buried not beneath a stone, but in a patch of shade under a large tree.”

Something flashes across the old woman’s face, and Adeline holds her breath, hoping it is recognition. But it is too brief.

“You are a clever spirit,” says Estele, “but you will not cross this hearth.”

“I am not a spirit!” shouts Adeline, storming into the light of the old woman’s door. “You taught me about the old gods, and all the ways to summon them, but I made a mistake. They wouldn’t answer, and the sun was going down so fast.” She wraps her arms tight around her ribs, unable to stop shaking. “I prayed too late, and something answered, and now everything is wrong.”

“Foolish girl,” chides Estele, sounding like herself. Sounding as if she knows her.

“What do I do? How do I fix it?”

But the old woman only shakes her head. “The darkness plays its own game,” she says. “It makes its own rules,” she says. “And you have lost.”

And with that, Estele draws back into her house.

“Wait!” calls Adeline as the old woman shuts the door.

The bolt drives home.

Adeline hurls herself against the wood, sobbing until her legs give way, and she sinks to her knees on the cold stone step, one fist still pounding against the wood.

And then, suddenly, the bolt draws back.

The door swings open, and Estele stands over her.

“What is this?” she asks, surveying the girl folded on her steps.

The old woman looks at her as if they’ve never met. The moments before erased by an instant and a closed door.

Her wrinkled gaze flicks over the stained wedding dress, the wild hair, the dirt under her nails, but there’s no knowing in her face, only a guarded curiosity.

“Are you a spirit? Or a stranger?”

Adeline squeezes her eyes shut. What is happening? Her name is still a rock lodged deep, and when she was a spirit, she was banished, so she swallows hard and answers, “A stranger.” Tears begin to slide down Adeline’s face. “Please,” she manages. “I have nowhere to go.”

The old woman looks at her for a long moment, and then nods.

“Wait here,” she says, slipping back into the house, and Adeline will never know what Estele was going to do then, because the door swings shut, and stays shut, and she is left kneeling on the ground, trembling more from shock than cold.

She doesn’t know how long she sits there, but her legs are stiff when she forces them to bear her weight. She rises, and walks past the old woman’s house to the line of trees beyond, past their sentinels’ edge into the crowded dark.

“Show yourself!” she calls out.

But there is only the ruffle of feathers, the crackle of leaves, the ripple of a forest disturbed in sleep. She conjures his face, those green eyes, those black curls, tries to will the darkness into shape again, but moments pass, and she is still alone.

I do not want to belong to anyone.

Adeline walks deeper into the forest. This is a wilder stretch of wood, the floor a nest of bramble and brush. It claws at her bare legs, but she doesn’t stop, not until the trees have closed around her, their branches blotting out the moon overhead.

“I call on you!” she screams.

I am not some genie, bound to your whim.

A low limb, half buried by the forest floor, rises just enough to catch her feet, and she goes down hard, knees hitting ragged earth and hands tearing through weedy soil.

Please, I will give anything.

The tears come, then, sudden and heaving. Fool. Fool. Fool. She pounds her fists against the ground.

This is a vile trick, she thinks, a horrid dream, but it will pass.

That is the nature of dreams. They do not last.

“Wake up,” she whispers into the dark.

Wake up.

Adeline curls into the forest floor, closes her eyes, and sees her mother’s tearstained cheeks, her father’s hollow sadness, Estele’s weary gaze. She sees the darkness, smiling. Hears his voice as he whispers that single, binding word.

Done.

XI

New York City

March 10, 2014

A Frisbee lands in the grass nearby.

Addie hears the rumble of running feet, and opens her eyes in time to see a giant black nose rushing at her face before the dog covers her in wet kisses. She laughs and sits up, runs her fingers through thick fur, catching the dog by his collar before he can get ahold of the paper bag with the second muffin.

“Hello, you,” she says as, across the park, someone calls out an apology.

She flings the Frisbee back in their direction, and the dog is off again. Addie shivers, suddenly wide awake, and cold.

That’s the trouble with March—the warmth never lasts. There’s that narrow stretch when it parades as spring, just enough for you to thaw if you’re sitting in the sun, but then it’s gone. The sun has moved on. The shadows have swept in. Addie shivers again, and pushes up from the grass, brushing off her leggings.

She should have stolen warmer pants.

Shoving the paper bag in her pocket, Addie tucks Fred’s book under her arm and abandons the park, heading east down Union and up toward the waterfront.

Halfway there, she stops at the sound of a violin, the notes picked out like ripened fruit.

On the sidewalk, a woman perches on a stool, the instrument tucked beneath her chin. The melody is sweet and slow, drawing Addie back to Marseilles, to Budapest, to Dublin.

A handful of people gather to listen, and when the song ends, the sidewalk fills with soft applause, and passing bodies. Addie digs the last change out of her pocket, and drops it into the open case, and carries on, lighter, and fuller.

When she reaches the theater in Cobble Hill, she checks the posted timetable and then pushes open the door, quickening her pace as she crosses the crowded lobby.

“Hey,” Addie says, flagging down a teen boy with a broom. “I think I left my purse in theater three.”

Lying is easy, so long as you choose the right words.

He waves her on without looking up, and she ducks beneath the velvet ticket-taker’s rope and into the darkened hall, the urgency falling away with every step. Muted thunder rolls beneath the doors of an action film. Music seeps into the hall from a romantic comedy. The highs and lows of voices, and scores. She ambles down the corridor, studying the COMING SOON posters and the ticker tapes announcing the showings above each door. She’s seen them all a dozen times, but she doesn’t care.

The credits must be rolling on number five, because the doors swing open, and a stream of people spill out into the corridor. Addie ducks past them, into the emptying room, and finds an overturned bucket of popcorn in the second row, golden pebbles littering the sticky floor. She scoops it up and marches back to the lobby, and the concession stand, waits in line behind a trio of preteen girls before reaching the counter, and the boy behind it.

She runs a hand through her hair, mussing it slightly, and blows out her breath.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “some little boy kicked over my popcorn.” She shakes her head, and so does he, a mimic, echoing her exasperation. “Is there any way you could charge me the refill cost instead of…” She is already reaching in her pocket, as if to pull out a wallet, but the boy takes the bucket.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, glancing around. “I’ve got you.”

Addie beams. “You’re a star,” she says, meeting his eyes, and the boy blushes fiercely, and stammers that it’s really no problem, no problem at all, even as he scans the lobby for a superior. He dumps out the rest of the spilled popcorn and fills it fresh, passing it like a secret back across the counter.

“Enjoy your show.”

Of all the inventions Addie has seen ushered into the world—steam-powered trains, electric lights, photography, and phones, and airplanes, and computers—movies might just be her favorite one.

Books are wonderful, portable, lasting, but sitting there, in the darkened theater, the wide screen filling her vision, the world falls away, and for a few short hours she is someone else, plunged into romance and intrigue and comedy and adventure. All of it complete with 4K picture and stereo sound.

A quiet heaviness fills her chest when the credits roll. For a while she was weightless, but now she returns to herself, sinking until her feet are back on the ground.

By the time Addie gets out of the theater it is almost six, and the sun is going down.

She winds her way back through the tree-lined streets, past the park, the market now shuttered and the stalls already gone, and toward the rusted green table at the other edge. Fred is still sitting there in his chair, reading M.

The pattern of spines on the table has shifted a little, an empty space here where a book has sold, a new rise there where another has been added. The light is getting low, and soon he’ll have to go in, pack up the boxes and carry them one by one back into the house, and up the two floors to his one-bedroom. Addie has offered many times to help, but Fred insists on doing it himself. Another echo of Estele. Stubborn as stale bread.

Addie crouches down beside the table, and rises with the borrowed book in hand, as if it had simply fallen off the end. She sets it back, careful not to upset the stack, and Fred must be at a good spot in the story, because he grunts without ever looking up at her, or the book, or the paper bag she sets on top, the one with the chocolate-chip muffin inside.

It’s the only kind he likes.

Candace always gave him hell for his sweet tooth, he told Addie one morning, said it would kill him, but life’s a bitch with a crooked sense of humor—’cause she’s gone, and he’s still eating shit (his words, not hers).

The temperature is falling, and Addie tucks her hands in her pockets and wishes Fred a good night before continuing down the block, her back to the low sun and her shadow long ahead.

It’s dark by the time Addie gets to the Alloway—one of those places that seems to relish its status as a dive bar, a reputation tarnished by the fact it’s become a favorite among headliners who want that Brooklyn feel. A handful of people mill around on the curb, smoking, chatting, waiting for friends, and Addie lingers among them a moment. She bums a cigarette, just to have something to do, resisting the easy draw of the door for as long as she can, that tipping sense of the familiar, déjà vu.

She knows this road.

Knows where it leads.

Inside, the Alloway is shaped like a bottle of whisky, the narrow stem of the entry, the dark wooden bar widening to a room of tables and chairs. She takes a seat at the counter. The man on her left buys her a drink, and she lets him.

“Let me guess,” says the man. “A rosé?”

And she thinks of ordering whisky just to see the surprise on his face, but that was never her drink; she’s always gone for sweet.

“Champagne.”

He orders, and they make small talk until he gets a call, and steps away, promising to be right back. She knows he won’t, is grateful for it as she sips her drink and waits for Toby to go onstage.

He takes a seat, one knee up to steady his guitar, and flashes that bashful smile, almost apologetic. He hasn’t learned yet how to take up space, but she’s sure he will. He looks out at the small crowd before he starts to play, and Addie closes her eyes and lets herself vanish into the music. He plays a few covers. One of his own folk tunes. And then, this.

The first chords float through the Alloway, and Addie is back in his place. She is sitting at the piano, coaxing out notes, and he is there, beside her, fingers folded over hers.

It is coming together now, words wrapped over melody. It is becoming his. It is like a tree, taking root. He will remember, on his own; not her, of course—not her, but this. Their song.

It ends, the music replaced by applause, and Toby sidles up to the bar, orders a Jack and Coke because they’ll give it to him for free, and somewhere between the first sip and the third he sees her, and smiles, and for an instant Addie thinks—hopes, even now—that he remembers something, because he looks at her as if he knows her, but the truth is simply that he wants to; attraction can look an awful lot like recognition in the wrong light.

“Sorry,” Toby says, head ducking the way it does whenever he’s embarrassed. The way it did that morning when he found her in his living room.

Someone brushes Addie’s shoulder as they reach past her for the bar door. She blinks, and the dream falls away.

She has not gone in. She is still standing on the street, the cigarette burned away to nothing between her fingers.

A man holds open the door. “You coming in?”

Addie shakes her head, and forces herself to step back, away from the door, and the bar, and the boy about to take the stage. “Not tonight,” she says.

The rise isn’t worth the fall.

XII

New York City

March 10, 2014

Night settles over Addie as she crosses the Brooklyn Bridge.

The promise of spring has retreated like a tide, replaced again by a damp winter chill, and she pulls her jacket close, breath fogging as she starts the long stretch up the length of Manhattan.

It would be easy enough to take the subway, but Addie has never liked being underground, where the air is close and stale, the tunnels too much like tombs. Being trapped, buried alive, these are the things that scare you when you cannot die. Besides, she doesn’t mind walking, knows the strength of her own limbs, relishes the kind of tired she used to dread.

Still, it’s late, and her cheeks are numb, her legs weary, by the time she reaches the Baxter on Fifty-sixth.

A man in a trim gray coat holds the door, and her skin tingles at the sudden flush of central heat as she steps into the Baxter’s marble lobby. She is already dreaming of a hot shower and a soft bed, already moving toward the open elevator, when the man behind the desk rises from his seat.

“Good evening,” he says. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see James,” she says, without slowing. “Twenty-third floor.”

The man frowns. “He isn’t in.”

“Even better,” she says, stepping into the elevator.

“Ma’am,” he calls, starting after her, “you can’t just—” but the doors are already closing. He knows he will not make it, is already turning back toward the desk, reaching for the phone to call security, and that is the last thing she sees before the doors slide shut between them. Perhaps he will get the phone to his ear, even begin to dial before the thought slips from his mind, and then he will look down at the receiver in his hand and wonder what he was thinking, apologize profusely to the voice on the line before sinking back into his seat.

The apartment belongs to James St. Clair.

They had met at a coffee shop downtown a couple months ago. The seats were all taken when he came over, wisps of blond escaping the hem of a winter hat, glasses fogging from the cold. That day Addie was Rebecca, and before he’d even introduced himself, James had asked if he could share her table, saw that she was reading Colette’s Chéri, and managed a few lines of broken, blushing French. He sat, and soon easy smiles gave way to easy conversation. Funny, how some people take an age to warm, and others simply walk into every room as if it’s home.

James was like that, instantly likable.

When he asked, she said that she was a poet (an easy lie, as no one ever asked for proof), and he told her he was between jobs, and she nursed her coffee for as long as she could, but eventually her cup was empty, and so was his, and new customers were circling, buzzard-like, in search of chairs, but when he began to rise, she’d felt that old familiar sadness. And then James asked if she liked ice cream, and even though it was January, the ground outside slicked with ice and paving salt, Addie said she did, and this time when they stood, they stood together.

Now she types the six-digit code into the keypad on his door and steps inside.

The lights come on, revealing pale wood floors, and clean marble counters, lush curtains and furniture that still looks unused. A high-backed chair. A cream sofa. A table neatly stacked with books.

She unzips her boots, steps out of them beside the door, and pads barefoot through the apartment, tossing her jacket over the arm of a chair. In the kitchen, she pours herself a glass of merlot, finds a block of Gruyère in a fridge drawer and a box of gourmet crackers in the cupboard, carries her makeshift picnic into the living room, the city unfolding beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Addie sifts through his records, puts on a pressing of Billie Holiday, and retreats to the cream sofa, knees tucked up beneath her as she eats.

She would love a place like this. A place of her own. A bed molded to her body. A wardrobe full of clothes. A home, decorated with markers of the life she’s lived, the material evidence of memory. But she cannot seem to hold on to anything for long.

It is not as though she hasn’t tried.

Over the years, she’s collected books, hoarded art, hidden fine dresses away in chests and locked them there. But no matter what she does, things always go missing. They vanish, one by one, or all at once, stolen by some strange circumstance, or simply time. Only in New Orleans did she have a home, and even that was not hers, but theirs, and it is gone.

The only thing she cannot seem to rid herself of is the ring.

There was a time when she couldn’t bear to part with it again. A time when she mourned its loss. A time when her heart soared to hold it, so many decades later.

Now, she cannot stand the sight of it. It is an unwelcome weight in her pocket, an unwanted reminder of another loss. And every time her fingers skim the wood, she feels the darkness kissing her knuckle as he slides the band back on.

See? Now we are even.

Addie shudders, upsetting her glass, and drops of red wine splash over the rim, landing like blood on the cream sofa. She does not curse, does not spring to her feet to fetch club soda and a towel. She simply watches as the stain soaks in, and through, and disappears. As if it was never there.

As if she was never there.

Addie rises, and goes to run herself a bath, soaks away the city grime with scented oil, scrubs herself clean with hundred-dollar soap.

When everything slips through your fingers, you learn to savor the feel of nice things against your palm.

She settles back into the tub, and sighs, breathing in a mist of lavender and mint.

They went for ice cream that day, she and James, ate it inside the shop, heads bowed together as they stole toppings from each other’s cups. His hat sat discarded on the table, his blond curls on full display, and he was striking, yes, but it still took her a while to notice the looks.

Addie was used to passing glances—her features are sharp, but feminine, her eyes bright above the constellation of freckles on her cheeks, a kind of timeless beauty, she’s been told—but this was different. Heads were turning. Gazes lingered. And when she wondered why, he looked at her with such cheerful surprise, and confessed that he was, in fact, an actor—in a show that was currently quite popular. He blushed when he said it, looked away, then back to study her face, as if braced for some fundamental change. But Addie has never seen his work, and even if she had, she is not one to blush at fame. She has lived too long, and known too many artists. And even still, or perhaps more to the point, Addie prefers the ones who aren’t yet finished, the ones still looking for their shape.

And so James and Addie carried on.

She teased him about his loafers, his sweater, his wire-frame glasses.

He told her he was born in the wrong decade.

She told him she was born in the wrong century.

He laughed, and she didn’t, but there was something old-fashioned in his manner. Only twenty-six, but when he talked, he had the easy cadence, the slow precision, of a man who knew the weight of his own voice, belonged to the class of young men who dressed like their fathers, the charade of those too eager to grow old.

Hollywood had seen it, too. He kept getting cast in period pieces.

“I’ve got a face for sepia,” he joked.

Addie smiled. “Better than a face for radio.”

It was a lovely face, but there was something wrong, the too-steady smile of a man with a secret. They made it through the ice cream before he came undone. That easy joy of his flickered, and went out, and he dropped the plastic spoon down into the cup and closed his eyes, and said, “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” she asked, and he flung himself back in his seat, and ran his fingers through his hair. To the strangers on the street it might have looked like such a careless gesture, a feline stretch, but she could see the anguish in his face as he said it.

“You are so beautiful, and kind, and fun.”

“But?” she pressed, sensing the turn.

“I’m gay.”

The word, like a hitch in his throat, as he explained that there was so much pressure, that he hated the gaze of the media and all its demands. That people were beginning to whisper, to wonder, and he wasn’t ready for them to know.

Addie realized, then, that they were on a stage. Propped before the plate-glass windows of the ice-cream shop, for everyone to see, and James was still apologizing, saying that he shouldn’t have flirted, shouldn’t have used her in this way, but she wasn’t really listening. His blue eyes went somewhat glassy as he spoke, and she wondered if this was what he called on when the script ordered tears. If this was the place he went. Addie has secrets, too, of course, though she cannot help but keep them.

Still, she knows what it’s like, to have a truth erased.

“I understand,” he was saying, “if you want to go.”

But Addie didn’t stand up, didn’t reach for her coat. She simply leaned in, and stole a blueberry from the edge of his bowl.

“I don’t know about you,” she said lightly, “but I’m having a lovely day.”

James let out a shaky breath, blinking away tears, and smiled.

“So am I,” he said, and things were better after that.

It is so much easier to share a secret than to keep one, and when they stepped outside again, hand in hand, they were conspirators, made giddy by their private knowledge. She was not worried about being noticed, being seen, knew that if there were photos, they would never turn out.

(There were photos, but her face was always conveniently in motion or obscured, and she remained a mystery girl in the tabloids for the next week, until the headlines inevitably moved on to juicier fare.)

They had come back here, to his apartment at the Baxter, for a drink. His tables were covered in a flurry of books and papers, all relating to the Second World War. He was preparing for a role, he told her, reading every firsthand account he could find. He showed them to her, these printed reproductions, and Addie said that she’d been fascinated by the war, that she knew a few stories, told them as if they were someone else’s, a stranger’s experience instead of her own. James listened, folded into the corner of the cream sofa, his eyes pressed shut and a glass of whisky balanced on his chest as she spoke.

They fell asleep side by side in the king-sized bed, in the shadow of each other’s warmth, and the next morning, Addie woke before dawn and slipped away, sparing them both the discomfort of a good-bye.

She has the sense that they would have been friends. If he’d remembered. She tries not to think about that—she swears sometimes her memory runs forward as well as back, unspooling to show the roads she’ll never get to travel. But that way lies madness, and she has learned not to follow.

Now she is back here, but he is not.

Addie wraps herself in one of James’s plush terry robes, and throws open the French doors, stepping out onto the bedroom balcony. The wind is up, the cold stinging the soles of her bare feet. The city sprawls around her like a low night sky, full of artificial stars, and she shoves her hands into the pockets of the robe, and feels it, resting on the bottom of the empty fold.

A small circle of smooth wood.

She sighs, closes her hand around the ring, and draws it out, leans her elbows on the balcony, and forces herself to look at the band in her open palm, to study it, as if she has not already memorized every warp and whorl. She traces the curve with her free hand, resists the urge to slip the band onto her finger. She has thought of it, of course, in darker moments, tired moments, but she will not be the one to break.

She tips her hand, and lets the ring fall over the edge of the balcony, down, down, into the dark.

Back inside, Addie pours herself another glass of wine and climbs into the magnificent bed, folds herself beneath the down duvet and between the Egyptian sheets, and wishes she’d gone into the Alloway, wishes that she’d sat at the bar and waited for Toby, with his messy curls and shy smile. Toby, who smells of honey, and plays bodies like instruments, and takes up so much space in bed.

XIII

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

July 30, 1714

A hand shakes Adeline awake.

For a moment, she is out of place, out of time. Sleep clings to her edges, and with it, the dream—it must have been a dream—of prayers made to silent gods, of deals made in the dark, of being forgotten.

Her imagination has always been a vivid thing.

“Wake up,” says a voice, one she has known all her life.

The hand again, firm on her shoulder, and she blinks away the last of sleep to find the wooden planks of a barn ceiling, straw pricking her skin, and Isabelle kneeling beside her, blond hair braided into a crown, brows drawn tight with worry. Her face has waned a little with every child, each birth stealing a little more of her life.

“Get up, you fool.”

That is what Isabelle should say, the chiding softened by the kindness in her voice. But her lips are pursed with worry, her forehead furrowed with concern. She has always frowned like that, fully, with her whole face, but when Adeline reaches out to press one thumb into the space between the other girl’s brows (to smooth away the worry, the way she has a thousand times before) Isabelle draws back, away from the touch of a stranger.

Not a dream, then.

“Mathieu,” Isabelle calls over her shoulder, and Adeline sees her oldest son standing in the barn’s open doorway, clutching a pail. “Go and get a blanket.”

The boy vanishes into the sun.

“Who are you?” asks Isabelle, and Adeline starts to answer, forgetting that the name won’t come. It lodges in her throat.

“What happened to you?” presses Isabelle. “Are you lost?”

Adeline nods.

“Where did you come from?”

“Here.”

Isabelle’s frown deepens. “Villon? But that’s not possible. We would have met. I’ve lived here all my life.”

“So have I,” she murmurs, and Isabelle must see the truth as a delusion, because she shakes her head as if clearing away a thought.

“That boy,” she mutters, “where has he gone?”

She turns her gaze fully back to Adeline. “Can you stand?”

Arm in arm, they walk into the yard. Adeline is filthy, but Isabelle doesn’t let go, and her throat tightens at the simple kindness, the warmth of the other girl’s touch. Isabelle treats her like a wild thing, her voice soft, her motions slow as she leads Adeline to the house.

“Are you hurt?”

Yes, she thinks. But she knows Isabelle is speaking of scrapes and cuts and simple wounds, and of those, she is less certain. She looks down at herself. In the darkness, the worst was hidden. In the light of morning, it’s on display. Adeline’s dress, spoiled. Her slippers, ruined. Her skin, painted with the forest floor. She felt the scratch and tear of brambles in the woods last night, but she can find no angry welts, no cuts, no signs of blood.

“No,” she says softly, as they step inside the house.

There is no sign of Mathieu, or Henri, their second child—just the baby, Sara, sleeping in a basket by the hearth. Isabelle sits Adeline in a chair across from the infant, and sets a pot of water over the fire.

“You’re being so kind,” Adeline whispers.

“‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me,’” says Isabelle.

It is a Bible verse.

She brings a basin to the table, along with a cloth. Kneeling at Adeline’s feet, she coaxes the dirty slippers off, sets them by the hearth, then takes Adeline’s hands and begins to clean the forest floor from her fingers, the soil from beneath her nails.

As she works, Isabelle peppers her with questions, and Adeline tries to answer, she really does, but her name is still a shape she cannot say, and when she speaks of her life in the village, of the shadow in the woods, of the deal she made, the words make it across her lips, but stop before they reach the other girl’s ears. Isabelle’s face goes blank, her gaze flat, and when Adeline finally trails off, she gives her head a quick shake, as if throwing off a daydream.

“Sorry,” says her oldest friend, with an apologetic smile. “What were you saying?”

She will learn in time that she can lie, and the words will flow like wine, easily poured, easily swallowed. But the truth will always stop at the end of her tongue. Her story silenced for all but herself.

A mug is pressed into Adeline’s hands as the infant begins to fuss.

“It is an hour’s ride to the nearest village,” Isabelle says, lifting the swaddled child. “Did you walk all this way? You must have…” She is speaking to Adeline, of course, but her voice is soft, sweet, her attention on Sara, breathing into the soft down of the baby’s hair, and Adeline must admit, her friend was seemingly made to be a mother—too content to even notice the attention.

“What will we do with you?” she coos.

Footsteps sound on the path outside, heavy and booted, and Isabelle straightens a little, patting the infant’s back. “That will be my husband, George.”

Adeline knows George well, had kissed him once when they were six, back when kisses were traded like pieces in a game. But now her heart flutters with panic, and she is already on her feet, the cup clattering to the table.

It is not George she fears.

It is the doorway, and what happens when Isabelle is on the other side.

She catches Isabelle’s arm, her grip sudden and tight, and for the first time, fear flits across the other woman’s face. But then she steadies, and pats Adeline’s hand.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll talk to him. It will all be well.” And before Adeline can refuse, the infant is pressed into her arms, and Isabelle is out of reach.

“Wait. Please.”

Fear beats inside her chest, but Isabelle is gone. The door stays open, voices rising and falling in the yard beyond, the words themselves reduced to windsong. The infant murmurs in her arms and she sways a little, trying to soothe the child, and herself. The baby quiets, and she’s just returning her to the basket when she hears a short gasp.

“Get away from her.”

It is Isabelle, her voice high and tight with panic. “Who let you in?”

All the Christian kindness, erased in an instant by a mother’s fear.

“You did,” says Adeline, and she has to fight the urge to laugh. There is no humor in the moment, only madness.

Isabelle stares in horror. “You’re lying,” she says, surging forward, halted only by her husband’s hand upon her shoulder. He has seen Adeline, too, marked her as a different kind of wild thing, a wolf inside their house.

“I meant no harm,” she says.

“Then go,” orders George.

And what else can she do? She abandons the baby, leaves behind the mug of broth, the basin on the table, and her oldest friend. She hurries out into the yard and glances back, sees Isabelle press her daughter to her chest before George blocks the doorway, ax in hand as if she is a tree to fell, a shadow set upon their house.

And then he too is gone, and the door is shut and bolted.

Adeline stands on the path, uncertain what to do, where to go. There are grooves in her mind, worn smooth and deep. Her legs have carried her to and from this place too many times. Her body knows the way. Go down this road, and take a left, and there is her own house, which is not her home anymore, even though her feet are already moving toward it.

Her feet—Adeline shakes her head. She left her slippers by Isabelle’s hearth to dry.

A pair of George’s boots lean against the wall beside the door, and she takes them and begins to walk. Not to the house she grew up in, but back to the river where her prayers began.

The day is already warm, the air edged with heat as she drops the boots onto the bank and steps out into the shallow stream.

Her breath catches with the cold as the river laps up around her calves, kisses the backs of her knees. She looks down, seeking out her warped reflection and half expects not to find it there, to see only the sky behind her head. But she is still there, distorted by the stream.

Hair once braided, now wild, sharp eyes wide. Seven freckles like flecks of paint across her skin. A face drawn in fear, and anger.

“Why didn’t you answer?” she hisses to the sunlight on the stream.

But the river only laughs, in its soft, slippery way, the burble of water over stone.

She wrestles with the laces of her wedding dress, peels the soiled thing away, plunges it down into the water. The current drags at the fabric, and her fingers long to let go, to let the river claim this last vestige of her life, but she has too little now to give up more.

Adeline plunges herself in, too, freeing the last flowers from her hair, rinsing the woods from her skin. She comes up feeling cold, and brittle, and new.

The sun is high, the day hot, and she lays the dress out in the grass to dry, sinks onto the slope beside it in her shift. They sit, side by side in silence, one a ghost of the other. And she realizes, looking down, that this is all she has.

A dress. A slip. A pair of stolen shoes.

Restless, she takes up a stick and begins to draw absent patterns in the silt along the bank. But every stroke she makes dissolves, the change too quick to be the river’s doing. She draws a line, watches it begin to wash away before she even finishes the mark. Tries to write her name, but her hand stills, pinned under the same rock that held her tongue. She carves a deeper line, gouges out the sand, but it makes no difference, soon that groove is gone, too, and an angry sob escapes her throat as she casts the stick away.

Tears prick her eyes as she hears the shuffle of small feet, blinks to find a round-faced boy standing over her. Isabelle’s four-year-old son. Addie used to swing him in her arms, spin until they both were dizzy and laughing.

“Hello,” says the boy.

“Hello,” she says, her voice a little shaky.

“Henri!” calls the boy’s mother, and in a moment Isabelle is there, on the rise, a basket of washing on her hip. She sees Adeline sitting in the grass, holds out a hand not for her friend, but for her son. “Come here,” she orders, those blue eyes lingering on Adeline.

“Who are you?” asks Isabelle, and she feels as if she’s at the edge of a steep hill, the ground plunging away beneath her feet. Her balance, tipping forward, as the dreaded descent begins again.

“Are you lost?”

Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vécu.

Already seen. Already known. Already lived.

They have been here before, walked this road, or something like it, and so Adeline now knows where to put her feet, knows what to say, which words will draw out kindness, knows that if she asks in the right way, Isabelle will take her home, and wrap a blanket around her shoulders, and offer her a cup of broth, and it will work until it doesn’t.

“No,” she says. “I’m just passing through.”

It is the wrong thing to say, and Isabelle’s expression hardens.

“It is not fitting for a woman to travel alone. And certainly not in such a state.”

“I know,” she says. “I had more, but I was robbed.”

Isabelle blanches. “By who?”

“A stranger in the woods,” she says, and it is not a lie.

“Are you hurt?”

Yes, she thinks. Grievously. But she forces herself to shake her head and answer, “I will live.”

She has no choice.

The other woman sets the washing down.

“Wait here,” says Isabelle, the kind and generous Isabelle again. “I will come right back.”

She swings her young son up in her arms, and turns back toward her house, and the moment she is out of sight, Adeline gathers her dress, still damp at the hem, and pulls it on.

Isabelle will, of course, forget again.

She’ll get halfway to her house before she slows and wonders why she started back without her clothes. She’ll blame her tired mind, addled from three children, the infant’s distemper, and return to the river. And this time, there will be no woman sitting on the banks, no dress spread in the sun, only a stick, abandoned in the grass, a canvas of silt laid smooth.

Adeline has drawn her family house a hundred times.

Memorized the angle of the roof, the texture of the door, the shadow of her father’s workshop, and the limbs of the old yew tree that sits like a sentinel at the edge of the yard.

That is where she’s standing now, tucked behind the trunk, watching Maxime graze beside the barn, watching her mother hang linens out to dry, watching her father whittle down a block of wood.

And as Adeline watches, she realizes she cannot stay.

Or rather, she could—could find a way to skip from house to house, like stones skating across the river—but she will not. Because when she thinks of it, she feels neither like the river nor the stone, but like a hand, as it tires of throwing.

There is Estele, closing her door.

There is Isabelle, one moment kind, and the next filled with horror.

Later, much later, Addie will make a game of these cycles, will see how long she can step from perch to perch before she falls. But right now, the pain is too fresh, too sharp, and she cannot fathom going through those motions, cannot weather the weary look on her father’s face, the rebuke in Estele’s eyes. Adeline LaRue cannot be a stranger here, to these people she has always known.

It hurts too much, watching them forget her.

Her mother slips back inside the house, and Adeline abandons the shelter of the tree and starts across the yard; not for the front door, but for her father’s shop.

There is a single shuttered window, an unlit lamp, the only light a stripe of sun spilling through the open door, but that is enough to see by. She knows the contours of this place by heart. The air smells like sap, earthy and sweet, the floor is covered in shavings and dust, and every surface holds the bounty of her father’s work. A wooden horse, modeled from Maxime, of course—but here no bigger than a cat. A set of bowls, decorated only by the rings of the trunk from which they were cut. A collection of palm-sized birds, their wings spread, or folded, or stretched mid-flight.

Adeline learned to sketch the world in charcoal and pressed lead, but her father has always created with a knife; whittled the shapes out of nothing, giving them breadth, and depth, and life.

She reaches out now, and runs her finger down the horse’s nose, the way she has a hundred times before.

What is she doing here?

Adeline does not know.

Saying good-bye, perhaps, to her father—her favorite person in this world.

This is how she would remember him. Not by the sad unknowing in his eyes, or the grim set of his jaw as he led her to church, but by the things he loved. By the way he showed her how to hold a stick of charcoal, coaxing shapes and shades with the weight of her hand. The songs and stories, the sights from the five summers she went with him to market, when Adeline was old enough to travel, but not old enough to cause a stir. By the careful gift of a wooden ring, made for his first and only daughter when she was born—the one she then offered to the dark.

Even now, her hand drifts to her throat to thumb the leather cord, and something deep inside her cringes when she remembers it is gone forever.

Scraps of parchment scatter the table, covered in drawings and dimensions, the markings of past and future work. A pencil sits on the edge of the desk, and Adeline finds herself reaching for it, even as a dread echo sounds inside her chest.

She brings it to the page, and begins to write.

But as the pencil scratches across the paper, the letters fade in its wake. By the time Adeline has finished those two, unsteady words, they are gone, and when she slams her hand down on the table, she upsets a tiny pot of varnish, spilling the precious oil onto her father’s notes, the wood beneath. She scrambles to collect the papers, staining her hands and knocking over one of the little wooden birds.

But there is no need for panic.

The varnish is already soaking through, sinking in and down like a rock in a river, until it’s gone. It is such a strange thing, to make sense of this moment, to count what has and hasn’t been lost.

The varnish is gone, but not back into the pot, which lies empty on its side, the contents lost. The parchment lies unmarked, untouched, as is the table beneath. Only her hands are stained, the oil tracing the whorls of her fingers, the lines of her palms. She is still staring at them when she steps back, and hears the terrible snap of wood splitting beneath her heel.

It is the little wooden bird, one of its wings splintered on the packed-earth floor. Adeline winces in sympathy—it was her favorite of the flock, frozen in a moment of upward motion, the first rise of flight.

She crouches to gather it up, but by the time she straightens, the splinters on the ground are gone, and in her hand, the little wooden bird is whole again. She nearly drops it in surprise, doesn’t know why this is the thing that seems impossible. She has been made a stranger, has seen herself slide from the minds of those she’s known and loved like the sun behind a cloud, has watched every mark she tries to make as it’s undone, erased.

But the bird is different.

Perhaps because she can hold it in her hands. Perhaps because, for an instant, it seems a blessing, this undoing of an accident, a righting of a wrong, and not simply an extension of her own erasure. The inability to leave a mark. But Adeline doesn’t think of it that way, not yet, has not spent months turning the curse over in her hands, memorizing its shape, studying the smooth surfaces in search of cracks.

In this moment, she simply clutches the small, unbroken bird, grateful that it’s safe.

She is about to return the figure to its flock when something stops her—perhaps the oddness of the moment, perhaps the fact that she is already missing this life, even if it will never miss her—but she tucks the bird into the pocket of her skirts, and forces herself out of the shed, and away from her home.

Down the road, and past the twisted yew tree, and around the bend, until she has reached the edge of town. Only then does she let herself look back, let her gaze drift one last time to the line of trees across the field, the dense shadow stretched beneath the sun, before she turns her back on the forest, and the village of Villon, and the life that is no longer hers, and begins to walk.

XIV

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

July 30, 1714

Villon vanishes like a cart around a bend, the rooftops swallowed up by the trees and the hills of the surrounding country. By the time Adeline musters the courage to look back, it is gone.

She sighs, and turns, and walks, wincing at the strange shape of George’s boots.

They are too large by half. Adeline found socks on a washing line, shoved them into the toes of the shoes to make them fit, but by the fourth hour of walking she can feel the places where her skin has rubbed raw, the blood pooling in the leather soles. She is afraid to look, and so she doesn’t, focuses only on the path ahead.

She has decided to walk toward the walled city of Le Mans. It is the farthest she has ever gone, and even still, she has never made the trip alone.

She knows the world is so much larger than the towns along the Sarthe, but right now she cannot think beyond the road in front of her. Every step she takes is a step away from Villon, away from a life that is no longer hers.

You wanted to be free, says a voice in her head, but it is not hers; no, it is deeper, smoother, lined with satin and woodsmoke.

She skirts the villages, the farms alone in their fields. There are whole stretches when the world seems to empty around her. As if an artist drew the barest lines of the landscape, then turned, distracted, from the task.

Once, Adeline hears a cart trundling down the road, and ducks into the shade of a nearby grove and waits for it to pass. She does not want to stray too far from the road, or the river, but over her shoulder, through a copse of trees, she sees the yellow blush of summer fruit, and her stomach aches with longing.

An orchard.

The shade is lovely, the air cool, and she picks a ripened peach from a low branch and sinks her teeth greedily into the fruit, her empty stomach cramping around the sugared bite. Despite the pain, she eats a pear as well, and a handful of mirabelles, scoops palm and after palm of water from a well at the orchard’s edge, before forcing herself forward, out of the shelter and back into the summer heat.

The shadows are stretching long when she finally sinks onto the riverbank and pulls off the boots to assess the damage to her feet.

But there is none.

The socks are unbloody. Her heels, uncut. No sign of the miles walked, the wear and tear of so many hours on the packed-earth road, though she felt the pain of every step. Nor are her shoulders burned from the sun, though all day she felt its heat. Her stomach twists, aching for something more than stolen fruit, but as the light ebbs, and the hills darken, there are no lanterns, no homes in sight.

Exhausted, she would curl up right there on the river’s edge and give in to sleep, but insects float above the water, nipping at her skin, and so she retreats into an open field, and sinks down amid the tall grass the way she did so many times when she was young, and wanted to be somewhere else. The grass would swallow the house, the workshop, the rooftops of Villon, everything except the open sky overhead, a sky that could belong to anywhere.

Now, as she stares up at the mottled dusk, she longs for home. Not for Roger, or the future she did not want, but the woody grip of Estele’s hand on hers as the old woman showed her how to wind raspberry bushes, and the soft hum of her father’s voice as he worked in his shed, the scent of sap and wood dust in the air. The pieces of her life she never meant to lose.

She slips her hand into the pocket of her skirt, fingers searching for the little carved bird. She has not let herself reach for it before, half-sure it would be gone, its theft undone like every other act—but it is still there, the wood smooth and warm.

Adeline draws it out, holds it up against the sky, and wonders.

She could not break the figurine.

But she could take it.

Amid the growing list of negatives—she cannot write, cannot say her name, cannot leave a mark—this is the first thing she has been able to do. She can steal. It will be a long time before she knows the contours of her curse, longer still before she understands the shadow’s sense of humor, before he looks at her over a glass of wine and observes that a successful theft is an anonymous act. The absence of a mark.

In this moment, she is simply grateful for the talisman.

My name is Adeline LaRue, she tells herself, clutching the little wooden bird. I was born in Villon in the year 1691, to Jean and Marthe, in a stone house just beyond the old yew tree …

She tells the story of her life to the little carving, as if afraid she’ll forget herself as easily as others do, unaware that her mind is now a flawless cage, her memory a perfect trap. She will never forget, though she’ll wish she could.

As the night creeps through, purple giving way to black, Adeline looks up into the dark, and begins to suspect that the dark is staring back, that god, or demon, with its cruel gaze, its mocking smile, features contorted in a way she never drew.

As she stares, head craned, the stars seem to pick out the lines of a face, the cheekbones and brow, the illusion drawing together until she half expects the blanket of night to ripple and twist as the shadows did in the woods, the space between stars splitting to reveal those emerald eyes.

She bites her tongue to keep from calling to him, lest something else decide to answer.

She is not in Villon, after all. She does not know which gods might linger here.

Later, her strength will falter.

Later, there will be nights when her need will smother caution, and she will scream and curse and dare him to come out and face her.

Later—but tonight she is tired, and hungry, and loath to waste what little energy she has on gods that will not answer.

So she curls onto her side, squeezes her eyes shut, and waits for sleep, and as she does, she thinks of torches in the field beyond the woods, of voices calling her name.

Adeline, Adeline, Adeline.

The words pound against her, drumming on her skin like rain.

She wakes sometime later with a start, the world inky black and the downpour already soaking through her dress, the rainstorm sudden and heavy.

She hurries, skirts dragging, across the field to the nearest line of trees. Back home she loved the patter of rain against the walls of the house, used to lie awake and listen to the world washed clean. But here she has no bed, no shelter. She does her best to wring the water from the dress, but it is already cooling on her skin, and she huddles among the roots, shivering beneath the broken canopy.

My name is Adeline LaRue, she tells herself. My father taught me how to be a dreamer, and my mother taught me how to be a wife, and Estele taught me how to speak to gods.

Her thoughts drag on Estele, who used to stand out in the rain, palms open as if to catch the storm. Estele, who never cared as much for the company of others as for her own.

Who probably would have been content to be alone in the world.

She tries to imagine what the old woman would say, if she could see her now, but every time she tries to summon those keen eyes, that knowing mouth, she sees only the way Estele looked at her in those last moments, the way her face furrowed, and then cleared, a lifetime of knowing brushed away like a tear.

No, she should not think of Estele.

Adeline wraps her arms around her knees, and tries to sleep, and when she wakes again, sunlight is pouring through the trees. A finch stands on the mossy ground nearby, pecking at the hem of her dress. She brushes it away, checking her pocket for the little wooden bird as she stands, sways, dizzy with hunger, realizes she has not had more than fruit in a day and a half.

My name is Adeline LaRue, she tells herself as she makes her way back to the road. It is becoming a mantra, something to pass the time, measure her steps, and she repeats it, over and over.

She rounds a bend, and stops, blinking fiercely, as if the sun is in her eyes. It’s not, and yet the world ahead has been plunged into a sudden, vivid yellow, the green fields devoured by a blanket the color of egg yolk.

She looks back over her shoulder, but the way behind her is still green and brown, the ordinary shades of summer. The field ahead is mustard seed, though she doesn’t know it then. Then, it is simply beautiful, in an overpowering way. Addie stares, and for a moment she forgets her hunger, her aching feet, her sudden loss, and marvels at the shocking brightness, the all-consuming color.

She wades through the field, flower buds brushing her palms, unafraid to crush the plants underfoot—they have already straightened in her wake, steps erased. By the time she reaches the far edge of the field, and the path, and the steady green, it looks dull, her eyes searching for another source of wonder.

Shortly after, a larger town comes into sight, and she is about to weave around it when she catches a scent on the air that makes her stomach ache.

Butter, yeast, the sweet and hearty smell of bread.

She looks like a dress that fell from the line, wrinkled and dirty, her hair a tangled nest, but she is too hungry to care. She follows the scent between the houses, and up a narrow lane toward the village square. Voices rise with the smell of baking, and when she rounds the corner she sees a handful of women sitting around a communal oven. They perch on the stone bench around it, laughing and chatting like birds on a branch as the loaves rise within the oven’s open mouth. The sight of them is jarring, ordinary in an aching way, and Adeline lingers in the shaded lane a moment, listening to the trill and chirp of their voices, before the hunger forces her forward.

She doesn’t have to search her pockets to know she has no coins. Perhaps she could barter for the bread, but all she has is the bird, and when she finds it in the folds of her skirt, her fingers refuse to loosen on the wood. She could beg, but her mother’s face comes to mind, eyes tight with scorn.

That leaves only theft—which is wrong, of course, but she is too hungry to weigh the sin of it. There is only the matter of how. The oven is hardly unmanned, and despite how fast she seems to fade from memory, she is still flesh and blood, not phantom. She cannot simply walk up and take the bread without causing a stir. Sure, they might forget her soon enough, but what danger would she be in before they did? If she got to the bread, and then away, how far would she have to run? How fast?

And then she hears it. A soft, animal sound, almost lost beneath the chatter.

She circles the stone hut and finds her chance, across the lane.

A mule stands in the shade, lazily chewing its bit beside a sack of apples, a stack of kindling.

All it takes is a single, sharp smack, and the mule lurches, more in shock, she hopes, than pain. It jostles forward, upsetting the apples and the wood as it sets off. And just like that, the square is startled, thrown into a brief but noisy state as the beast trots away, dragging a bag of grain, and the women leap to their feet, the trills and warbles of their laughs dissolving into taut shouts of dismay.

Adeline slips across the oven like a cloud, swiping the nearest loaf from the stone mouth. Pain sears across her fingers as she grabs it, and she nearly drops the bread, but she is too hungry, and pain, she is learning, doesn’t last. The loaf is hers, and by the time the mule is settled, and the grain set right, and the apples gathered, and the women returned to their place by the oven, she is already gone.

She leans in the shade of a stable on the edge of town, teeth tearing into the under-baked bread. The dough collapses in her mouth, heavy, sweet, and hard to swallow, but she doesn’t care. It is filling enough, wearing the edges off her hunger. Her mind begins to clear. Her chest loosens, and for the first time since she left Villon, she feels something like human, if not whole. She pushes off the stable wall and begins to walk again, following the line of the sun, and the path of the river, toward Le Mans.

My name is Adeline … she starts again, then stops.

She never loved the name, and now she cannot even say it. Whatever she calls herself, it will be only in her head. Adeline is the woman she left in Villon, on the eve of a wedding she did not want. But Addie—Addie was a gift from Estele, shorter, sharper, the switch-quick name for the girl who rode to markets, and strained to see over roofs, for the one who drew and dreamed of bigger stories, grander worlds, of lives filled with adventure.

And so, as she walks on, she starts the story over in her head.

My name is Addie LaRue …

XV

New York City

March 11, 2014

It is too quiet without James.

Addie never thought of him as loud—charming, cheerful, but hardly raucous—but now she realizes how much he filled this space when they were in it.

That night, he put on a record and sang along as he made grilled cheese on the six-burner stove, which they ate standing up because the place was new, and he hadn’t bought kitchen chairs. There are still no kitchen chairs, but now there is no James, either—he’s off on location somewhere—and the apartment stretches out around her, too silent and too large for one person, the high floor and the double-paned glass combining to block out the sounds of the city, reducing Manhattan to a picture, still and gray, beyond the windows.

Addie plays record after record, but the sound only echoes. She tries to watch TV, but the drone of news is more static than anything, as is the tinny choir of voices on the radio, too far away to feel real.

The sky outside is a static gray, a thin mist of rain blurring the buildings. It is the kind of day designed for wood fires, and mugs of tea, and well-loved books.

But while James has a fireplace, it’s only gas, and when she checks the cupboard for her favorite blend, she finds the box nestled at the back, but it is empty, and all the books he keeps are histories, not fiction, and Addie knows she cannot pass the day here, with only herself for company.

She gets dressed again, in her own clothes, and smooths the covers back onto the bed, even though the cleaners will surely return before James does. With a last glance at the dreary day, she steals a scarf from a closet shelf, a soft plaid cashmere with the tags still on, and sets out, the lock chiming behind her.

She does not know, at first, where she is going.

Some days she still feels like a lion caged, pacing its enclosure. Her feet have a mind of their own, and soon they are carrying her uptown.

My name is Addie LaRue, she thinks to herself as she walks.

Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself.

Like Peter, in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget.

But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten.

To remember when no one else does.

I remember, whispers the darkness, almost kindly, as if he’s not the one who cursed her.

Perhaps it is the bad weather, or perhaps it is this maudlin mood that leads Addie up along the eastern edge of Central Park, to Eighty-second and into the granite halls of the Met.

Addie has always had a fondness for museums.

Spaces where history gathers out of place, where art is ordered, and artifacts sit on pedestals, or hang on walls above little white didactics. Addie feels like a museum sometimes, one only she can visit.

She crosses the great hall, with its stone arches and colonnades, weaves her way through Greco-Roman and past Oceania, exhibits she has lingered in a hundred times, continues until she reaches the European sculpture court, with its grand marble figures.

One room over, she finds it, where it always is.

It sits in a glass case along one wall, framed on either side by pieces made of iron, or silver. It is not large, as far as sculptures go, the length of her arm, from elbow to fingertips. A wooden plinth with five marble birds perched atop it, each about to fly away. It is the fifth that holds her gaze: the lift of its beak, the angle of its wings, the soft down of its feathers captured once in wood, and now in stone.

Revenir, it’s called. To come back.

Addie remembers the first time she found the work, the small miracle of it, sitting there on its clean white block. The artist, Arlo Miret, a man she never knew, never met, and yet here he is, with a piece of her story, her past. Found, and made into something memorable, something worthwhile, something beautiful.

She wishes she could touch the little bird, run her finger along its wing, the way she always did, even though she knows it’s not the one she lost, knows this one wasn’t carved by her father’s strong hands, but by a stranger. Still, it is there, it is real, it is, in some way, hers.

A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.

XVI

Le Mans, France

July 31, 1714

Le Mans lies likes a sleeping giant in the fields along the Sarthe.

It has been more than ten years since Addie was allowed to make the trek to the walled city, perched beside her father in the family cart.

Now her heart quickens as she steps through the city gates. There is no horse this time, no father, no cart, but in the late-afternoon light, the city is just as busy, just as bustling, as she remembered. Addie doesn’t bother trying to blend in—if, now and then, someone glances her way, notices the young woman in the stained white dress, they keep their opinions to themselves. It is easier to be alone among so many people.

Only—she doesn’t know where to go. She pauses a moment to think, only to hear hooves clattering, too sudden and too close, and narrowly escapes being trampled by a cart.

“Out of the way!” shouts the driver, as she lunges back, only to collide with a woman carrying a basket of pears. It tips, spilling three or four onto the cobbled path.

“Watch where you’re going,” snarls the woman, but when Addie bends to help her fetch the fallen fruit, the woman screeches and stomps at her fingers.

Addie backs away and thrusts her hands into her pockets, clings to the little wooden bird as she continues through the winding streets toward the center of the city. There are so many roads, but they all look the same.

She thought this place would feel more familiar, but it only feels strange. A figment from a long-ago dream. When Addie was last here, the city seemed a wonder, a grand and vital place: the bustling markets, bathed in sun; the voices ringing off of stone; her father’s broad shoulders, blocking out the city’s darker sides.

But now, alone, a menace has crept in, like fog, erasing the buoyant charm, leaving only the sharp edges jutting through the mist. One version of the city replaced by another.

Palimpsest.

She doesn’t know the word just yet, but fifty years from now, in a Paris salon, she will hear it for the first time, the idea of the past blotted out, written over by the present, and think of this moment in Le Mans.

A place she knows, and yet doesn’t.

How foolish to think it would stay the same, when everything else has changed. When she has changed, grown from a girl into a woman, and then into this—a phantom, a ghost.

She swallows hard, and stands up straight, determined not to fray or fall apart.

But Addie cannot find the inn where she and her father stayed, and even if she could, what did she plan to do there? She has no way to pay, and even if she had the coin, who would rent to a woman on her own? Le Mans is a city, but it is not so big that such a thing would pass beneath a landlord’s notice.

Addie’s grip tightens on the carving in her skirts as she continues through the streets. There is a market just past the town hall, but it is closing up, tables empty, the carts pulling away, the ground littered only with the dregs of lettuce and a few moldy potatoes, and before she can think of scrounging for them, they are gone, swept away by smaller, quicker hands.

There is a tavern inn at the edge of the square.

She watches a man dismount his horse, a dappled mare, and pass the reins to a stable hand, already turning toward the noise and hustle of the open doors. She watches the stable hand lead the mare across the way to a broad wooden barn, and vanish into the relative dark. But it’s not the barn that’s caught her eye, or the horse—it’s the pack still thrown across its back. Two heavy satchels, bulging like sacks of grain.

Addie crosses the square and slips into the stable behind the man and the mare, her steps as light and quick as possible. Sunlight streams weakly through the beams in the stable roof, casting the place in soft relief, a few highlights amid the layered shadow, the kind of place she would have loved to draw.

A dozen horses shuffle in their stalls, and across the barn, the stable hand hums to the mare as he strips away its tack, tosses the saddle over the wooden divide, and brushes down the beast, his own hair a nest of knots and snarls.

Addie ducks low, creeping toward the stalls at the back of the barn, the sacks and satchels strewn on the wooden barriers between the horses. Her hands dart hungrily across the trappings, searching beneath buckles and under flaps. There are no purses, but she finds a heavy riding coat, a skin of wine, a boning knife the length of her hand. The coat she drapes around her shoulders, the blade goes into one deep pocket and the wine in the other as she creeps on, quiet as a ghost.

She doesn’t see the empty bucket until her shoe cracks against it with a sharp clatter. It falls with a muffled thud onto the hay, and Addie holds her breath and hopes the sound is lost among the shuffling hooves. But the stable hand stops humming. She sinks lower, folds herself into the shadows of the nearest stall. Five seconds pass, then ten, and then at last the humming starts again, and Addie straightens and makes her way to the final stall, where a stout draft horse lounges, munching grain, beside a belted bag. Her fingers drift toward the buckle.

“What are you doing?”

The voice, too close, behind her. The stable hand, no longer humming, no longer brushing the dappled mare, but standing in the alley between berths, a crop in his hand.

“Sorry, sir,” she says, a shade breathless. “I came looking for my father’s horse. He wanted something from his satchel.”

He stares at her, unblinking, his features half-swallowed by the dark sprawl of his hair. “Which horse would that be?”

She wishes she’d studied the horses as well as their packs, but she cannot hesitate, it would reveal the lie, so she turns quickly toward the workhorse. “This one.”

It is a good lie, as far as lies go, the kind that could have easily been true, if she’d only picked another horse. A grim smile twitches beneath the man’s beard.

“Ah,” he says, flicking the crop against his palm, “but you see, that one’s mine.”

Addie has the strange and sickening urge to laugh.

“Can I pick again?” she whispers, inching toward the stable door.

Somewhere nearby, a mare whinnies. Another stamps its hoof. The crop stops snapping against the man’s palm, and Addie lurches sideways, between the stalls, the stable hand on her heels.

He’s fast, a speed clearly born from catching beasts, but she is lighter, and has far more to lose. His hand grazes the collar of her stolen coat, but he cannot catch her; his heavy steps falter and slow, and Addie thinks she’s free, right before she hears the crisp, bright sound of a bell ringing on the stable wall, followed by the sound of boots coming from outside.

She is nearly to the mouth of the barn when the second man appears, cutting like a wide shadow across the doorway.

“Has a beast got free?” he shouts before he sees her, wrapped in the stolen coat, her too-large boots catching on the hay. She scrambles backward, right into the arms of the stable hand. His fingers close around her shoulders, heavy as shackles, and when she tries to twist free, his grip digs deep enough to bruise.

“Caught her thieving,” he says, the coarse bristles on his cheek scraping hers.

“Let me go,” she pleads as he pulls her tight.

“This isn’t a market stall,” sneers the second, drawing a knife from his belt. “Do you know what we do with thieves?”

“It was a mistake. Please. Let me go.”

The knife wags like a finger. “Not until you’ve paid.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“That’s all right,” says the second man, drawing closer. “Thieves pay in flesh.”

She tries to tear free, but the grip on her arms is iron as the knife comes to rest against the laces of her dress, plucking them like strings. And when she twists again, she is no longer trying to get free, simply trying to reach the boning knife inside the pocket of her stolen coat. Twice her fingers brush the wooden hilt before she manages to catch it.

She drives the blade down and back into the first man’s thigh, feels it sink into the meat of his leg. He cries out before he thrusts her away like a hornet, flinging her forward, right onto the other man’s blade.

Pain screams through her shoulder as the knife bites in, skates along her collarbone, leaving a trail of searing heat. Her mind goes blank with it, but her legs are already moving, carrying her through the stable doors and out into the square. She throws herself behind a barrel, out of sight, as the men come stumbling, swearing, out of the barn behind her, their faces twisted with rage and something worse, something primal, hungry.

And then, between one step and the next, they begin to slow.

Between one step and the next, the urgency falters, and fades, the purpose slipping, like a thought, out of reach. The men look around, and then at each other. The one she stabbed stands straighter now, no sign of the tear in his trousers, no blood soaking through the fabric. The mark she left on him, erased.

They jostle, and rib, and head back into the barn, and Addie slumps forward, her head coming to rest against the wooden barrel. Her chest throbs, pain tracing a vivid line along her collar, and when she presses her hand to the wound, her fingers come away red.

She cannot stay there, curled behind the barrel, forces herself up, and sways, feeling faint, but soon the wave of sickness passes, and she is still on her feet. She walks, one hand pressed to her shoulder, and the other closed tight around the knife beneath her stolen coat. She doesn’t know when she decides to leave Le Mans, but soon enough she is crossing the courtyard, away from the stable and through the winding streets, past bawdy inns and tavern houses, past crowded steps and raucous laughter, giving the city up with every step.

The ache in her shoulder fades from a searing heat to a dull throb, and then, to nothing. She runs her fingers over the gash, but it is gone. As is the blood on her dress, swallowed up like the words she scrawled across her father’s parchment, the lines she drew in the silt on the riverbank. The only traces of it are on her skin, a crust of drying blood along her collarbone, a smear of browning red across her palm. And Addie marvels a moment, despite herself, at the strange magic of it, the proof that in one way, the shadow kept his word. Twisted it, yes, warped her wishes into something wrong and rotten. But granted her this, at least.

To live.

A small, mad sound escapes her throat, and there is relief in it, perhaps, but also horror. For the truth of her hunger, which she is only just discovering. For the ache in her feet, though they do not cut or bruise. For the pain of the wound in her shoulder, before it healed. The darkness has granted her freedom from death, perhaps, but not from this. Not from suffering.

It will be years before she learns the true meaning of that word, but in this moment, as she walks into the thickening dusk, she is still relieved to be alive.

A relief that flickers when she reaches the edge of the city.

This is as far as Adeline has ever gone.

Le Mans looms at her back, and ahead the high stone walls give way to scattered towns, each one like a copse of tress, and then, to open field, and then, to what, she does not know.

When Addie was young, she would surge up the slopes that rose and fell around Villon, fling herself to the very edge of the hill, the place where the ground fell away, and stop, heart racing as her body leaned forward, longing for the fall.

The slightest push, and weight would do the rest.

There is no steep hill beneath her now, no slope, and yet, she feels her balance tilt.

And then, Estele’s voice rises to meet her in the dark.

How do you walk to the end of the world? she once asked. And when Addie didn’t know, the old woman smiled that wrinkled grin, and answered.

One step at a time.

Addie is not going to the end of the world, but she must go somewhere, and in that moment, she decides.

She is going to Paris.

It is, beside Le Mans, the only city she knows by name, a place that played so many times across her stranger’s lips, and featured into every tale her father told, a place of gods and kings, gold and majesty, and promise.

This is how it starts, he would have said, if he could see her now.

Addie takes the first step, and feels the ground give way, feels herself tip forward, but this time, she does not fall.

XVII

New York City

March 12, 2014

It is a better day.

The sun is out, the air is not so cold, and there is so much to love about a city like New York.

The food, the art, the constant offerings of culture—though Addie’s favorite thing is its scale. Towns and villages are easily conquered. A week in Villon was enough to walk every path, to learn every face. But with cities like Paris, London, Chicago, New York, she doesn’t have to pace herself, doesn’t have to take small bites to make the newness last. A city she can consume as hungrily as she likes, devour it every day and never run out of things to eat.

It is the kind of place that takes years to visit, and still there always seems to be another alley, another set of steps, another door.

Perhaps that’s why she hasn’t noticed it before.

Set off from the curb, and down a short flight of steps, there is a shop half-hidden by the line of the street. The awning was clearly once purple, but has long faded toward gray, though the shop’s name is still legible, picked out in white lettering.

The Last Word.

A used bookstore, judging by the name, and the windows brimming with stacked spines. Addie’s pulse thrills a little. She was certain she’d found them all. But that is the brilliant thing about New York. Addie has wandered a fair portion of the five boroughs, and still the city has its secrets, some tucked in corners—basement bars, speakeasies, members-only clubs—and others sitting in plain sight. Like Easter eggs in a movie, the ones you don’t notice until the second or third viewing. And not like Easter eggs at all, because no matter how many times she walks these blocks, no matter how many hours, or days, or years she spends learning the contours of New York, as soon as she turns her back it seems to shift again, reassemble. Buildings go up and come down, businesses open and close, people arrive and depart and the deck shuffles itself again and again and again.

Of course, she goes in.

A faint bell announces her arrival, the sound quickly smothered by the crush of books in various conditions. Some bookstores are organized, more gallery than shop. Some are sterile, reserved for only the new and untouched.

But not this one.

This shop is a labyrinth of stacks and shelves, texts stacked two, even three deep, leather beside paper beside board. Her favorite kind of store, one that’s easy to get lost in.

There is a checkout counter by the door, but it is empty, and she wanders, unmolested, through the aisles, picking her way along the well-loved shelves. The bookshop seems fairly empty, save for an older white man studying a row of thrillers, a gorgeous Black girl sitting cross-legged in a leather chair at the end of a row, silver shining on her fingers and in her ears, a giant art book open in her lap.

Addie wanders past a placard marked POETRY, and the darkness whispers against her skin. Teeth skimming like a blade along a bare shoulder.

Come live with me and be my love.

Addie’s refrain, worn smooth with repetition.

You do not know what love is.

She doesn’t stop, but turns the corner, fingers trailing now along THEOLOGY. She has read the Bible, the Upanishads, the Quran, after a spiritual bender of sorts a century ago. She passes Shakespeare, too, a religion all his own.

She pauses at MEMOIR, studying the titles on the spines, so many I’s and Me’s and My’s, possessive words for possessive lives. What a luxury, to tell one’s story. To be read, remembered.

Something knocks against Addie’s elbow, and she looks down to see a pair of amber eyes peering over her sleeve, surrounded by a mass of orange fur. The cat looks as old as the book in her hand. It opens its mouth, and lets out something between a yawn and a meow, a hollow, whistling sound.

“Hello.” She scratches the cat between the ears, eliciting a low rumble of pleasure.

“Wow,” says a male voice behind her. “Book doesn’t usually bother with people.”

Addie turns, about to comment on the cat’s name, but loses her train of thought when she sees him, because for a moment, only a moment, before the face comes into focus, she is certain it is—

But it is not him.

Of course it is not.

The boy’s hair, though black, falls in loose curls around his face, and his eyes, behind their thick-frame glasses, are closer to gray than green. There is something fragile to them, more like glass than stone, and when he speaks, his voice is gentle, warm, undeniably human. “Help you find anything?”

Addie shakes her head. “No,” she says, clearing her throat. “Just browsing.”

“Well then,” he says with a smile. “Carry on.”

She watches him go, black curls vanishing into the maze of titles, before dragging her gaze back to the cat.

But the cat is gone, too.

Addie returns the memoir to the shelf and continues browsing, attention wandering over ART and WORLD HISTORY, all the while waiting for the boy to reappear, to start the cycle over, wondering what she’ll say when he does. She should have asked for help, let him lead her through the shelves—but he doesn’t come back.

The shop bell chimes again, announcing a new customer as Addie reaches the Classics. Beowulf. Antigone. The Odyssey. There are a dozen versions of this last, and she’s just drawing one out when there’s a sudden burst of laughter, high and light, and she glances through a gap in the shelves and sees a blond girl leaning on the counter. The boy stands on the other side, cleaning his glasses on the edge of his shirt.

He bows his head, dark lashes skimming his cheeks.

He isn’t even looking at the girl, who’s rising on her toes to get closer to him. She reaches out and runs one hand along his sleeve the way Addie just did along the shelves, and he smiles, then, a quiet, bashful grin that erases the last of his resemblance to the dark.

Addie tucks the book under her arm and heads for the door, and out, taking advantage of his distraction.

“Hey!” calls a voice—his voice—but she continues up the steps onto the street. In a moment, he will forget. In a moment, his mind will trail off, and he’ll—

A hand lands on her shoulder.

“You have to pay for that.”

She turns, and there’s the boy from the shop, a little breathless, and very annoyed. Her eyes flick past him to the steps, the open door. It must have been ajar. He must have been right behind her. But still. He followed her out.

“Well?” he demands, hand dropping from her shoulder and coming to rest, palm open, in the space between them. She could run, of course, but it’s not worth it. She checks the cost on the back of the book. It isn’t much, but it’s more than she has on her.

“Sorry,” she says, handing it back.

He frowns, then, a furrow too deep for his face. The kind of line carved by years of repetition, even though he can’t be more than thirty. He looks down at the book, and a dark brow lifts behind his glasses.

“A shop full of antique books, and you steal a battered paperback of The Odyssey? You know this won’t fetch anything, right?”

Addie holds his gaze. “Who says I wanted to resell it?”

“It’s also in Greek.”

That, she hadn’t noticed. Not that it matters. She learned the classics in Latin first, but in the decades since, she’s picked up Greek.

“Silly me,” she says dryly, “I should have stolen it in English.”

He almost—almost—smiles, then, but it’s a bemused, misshapen thing. Instead, he shakes his head. “Just take it,” he says, holding out the book. “I think the shop can spare it.”

She has to fight the sudden urge to push it back.

The gesture feels too much like charity.

“Henry!” calls the pretty Black girl from the doorway. “Should I call the cops?”

“No,” he calls back, still looking at Addie. “It’s fine.” He narrows his eyes, as if studying her. “Honest mistake.”

She stares at this boy—at Henry. Then she reaches out and takes back the book, cradling it against her as the bookseller vanishes back into the shop.