The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

I

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

July 29, 1764

Addie makes her way to the church.

It sits, near the center of Villon, squat and gray and unchanged, the field beside it bordered by a low stone wall.

It does not take her long to find her father’s grave.

Jean LaRue.

Her father’s grave is spare—a name, and dates, a Bible verse—Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. No mention of the man her father was, no mention of his craft, or even his kindness.

A life reduced to a block of stone, a patch of grass.

Along the way Addie had picked a handful of flowers, wild things that grow at the edge of the path, weedy blossoms, yellow and white. She kneels to set them on the ground, stops when she sees the dates below her father’s name.

1670–1714.

The year she left.

She searches her memory, tries to remember any signs of sickness. The cough that lingered in his chest, the shadow of weakness in his limbs. The memories from her second life are trapped in amber, perfectly preserved. But the ones from before, when she was Adeline LaRue—memories of kneading bread on a stool beside her mother, of watching her father carve faces into blocks of wood, of trailing Estele through the shallows of the Sarthe—those are fading. The twenty-three years she lived before the woods, before the deal, worn to little more than edges.

Later, Addie will be able to recall almost three hundred years in perfect detail, every moment of every day, preserved.

But she is already losing the sound of her father’s laugh.

She cannot remember the exact color of her mother’s eyes.

Cannot recall the set of Estele’s jaw.

For years, she will lie awake and tell herself stories of the girl she’d been, in hopes of holding fast to every fleeting fragment, but it will have the opposite effect—the memories like talismans, too often touched; like saint’s coins, the etching worn down to silver plate and faint impressions.

As for her father’s sickness, it must have stolen in between one season and the next, and for the first time, Addie is grateful for the cleansing nature of her curse, for having made the deal at all—not for her own sake, but for her mother’s. That Marthe LaRue had only to grieve one loss, instead of two.

Jean is buried among the other members of their family. An infant sister who only saw two years. A mother and father, both gone before Addie herself was ten. One row over, their own parents and unmarried siblings. The plot beside him, empty, and waiting for his wife.

There is no place for her, of course. But this string of graves, like a timeline, charting from the past into the future, this is what drove her to the woods that night, the fear of a life like this, leading to the same small patch of grass.

Staring down at her father’s grave, Addie feels the heavy sadness of finality, the weight of an object coming to rest. The grief has come and gone—she lost this man fifty years ago, she has already mourned, and though it hurts, the pain isn’t fresh. It has long dulled to an ache, the wound given way to scar.

She lays the flowers on her father’s grave, and rises, moving deeper between the plots, drawn back in time with every step, until she is no longer Addie, but Adeline; no longer a ghost but flesh and blood and mortal. Still bound to this place, roots aching like phantom limbs.

She studies the names on the gravestones, knows each and every one, but the difference is that once upon a time, the names knew her, too.

Here is Roger, buried beside his first and only wife, Pauline.

Here is Isabelle, and her youngest, Sara, taken in the same year.

And here, almost in the center of the yard, is the name that matters most. The one that held her hand so many times, showed her there was more to life.

Estele Magritte, reads her tombstone. 1642–1719.

The dates are carved over a simple cross, and Addie can almost hear the old woman hissing through her teeth.

Estele, buried in the shadow of a house she did not worship.

Estele, who would say that a soul is just the seed returned to soil, who wanted nothing but a tree over her bones. She should have been laid to rest at the edge of the woods, or amid the vegetables in her garden. She should have at least been buried in a corner plot, where the branches of an old yew reach over the low wall to shade the graves.

Addie crosses to the small shed at the edge of the churchyard, and finds a trowel amid the tools, and sets off for the woods.

It is the height of summer, but the air is cool beneath the cover of the trees. Midday, but still the smell of night lingers on the leaves. The scent of this place, so universal, and specific. With every breath the taste of soil on her tongue, the memory of desperation, a girl, sinking her hands into the dirt as she prayed.

Now, she sinks the trowel instead, coaxes a sapling from the soil. It is a fragile thing, likely to fall over with the next strong storm, but she carries it back to the churchyard, cradled like an infant in her hands, and if anyone finds it strange, they will forget about the sight long before they think to tell anyone. And if they notice the tree growing over the old woman’s grave, perhaps they will stop and think of older gods again.

And as Addie leaves the church behind, the bells begin to chime, calling the villagers to Mass.

She walks down the road as they pour from their homes, children clinging to their mother’s hands, and men and women side by side. Some faces new to her, and others, she knows.

There is George Therault, and Roger’s oldest daughter, and Isabelle’s two sons, and the next time Addie comes, they will all be dead, the last of her old life—her first life—buried in the same ten-meter plot.

The hut sits abandoned at the edge of the woods.

The low fence has fallen in, and Estele’s garden is long overgrown, the house itself slowly giving way, sagging with age and neglect. The door is shut fast, but the shutters hang on broken joints, exposing the glass of a single window, cracked open like a tired eye.

The next time Addie comes, the frame of the house will be lost beneath the green, and the time after that, the woods will have crept forward and swallowed it all.

But today, it still stands, and she makes her way up the weedy path, the stolen lantern in one hand. She keeps expecting the old woman to step out of the woods, wrinkled arms filled with cuttings, but the only rustle comes from magpies and the sound of her own feet.

Inside, the hut is damp, and empty, the dark space littered with debris—the clay shards of a broken cup, a crumbling table—but gone are the bowls in which she mixed her salves, and the cane she used when the weather was wet, and the bundles of herbs that hung from the rafters, and the iron pot that sat in the hearth.

Addie is sure that Estele’s things were taken up after her death, parceled out through the village, just as her life was, deemed public property simply because she did not wed. Villon, her ward, because Estele had no child.

She goes into the garden, and harvests what she can from the wild plot, carries the ragged bounty of carrots and long beans inside and sets it on the table. She throws the shutters open and finds herself face-to-face with the woods.

The trees stand in a dark line, tangled branches clawing at the sky. Their roots are inching forward, crawling into the garden and across the lawn. A slow and patient advance.

The sun is sinking now, and even though it’s summer, a damp has crawled in through the gaps in the thatched roof, between the stones and under the door, and a chill hangs over the bones of the little hut.

Addie carries a stolen lantern to the hearth. It has been a rainy month, and the wood is damp, but she is patient, coaxing the flame from the lamp until it catches on the kindling.

Fifty years, and she is still learning the shape of her curse.

She cannot make a thing, but she can use it.

She cannot break a thing, but she can steal it.

She cannot start a fire, but she can keep it going.

She does not know if it’s some kind of mercy, or simply a crack in the mortar of her curse, one of the few fissures she’s found in the walls of this new life. Perhaps Luc hasn’t noticed. Or perhaps he has put them there on purpose, to draw her out, to make her hope.

Addie draws a smoldering twig from the fireplace and brings it idly to the threadbare rug. It is dry enough that it should catch, and burn, but it does not. It gutters, and cools too quickly, just outside the safety of its hearth.

She sits on the floor, humming softly as she feeds stick after stick into the blaze until it burns the chill off the place like a breath scattering dust.

She feels him like a draft.

He does not knock.

He never knocks.

One moment she is alone, and the next, she is not.

“Adeline.”

She hates the way it makes her feel to hear him say her name, hates the way she leans into the word like a body seeking shelter from a storm.

“Luc.”

She turns, expecting to see him as he was in Paris, dressed in the fine salon fashion, but instead he is exactly as he was the night they met, wind-blown and shadow-edged, in a simple dark tunic, the laces open at the collar. The firelight dances across his face, shades the edges of his jaw and cheek and brow like charcoal.

His eyes slide over the meager bounty on the sill before returning to her. “Back where you started…”

Addie rises to her feet, so he can’t look down on her.

“Fifty years,” he says. “How quickly they go by.”

They have not gone quickly at all, not for her, and he knows it. He is looking for bare skin, soft places to slide the knife, but she will not give him such an easy target. “No time at all,” she echoes coolly. “To think one life would ever be enough.”

Luc flashes only the edge of a smile.

“What a picture you make, tending that fire. You could almost be Estele.”

It is the first time she has heard that name on his lips, and there is something in the way he says it, almost wistful. Luc crosses to the window, and looks out at the line of trees. “How many nights she stood here, and whispered out into the woods.”

He glances over his shoulder, a coy grin playing over his lips. “For all her talk of freedom, she was so lonely in the end.”

Addie shakes her head. “No.”

“You should have been here with her,” he says. “Should have eased her pain when she was ill. Should have laid her down to rest. You owed her that.”

Addie draws back as if struck.

“You were so selfish, Adeline. And because of you, she died alone.”

We all die alone. That is what Estele would say—at least, she thinks. She hopes. Once, she would have been certain, but the confidence has faded with the memory of the woman’s voice.

Across the room, the darkness moves. One moment he is at the window, the next, he is behind her, his voice threading through her hair.

“She was so ready to die,” Luc says. “So desperate for that spot in the shade. She stood at that window and begged, and begged. I could have given it to her.”

A memory, old fingers tight around her wrist.

Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.

Addie turns on him. “She would never have prayed to you.”

A flickering smile. “No.” A sneer. “But think of how sad she’d be to know you did.”

Addie’s temper flares. Her hand flies out before she thinks to stop it, and even then, she half expects to find no purchase, only air and smoke. But Luc is caught off guard, and so her palm strikes skin, or something like it. His head turns a fraction with the force of the blow. There is no blood on those perfect lips, of course, no heat on that cool skin, but she has at least wiped the smile from his face.

Or so she thinks.

Until he begins to laugh.

The sound is eerie, unreal, and when he turns his face back toward her, she stills. There is nothing human in it now. The bones are too sharp, the shadows too deep, the eyes too bright.

“You forget yourself,” he says, his voice dissolving into woodsmoke. “You forget me.”

Pain lances up through Addie’s feet, sudden and sharp. She looks down, searching for a wound, but the pain lights her from within. A deep, internal ache, the force of every step she’s ever walked.

“Perhaps I have been too merciful.”

The pain climbs through her limbs, infecting knee and hip, wrist and shoulder. Her legs buckle beneath her, and it is all she can do not to scream.

The darkness looks down with a smile.

“I have made this too easy.”

Addie watches in horror as her hands begin to wrinkle and thin, blue veins standing out beneath papery skin.

“You asked only for life. I gave you your health, and youth, as well.”

Her hair comes loose from its bun and hangs lank before her eyes, the strands going dry and brittle and gray.

“It has made you arrogant.”

Her sight weakens, vision blurring until the room is only smudges and vague shapes.

“Perhaps you need to suffer.”

Addie squeezes her eyes shut, heart fluttering with panic.

“No,” she says, and it is the closest she has ever come to pleading.

She can feel him, moving closer. Can feel the shadow of him looming over her.

“I will take away these pains. I will let you rest. I will even raise a tree over your bones. And all you have to do”—the voice seeps through the dark—“is surrender.”

That word, like a tear in the veil. And for all the pain, and terror, of this moment, Addie knows she will not give in.

She has survived worse. She will survive worse. This is nothing but a god’s foul temper.

When she finds the breath to speak, the words come out in a ragged whisper. “Go to Hell.”

She braces herself, wonders if he will rot her all the way through, bend her body into a corpse, and leave her there, a broken husk on the old woman’s floor. But there is only more laughter, low and rumbling, and then nothing, the night stretching into stillness.

Addie is afraid to open her eyes, but when she does, she finds herself alone.

The ache has faded from her bones. Her loose hair has regained its chestnut shade. Her hands, once ruined, are again young, smooth, and strong.

She rises, shaking, and turns toward the hearth.

But the fire, so carefully tended, has gone out.

That night, Addie curls up on the moldering pallet, beneath a threadbare blanket left unclaimed, and thinks of Estele.

She closes her eyes and inhales until she can almost smell the herbs that clung to the old woman’s hair, the garden and sap on her skin. She holds fast to the memory of Estele’s crooked smile, her crow-like laugh, the voice she used when she spoke to gods, and the one she used with Addie. Back when she was young, when Estele taught her not to be afraid of storms, of shadows, of sounds in the night.

II

New York City

March 19, 2014

Addie leans against the window, watching the sun rise over Brooklyn.

She wraps her fingers around a cup of tea, savoring the heat against her palms. The glass fogs with cold, the dregs of winter clinging to the edges of the day. She is wearing one of Henry’s sweatshirts, cotton branded with the Columbia logo. It smells like him. Like old books and fresh coffee.

She pads barefoot back into the bedroom, where Henry lies facedown, arms folded beneath the pillow, his cheek turned away. And in that moment, he looks so much like Luc, and yet nothing like Luc at all. The resemblance between them wavers, like double vision. His curls, spread like black feathers on the white pillow, fading to downy fluff at the nape of his neck. His back rises and falls, steady with the smooth, shallow tread of sleep.

Addie sets the cup down on the bedside table, between Henry’s glasses and a leather watch. She traces her finger along the dark metal rim, the gold numerals set into the black ground. It rocks under her touch, reveals the small inscription on the back.

Live well.

A small shiver runs through her, and she’s about to pick it up when Henry groans into his pillow, a soft protest to morning.

Addie abandons the watch, and climbs back into bed beside him. “Hello.”

He gropes for his glasses, puts them on, and looks at her, and smiles, and this is the part that will never get old. The knowing. The present folding on top of the past instead of erasing it, replacing it. He pulls her back against him.

“Hello,” he whispers into her hair. “What time is it?”

“Almost eight.”

Henry groans, and tightens his grip around her. He is warm, and Addie wishes aloud they could stay there all day. But he is awake now, that restless energy winding around him like rope. She can feel it in the tension of his arms, the subtle shifting of his weight.

“I should go,” she says, because she assumes that is what you are supposed to say when you are in someone else’s bed. When they remember how you got there. But she doesn’t say “I should go home” and Henry senses the dropped word.

“Where do you live?” he asks.

Nowhere, she thinks. Everywhere.

“I manage. The city is full of beds.”

“But you don’t have a place of your own.”

Addie looks down at the borrowed sweatshirt, the sum total of her current possessions flung over the nearest chair. “No.”

“Then you can stay here.”

“Three dates, and you’re asking me to move in?”

Henry laughs, because of course it is absurd. But it is hardly the strangest thing in either of their lives.

“How about I ask you to stay—for now.”

Addie doesn’t know what to say. And before she can think of something, he is out of bed, pulling open the bottom drawer. He pushes the contents to one side, carving out space. “You can put your stuff here.”

He looks at her, suddenly uncertain. “Do you have things?”

She will explain, eventually, the details of her curse, the way it twists and curls around her. But he doesn’t know them yet—doesn’t need to. For him, her story has just started.

“There’s no point really, in having more than you can hold, when you have no place to put things down.”

“Well, if you get things—if you want them—you can put them there.”

With that, he heads sleepily for the shower, and she stares at the space he’s made for her, and wonders what would happen if she had things to put inside. Would they disappear immediately? Go slowly, carelessly missing, like socks stolen by a dryer? She has never been able to hang on to anything for long. Only the leather jacket, and the wooden ring, and she’s always known it is because Luc wanted her to have both—had bound them to her under the guise of gifts.

She turns and studies the clothes flung over the chair.

They are streaked with paint from the High Line. There’s green on her shirt, a purple smear on the knee of her jeans. Her boots, too, are flecked with yellow and blue. She knows the paint will fade, rinsed off by a puddle, or simply wiped away by time, but that’s how memories are supposed to work.

There—and then, little by little, gone.

She gets dressed in yesterday’s outfit, takes up the leather jacket, but instead of shrugging it on, she folds it carefully, places it in the empty drawer. It sits there, surrounded by open space, waiting to be filled.

Addie rounds the bed, and nearly steps on the notebook.

It lies open on the floor—it must have slipped off the bed during the night—and she lifts it gingerly, as if it’s bound with ash and spider silk instead of paper and glue. She half expects it to crumble at her touch, but it holds, and when she chances to pull back the cover, she finds the first few pages filled. Addie takes another chance, runs her fingers lightly over the words, feels the indent of the pen, the years hidden behind each word.

This is how it starts, he wrote under her name.

The first thing she still remembers is the ride to market. Her father in the seat beside her, cart filled with his work …

She holds her breath as she reads, the shower filling the room with a quiet hush.

Her father tells her stories. She doesn’t remember the words but she remembers the way he said them …

Addie perches there, reading until she runs out of words, the script giving way to page after page of empty space, waiting to be filled.

When she hears Henry turn the water off, she forces herself to close the book, and sets it gently, almost reverently, back on the bed.

III

Fécamp, France

July 29, 1778

To think, she could have lived and died and never seen the sea.

No matter, though. Addie is here now, pale cliffs rising to her right, stone sentinels at the edge of the beach where she sits, skirts pooling on the sand. She stares out at the expanse, the coastline giving way to water, and water giving way to sky. She has seen maps of course, but ink and paper hold nothing to this. To the salt smell, the murmur of waves, the hypnotic draw of the tide. To the scope and scale of the sea, and the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the horizon, there is more.

It will be a century before she crosses the Atlantic, and when she does, she’ll wonder if the maps are wrong, will begin to doubt the existence of land at all—but here and now, Addie is simply enchanted.

Once upon a time, her world was only as large as a small village in the middle of France. But it keeps getting bigger. The map of her life unfurls, revealing hills and valleys, towns and cities and seas. Revealing Le Mans. Revealing Paris. Revealing this.

She has been in Fécamp for nearly a week, spending her days between the pier and the tide, and if anyone takes notice of the strange woman alone on the sand, they have not seen fit to bother her about it. Addie watches boats come and go, and wonders where they are going; wonders, too, what would happen if she boarded one, where it would take her. Back in Paris, the food shortages are getting worse, the penalties, worse, everything steadily worse. The tension has spilled out of the city, too, the nervous energy reaching all the way here, to the coast. All the more reason, Addie tells herself, to sail away.

And yet.

Something always holds her back.

Today, it is the storm that’s rolling in. It hovers out over the sea, bruising the sky. Here and there the sun splits through, a line of burned light falling toward the slate gray water. She retrieves the book, lying in the sand beside her, begins to read again.

It is Shakespeare’s Tempest. Now and then she trips over the playwright’s cadence, the style strange, English rhyme and meter still foreign to her mind. But she is learning, and here and there she finds herself falling into the flow.

Her eyes begin to strain against the failing light.

“‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’” comes a now familiar voice behind her. “‘And our little life is rounded with a sleep.’” A soft sound, like breathless laughter. “Well, not all lives.”

Luc looms over her like a shadow.

She has not forgiven him for the violence of that night back in Villon. Braces for it even now, though they have seen each other several times in the intervening years, forged a wary kind of truce.

But she knows better than to trust it as he sinks onto the sand beside her, one arm draped lazily over his knee, the picture of languid grace, even here. “I was there, you know, when he wrote that verse.”

“Shakespeare?” She cannot hide her surprise.

“Who do you think he called on in the dead of night, when the words would not come?”

“You lie.”

“I boast,” he says. “They are not the same. Our William sought a patron, and I obliged.”

The storm is rolling in, a curtain of rain sliding toward the coast. “Is that really how you see yourself?” she asks, tapping sand from her book. “As some splendid benefactor?”

“Do not sulk, simply because you chose poorly.”

“Did I though?” she counters. “After all, I am free.”

“And forgotten.”

But she is ready for the barb. “Most things are.” Addie looks out to sea.

“Adeline,” he scolds, “what a stubborn thing you are. And yet, it has not even been a hundred years. I wonder, then, how you will feel after a hundred more.”

“I don’t know,” she says blandly. “I suppose you’ll have to ask me then.”

The storm reaches the coast. The first drops begin to fall, and Addie presses the book to her chest, shielding the pages from the damp.

Luc rises. “Walk with me,” he says, holding out his hand. It is not an invitation so much as a command, but the rain is quickly turning from a promise to a steady pour, and she has only the one dress. She rises without his help, brushing the sand from her skirts.

“This way.”

He leads her through town, toward the silhouette of a building, its vaulted steeple piercing the low clouds. It is, of all things, a church.

“You’re joking.”

“I am not the one getting wet,” he says. And indeed, he’s not. She is soaked through by the time they reach the shelter of the stone awning, but Luc is dry. The rain has not even touched him.

He smiles, reaching for the door.

It does not matter that the church is locked. Were it draped in chains, it would still open for him. Such boundaries, she has learned, mean nothing to the dark.

Inside, the air is stuffy, the stone walls holding in the summer heat. It is too dark to see more than the outlines of the pews, the figure on its cross.

Luc spreads his arms. “Behold, the house of God.”

His voice echoes through the chamber, soft and sinister.

Addie has always wondered if Luc could set foot on sacred ground, but the sound of his shoes on the church floor is answer to that question.

She makes her way down the aisle, but she cannot shake the strangeness of this place. Without the bells, the organ, the bodies crowding in for services, the church feels abandoned. Less a house of worship and more a tomb.

“Care to confess your sins?”

Luc has moved with all the ease of shadows in the dark. He is no longer behind her, but sitting in the first row now, his arms spread along the back of the pew, his legs thrown out, ankles crossed in lazy repose.

Addie was raised to kneel in the little stone chapel in the center of Villon, spent days folded into Paris pews. She has listened to the bells, and the organ, and the calls to prayer. And yet, despite it all, she has never understood the appeal. How does a ceiling bring you closer to heaven? If God is so large, why build walls to hold Him in?

“My parents were believers,” she muses, her fingers trailing over the pews. “They always spoke of God. Of His strength, His mercy, His light. They said He was everywhere, in everything.” Addie stops before the altar. “They believed in everything so easily.”

“And you?”

Addie looks up at the panels of stained glass, the images little more than ghosts without the sun to light them. She wanted to believe. She listened, and waited to hear His voice, to feel His presence, the way she might feel sun on her shoulders, or wheat beneath her hands. The way she felt the presence of the old gods Estele so favored. But there, in the cold stone house, she never felt anything.

She shakes her head, and says aloud, “I never understood why I should believe in something I could not feel, or hear, or see.”

Luc raises a brow. “I think,” he says, “they call that faith.”

“Says the devil in the house of God.” Addie glances his way as she says it, and catches a brief flash of yellow across the steady green.

“A house is a house,” he says, annoyed. “This one belongs to all, or none. And you think me the devil, now? You weren’t so certain in the woods.”

“Perhaps,” she says, “you have made me a believer.”

Luc tips his head back, a wicked smile tugging at his mouth. “And you think if I am real, then so is he. The light to my shadow, the day to my dark? And you are convinced, if only you had prayed to him instead of me, he would have shown you such kindness and such mercy.”

She has wondered as much a hundred times, though of course she does not say it.

Luc’s hands slide off the pew as he leans forward.

“And now,” he adds, “you will never know. But as for me,” he says, rising, “well—the devil is simply a new word for a very old idea. And as for God, well, if all it takes is a flair for drama and a bit of golden trim…”

He flicks his fingers, and suddenly the buttons on his coat, the buckles on his shoes, the stitching on his waistcoat are no longer black, but gilded. Burnished stars against a moonless night.

He smiles, then brushes the filigree away like dust.

She watches it fall, looks up again to find him there, inches from her face.

“But this is the difference between us, Adeline,” he whispers, fingers grazing her chin. “I will always answer.”

She shivers, despite herself. At the too-familiar touch against her skin, at the lurid green of his eyes, at the wolfish, wild grin.

“Besides,” he says, fingers falling from her face, “all gods have a price. I’m hardly the only one who trades in souls.” Luc holds his hand, open, to one side, and light blooms in the air just above his palm. “He lets souls wither on shelves. I water them.”

The light warps and coils.

“He makes promises. I pay up front.”

It flares once, sudden and brilliant, and then draws close, taking on a solid shape.

Addie has always wondered what a soul would look like.

It is such a grand word, soul. Like god, like time, like space, and when she’s tried to picture it, she’s conjured images of lightning, or sunbeams through dust, of storms in the shapes of human forms, of vast and edgeless white.

The truth is so much smaller.

The light in Luc’s hand is a marble, glassy and glowing with a faint internal light.

“Is that all?”

And yet, Addie cannot tear her gaze from the fragile orb. She feels herself reaching for it, but he draws it back, out of her reach.

“Do not be deceived by its appearance.” He turns the glowing bead between his fingers. “You look at me and see a man, though you know I am nothing of the sort. This shape is only an aspect, designed for the beholder.”

The light twists, and shifts, the orb flattening into a disk. And then a ring. Her ring. The ash wood glows, and her heart aches to see it, to hold it, to feel the worn surface against her skin. But she clenches her hands into fists to keep from reaching out again.

“What does it really look like?”

“I can show you,” he purrs, letting the light settle in his palm. “Say the word, and I will lay your own soul bare before you. Surrender, and I promise, the last thing you see will be the truth.”

There it is again.

One time salt, and the next honey, and each designed to cover poison.

Addie looks at the ring, lets herself linger on it one last time, and then forces her gaze up past the light to meet the dark.

“You know,” she says, “I think I’d rather live and wonder.”

Luc’s mouth twitches, and she cannot tell if it is anger or amusement.

“Suit yourself, my dear,” he says, dousing the light between his fingers.

IV

New York City

March 23, 2014

Addie sits folded in a leather chair in the corner of The Last Word, the soft purr of the cat emanating from the shelves somewhere behind her head, as she watches customers lean toward Henry like flowers toward the sun.

Once you know about a thing, you start to see it everywhere.

Someone says the words purple elephant, and all of a sudden, you catch sight of them in shop windows and on T-shirts, stuffed animals and billboards, and you wonder how you never noticed.

It is the same with Henry, and the deal he made.

A man, laughing at everything he says.

A woman beams, radiant with joy.

A teenage girl steals chances to touch his shoulder, his arm, blushing with blatant attraction.

Despite it all, Addie is not jealous.

She has lived too long and lost too much, and what little she’s had has been borrowed or stolen, never kept to herself. She has learned to share—and yet, every time Henry steals a glance her way, she feels a pleasant flush of warmth, as welcome as the sudden appearance of sunlight between clouds.

Addie draws her legs up into the chair, a book of poems open in her lap.

She’s swapped the paint-spattered clothes for a new pair of black jeans, and an oversized sweater, lifted from a thrift store while Henry was working. But she kept the boots, the little flecks of yellow and blue a reminder of the night before, the closest thing she has to a photo, a material memory. “Ready?”

She looks up, sees the shop sign already turned outwardly to CLOSED, and Henry standing near the door, his jacket slung over his arm. He holds out his hand, helps her from the leather chair, which, he explains, has a way of eating people.

They step outside, climb the four steps back to the street.

“Where to?” asks Addie.

It is early, and Henry’s buzzing with a restless energy. It seems to worsen around dusk, sunset a steady marker of one day gone, time passing with the loss of light.

“Have you been to the Ice Cream Factory?”

“That sounds like fun.”

His face falls. “You’ve already been.”

“I don’t mind going again.”

But Henry shakes his head, and says, “I want to show you something new. Is there anywhere you haven’t been?” he asks, and after a long moment, Addie shrugs.

“I’m sure there is,” she says. “But I haven’t found it yet.”

She meant it to be funny, light, but Henry frowns, deep in thought, and looks around.

“Okay,” he says, grabbing her hand. “Come with me.”

An hour later, they are standing in Grand Central.

“I hate to break it to you,” she says, looking around at the bustling station, “but I’ve been here before. Most people have.”

But Henry shoots her a grin that’s pure mischief. “This way.”

She follows him down the escalator to the station’s lower level. They weave, hand in hand, through a steady sea of evening travelers, toward the bustling food hall, but Henry stops short, beneath an intersection of tile arches, corridors branching every direction. He draws her into one of the pillared corners, where the arches split, curving overhead and across, turns her toward the tiled wall.

“Stay here,” he says, and starts to walk away.

“Where are you going?” she asks, already turning to follow.

But Henry returns, squaring her shoulders to the arch. “Stay here, like this,” he says. “And listen.”

Addie turns her ear to the tile wall, but she can’t hear anything over the shuffle of foot traffic, the clatter and rattle of the evening crowd. She glances over her shoulder.

“Henry, I don’t—”

But Henry isn’t there. He’s jogging across the hall to the opposite side of the arch, maybe thirty feet away. He looks back at her, and then turns away and buries his face in the corner, looking for all the world like a kid playing hide-and-seek, counting to ten.

Addie feels ridiculous, but she leans in close to the tiled wall, and waits, and listens.

And then, impossibly, she hears his voice.

“Addie.”

She startles. The word is soft but clear, as if he’s standing right beside her.

“How are you doing this?” she asks the arch. And she can hear the smile in his voice when he answers.

“The sound follows the curve of the arch. A phenomenon that happens when spaces bend just right. It’s called a whispering gallery.”

Addie marvels. Three hundred years, and there are still new things to learn.

“Talk to me,” comes the voice against the tile.

“What should I say?” she whispers to the wall.

“Well,” says Henry, softly, in her ear. “Why don’t you tell me a story?”

V

Paris, France

July 29, 1789

Paris is burning.

Outside, the air reeks of gunpowder and smoke, and while the city has never been truly quiet, for the last fortnight the noise has been ceaseless. It is musket rounds, and cannon fire, it is soldiers shouting orders, and the retort carried from mouth to mouth.

Vive la France. Vive la France. Vive la France.

Two weeks since the taking of the Bastille, and the city seems determined to tear itself in two. And yet, it must go on, it must survive, and all those in it, left to find a way through the daily storm.

Addie has chosen to move at night instead.

She weaves through the dark, a saber jostling at her hip and a tricorne low over her brow. The clothes she peeled from a man who had been shot in the street, the torn cloth and dark stain on the stomach hidden beneath a vest that she salvaged from another corpse. Beggars can’t be choosers, and it is too dangerous to travel as a woman alone. Worse still these days to play the part of noble—better to blend in in other ways.

A current has swept through the city, at once triumphant and intoxicating, and in time, Addie will learn to taste the changes in the air, to sense the line between vigor and violence. But tonight, the rebellion is still new, the energy strange and unreadable.

As for the city itself, the avenues of Paris have all become a maze, the sudden erection of barriers and barricades turning any path into a series of dead ends. It is no surprise then when she rounds another corner and finds a pile of crates and debris burning up ahead.

Addie swears under her breath, is about to double back, when boots sound on the road behind her and a gun goes off, cracking against the barricade above her head.

She turns to find half a dozen men barring her retreat, dressed in the mottled garb of the rebellion. Their muskets and sabers glint dully in the evening light. She is grateful, then, that her clothes belonged once to a commoner.

Addie clears her throat, careful to force her voice deep, gruff as she calls out, “Vive la France!”

The men return the cheer, but to her dismay, they don’t retreat. Instead, they continue toward her, hands resting on their weapons. In the light of the blaze, their eyes are glassy with wine, and the nameless energy of the night.

“What are you doing here?” demands one.

“Could be a spy,” says another. “Plenty of soldiers parading about in common dress. Robbing the bodies of the valiant dead.”

“I want no trouble,” she calls out. “I am simply lost. Let me pass, and I will be gone.”

“And return with a dozen more,” mutters the second.

“I am not a spy, nor a soldier, nor a corpse,” she calls back. “I was only looking—”

“—to sabotage,” cuts in a third.

“Or raid our stores,” suggests another.

They are no longer shouting. There is no need. They have drawn close enough to speak in level tones, pressing her back against the burning barricade. If she can only get past them, get away, out of sight and out of mind—but there is nowhere to run. The side streets have all been barred. The crates burn hot behind her.

“If you are a friend, then prove it.”

“Lay down your sword.”

“Take off your hat. Let us see your face.”

Addie swallows, and casts the hat aside, hoping the dark will be enough to hide the softness of her features. But just then, the barricade crackles behind her, some beam giving way to flame, and for an instant, the fire brightens, and she knows the light is strong enough to see by. Knows it by the way their faces change.

“Let me pass,” she says again, hand going to the sword at her hip. She knows how to wield it, knows too that there are five of them and only one of her, and if she draws steel, there will be no way out of this but through. The promise of survival is small comfort against the prospect of what might happen first.

They close in, and Addie draws the sword.

“Stay back,” she growls.

And to her surprise, the men stop walking. Their steps drag to a halt, and a shadow falls across their faces, the expressions going slack. Hands slip from weapons, and heads loll on shoulders, and the night goes still, save for the crackle of the burning crates and the breezy arrival of a voice at her back.

“Humans are so ill-equipped for peace.”

She turns, her sword still raised, and finds Luc, his edges black against the blaze. He doesn’t retreat from the sword, simply reaches up and runs his hand along the steel with all the grace of a lover touching skin, a musician fondling an instrument. She half expects the blade to sing beneath his fingers.

“My Adeline,” says the darkness, “you do have a way of finding trouble.” That vivid green gaze drifts to the motionless men. “How lucky I was here.”

“You are the night itself,” she parrots. “Shouldn’t you be everywhere?”

A smile flickers across his face. “What a good memory you have.” His fingers curl around her blade, and it begins to rust. “How tiresome that must be.”

“Not at all,” she says dryly. “It is a gift. Think of all there is to learn. And I, with all the time to learn i—”

She is interrupted by a volley of gunfire in the distance, the answer of a cannon, heavy as thunder. Luc frowns in distaste, and it amuses her to see him unsettled. The cannon sounds again, and he takes her by the wrist.

“Come,” he says, “I cannot hear myself think.”

He turns swiftly on his heel, and draws her in his wake. But instead of stepping forward, he steps sideways, into the deep shadow of the nearest wall. Addie flinches back, expecting to strike stone, but the wall opens, and the world gives way, and before she can draw breath, draw back, Paris is gone, and so is Luc.

As she is plunged into absolute darkness.

It is not as still as death, not as empty, or calm. There is a violence to this blind black void. It is birds’ wings beating against her skin. It is the rush of the wind in her hair. It is a thousand whispering voices. It is fear, and falling, and it is a feral, wild feeling, and by the time she thinks to scream, the darkness has peeled away again, the night has re-formed, and Luc is once again beside her.

Addie sways, braces herself against a doorway, feeling ill, and empty, and confused.

“What was that?” she asks, but Luc does not answer. He is now standing several feet away, hands splayed on the railing of a bridge as he looks out over the river.

But it is not the Seine.

There are no burning barricades. There is no cannon fire. No men waiting, weapons at their sides. Only a foreign river running beneath a foreign bridge, and foreign buildings rising along foreign banks, their rooftops capped in red tiles.

“That’s better,” he says, adjusting his cuffs. Somehow, in the moment of nothing, he has changed clothes, the collar higher now, the cut and trim a looser silk, while Addie wears the same ill-fitted tunic, salvaged from a Paris street.

A couple passes arm in arm, and she catches only the highs and lows of a foreign tongue.

“Where are we?” she demands.

Luc glances over his shoulder, and says something in the same choppy flow before repeating himself in French. “We are in Florence.”

Florence. She has heard the name before, but knows little of it, besides the obvious—that it is not in France but Italy.

“What have you done?” she demands. “How have you— No, never mind. Just take me back.”

He arches a brow. “Adeline, for someone with nothing but time, you are always in a hurry.” And with that, he ambles away, and Addie is left to follow in his wake.

She takes in the strangeness of the new city. Florence is all odd shapes and sharp edges, domes and spires, white stone walls and copper-slated roofs. It is a place painted in a different palette, music played in a different chord. Her heart flutters at the beauty of it, and Luc smiles as if he can sense her pleasure.

“You would rather the burning streets of Paris?”

“I assumed you would be fond of war.”

“That isn’t war,” he says curtly. “It’s only a skirmish.”

She follows him into an open courtyard, a plaza scattered with stone benches, the air heavy with the scent of summer blossoms. He walks ahead, the picture of a gentleman taking the night air, slowing only when he sees a man, a bottle of wine beneath one arm. He curls his fingers, and the man changes course, coming like a dog to heel. Luc slides into that other tongue, a language she will come to know as Florentine, and though she does not yet know the words, she knows the lure in his voice, that gauzy sheen that takes shape in the air around them. Knows, too, the dreamy look in the Italian’s eyes as he hands over the wine with a placid smile, and strolls absently away.

Luc sinks onto a bench, and draws two glasses out of nothing.

Addie does not sit. She stands, and watches as he uncorks the bottle and pours the wine, and says, “Why would I be fond of war?”

It is the first time, she thinks, he has asked an honest question, one not meant to goad, demand, coerce. “Are you not a god of chaos?”

His expression sours. “I am a god of promise, Adeline, and wars make terrible patrons.” He offers her a glass, and when she does not reach to take it, he lifts, as if to toast her. “To long life.”

Addie cannot help herself. She shakes her head, bemused. “Some nights, you love to see me suffer, so that I will yield. Others, you seem intent to spare me from it. I do wish you’d make up your mind.”

A shadow sweeps across his face. “Trust me, my dear, you don’t.” A small shiver runs through her as he lifts the wineglass to his lips. “Do not mistake this—any of it—for kindness, Adeline.” His eyes go bright with mischief. “I simply want to be the one who breaks you.”

She looks around at the tree-lined plaza, lit by lanterns, the moonlight shining on the red-capped roofs. “Well, you’ll have to try harder than…”

But she trails off as her attention returns to the stone bench.

“Oh, hell,” she mutters, looking around the empty square.

Because Luc, of course, is gone.

VI

New York City

April 6, 2014

“He just left you there?” says Henry, aghast.

Addie takes a fry, turning it between her fingers. “There are worse places to be left.”

They’re sitting at a high-top table in a so-called pub—what passes for a pub outside of Britain—sharing an order of vinegary fish-and-chips and a pint of warm beer.

A waiter passes by, and smiles at Henry.

A pair of girls heading for the bathroom slow as they come into his orbit, and stare as they leave again.

A stream of words drifts over from a nearby table, the low, rapid staccato of German, and Addie’s mouth twitches in a smile.

“What is it?” asks Henry.

She leans in. “The couple over there.” She tilts her head in their direction. “They’re having a fight. Apparently the guy slept with his secretary. And his assistant. And his Pilates instructor. The woman knew about the first two, but she’s mad about the third, because they both take Pilates at the same studio.”

Henry stares at her, marveling. “How many languages do you know?”

“Enough,” she says, but he clearly wants to know, so she ticks them off on her fingers. “French, of course. And English. Greek and Latin. German, Italian, Spanish, Swiss, some Portuguese, though it’s not perfect.”

“You would have made an amazing spy.”

She raises a brow behind her pint. “Who says I haven’t been one?”

The plates are empty when she looks around, sees the waiter duck into the kitchen. “Come on,” she says, grabbing his hand.

Henry frowns. “We haven’t paid.”

“I know,” she says, hopping down from the stool, “but if we go now, he’ll think he just forgot to clear the table. He won’t remember.”

This is the problem with a life like Addie’s.

She has gone so long without roots, she doesn’t know how to grow them anymore.

So used to losing things, she isn’t sure how to hold them.

How to make space in a world the size of herself.

“No,” says Henry. “He won’t remember you. But he’ll remember me. I’m not invisible, Addie. I’m the exact opposite of invisible.”

Invisible. The word scrapes over her skin.

“I’m not invisible either,” she says.

“You know what I mean. I can’t just come and go. And even if I could,” he says, reaching for his wallet, “it would still be wrong.”

The word hits like a blow, and she is back in Paris, doubled over with hunger. She is at the marquis’s house, dining in stolen clothes, stomach twisting as Luc points out that someone will pay for every bite she takes.

Her face burns with shame.

“Fine,” she says, pulling a handful of twenties from her pocket. She drops two on the table. “Better?” But when she looks at Henry, his frown has only deepened.

“Where did you get that money?”

She doesn’t want to tell him that she walked out of a designer store and into a pawn shop, moving pieces from one hand to the other. Doesn’t want to explain that everything she has—everything besides him—is stolen. And that in some ways, so is he. Addie doesn’t want to see the judgment on his face, doesn’t want to think about how merited it might be.

“Does it matter?” she asks.

And Henry says, “Yes,” with so much conviction, she flushes crimson.

“Do you think I want to live like this?” Addie grits her teeth. “No job, no ties, no way to hold on to anyone or anything? Do you think I like being so alone?”

Henry looks pained. “You aren’t alone,” he says. “You have me.”

“I know, but you shouldn’t have to do everything—be everything.”

“I don’t mind—”

“But I do!” she snaps, thrown by the anger in her own voice. “I’m a person, not a pet, Henry, and I don’t need you looking down at me, or coddling me either. I do what I have to, and it’s not always nice, and it’s not always fair, but it’s how I survive. I’m sorry you disapprove. But this is who I am. This is what works for me.”

Henry shakes his head. “But it won’t work for us.”

Addie pulls back as if struck. Suddenly the pub is too loud, too full, and she can’t stand there, can’t stand still, so she turns, and storms out.

The moment the night air hits her, she feels ill.

The world rocks, re-steadies … and somewhere between one step and the next, the anger evaporates, and she just feels tired, and sad.

She doesn’t understand how the night went sideways.

Doesn’t understand the sudden weight on her chest until she realizes what it is—fear. Fear that she’s messed up, thrown away the one thing she’s always wanted. Fear that it was that fragile, that it came apart so easily.

But then she hears footsteps, feels Henry coming up beside her.

He doesn’t say anything, only walks, half a step behind, and this is a new kind of silence. The silent aftermath of storms, the damage not yet tallied.

Addie swipes a tear from her cheek. “Did I ruin it?”

“Ruin what?” he asks.

“Us.”

“Addie.” He grabs her shoulder. She turns, expecting to see his face streaked with anger, but it’s steady, smooth. “It was just a fight. It’s not the end of the world. It’s certainly not the end of us.”

Three hundred years she’s dreamed of this.

She always thought it would be easy.

The opposite of Luc.

“I don’t know how to be with someone,” she whispers. “I don’t know how to be a normal person.”

His mouth quirks into a crooked grin. “You’re incredible, and strong, and stubborn, and brilliant. But I think it’s safe to say you’re never going to be normal.”

They walk, arm in arm, through the cool night air.

“Did you go back to Paris?” asks Henry.

It is an olive branch, a bridge built, and she is grateful for it.

“Eventually,” she says.

It had taken far longer to get back there, without Luc’s help, or her naïve drive to reach the city, and she’s embarrassed to say she did not hurry back. That even if Luc meant to abandon her, stranding her there in Florence, in doing so he broke a kind of seal. In yet another, maddening way, he forced her free.

Until that moment, Addie had never conceived of leaving France. It’s absurd to think of now, but the world felt so much smaller then. And then, suddenly, it was not.

Perhaps he meant to cast her into chaos.

Perhaps he thought she was getting too comfortable, growing too stubborn.

Perhaps he wanted her to call for him again. To beg him to come back.

Perhaps perhaps perhaps—but she will never know.

VII

Venice, Italy

July 29, 1806

Addie wakes to sunlight and silk sheets.

Her limbs feel leaden, her head full of muslin. The kind of heaviness that comes with too much sun, and too much sleep.

It is ungodly hot in Venice, hotter than it ever was in Paris.

The window is open, but neither the faint breeze nor the silk bedding are enough to dissipate the stifling heat. It is only morning, and sweat already beads on her bare skin. She is dreading the thought of midday as she drags herself awake, and sees Matteo perched at the foot of the bed.

He is just as beautiful in daylight, sun-kissed and strong, but she is struck less by his lovely features, and more by the strange calm of the moment.

Mornings are usually muddled with apologies, confusion, the aftermath of forgetting. They are sometimes painful, and always awkward.

But Matteo seems utterly unfazed.

He doesn’t remember her, of course, that much is obvious—but her presence there, this stranger in his bed, seems neither to startle nor to bother him. His attention is focused solely on the sketchpad balanced on his knee, the charcoal skating gracefully across the paper. It is only when his gaze flicks up to her, and then down again, that she realizes he is drawing her.

She makes no move to cover herself, to reach for the slip cast off on the chair, or the thin robe at the foot of the bed. Addie hasn’t been shy about her body in a long time. Indeed, she has come to enjoy being admired. Perhaps it is the natural abandon that comes with time, or perhaps it is the constancy of her shape, or perhaps it is the liberation that comes with knowing her spectators won’t remember.

There is a freedom, after all, in being forgotten.

And yet, Matteo is still drawing, the motions swift and easy.

“What are you doing?” she asks gently, and he tears his gaze from the parchment.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “The way you looked. I had to capture it.”

Addie frowns, begins to rise, but he lets out a stifled sound and says, “Not yet,” and it takes all her strength to stay there, on the bed, hands tangled in the sheets until he sighs and sets the work aside, eyes glazed with the afterglow unique to artists.

“Can I see?” she asks in the melodic Italian she has learned.

“It is not finished,” he says, even as he offers her the pad.

Addie stares at the drawing. The marks are easy, imprecise, a quick study by a talented hand. Her face is barely drawn, almost abstract in the gestures of light and shadow.

It is her—and it is not her.

An image, distorted by the filter of someone else’s style. But she can see herself in it. From the curve of her cheek to the shape of her shoulders, the sleep-mussed hair and the charcoal dots scattered across her face. Seven freckles charted out like stars.

She brushes the charcoal toward the bottom edge of the page, where her limbs dissolve into the linens of the bed, feels it smudge against her skin.

But when she lifts her hand away, her thumb is stained, and the line is clean. She has not left a mark. And yet, she has. She has impressed herself upon Matteo, and he has impressed her upon the page.

“Do you like it?” he asks.

“Yes,” she murmurs, resisting the urge to tear the drawing from the pad, to take it with her. Every inch of her wants to have it, to keep it, to stare at the image like Narcissus in the pond. But if she takes it now, then it will find a way to disappear, or it will belong to her, and her alone, and then it will be as good as lost, forgotten.

If Matteo keeps the picture, he will forget the source, but not the sketch itself. Perhaps he will turn to it when she is gone, and wonder at the woman sprawled across his sheets, and even if he thinks it the product of some drunken revel, some fever dream, her image will still be there, charcoal on parchment, a palimpsest beneath a finished work.

It will be real, and so will she.

So Addie studies the drawing, grateful for the prism of her memory, and hands it back to her artist. She rises, reaching for her clothes.

“Did we have a good time?” Matteo asks. “I confess, I cannot remember.”

“Neither can I,” she lies.

“Well then,” he says with a rakish grin. “It must have been a very good time.”

He kisses her bare shoulder, and her pulse flutters, body warming with the memory of the night before. She is a stranger to him now, but Matteo has the easy passion of an artist enamored with his newest subject. It would be simple enough to stay, to start again, enjoy his company another day—but her thoughts are still on the drawing, the meaning of those lines, the weight of them.

“I must go,” she says, leaning in to kiss him one last time. “Try to remember me.”

He laughs, the sound breezy and light as he pulls her close, leaves ghosts of charcoal fingers on her skin. “How could I possibly forget?”

That night, the sunset turns the canals to gold.

Addie stands on a bridge over the water, and rubs at the charcoal still on her thumb, and thinks of the drawing, an artist’s rendition, like an echo of the truth, thinks of Luc’s own words so long ago, when he cast her from Geoffrin’s salon.

Ideas are wilder than memories.

He meant it as a barb, no doubt, but she should have seen it as a clue, a key.

Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever, and stubborn, and perhaps—perhaps—they are in reach.

Because two blocks away, in that small studio over the café, there is an artist, and on one of his pages, there is a drawing, and it is of her. And now Addie closes her eyes, and tips her head back, and smiles, hope swelling in her chest. A crack in the walls of this unyielding curse. She thought she’d studied every inch, but here, a door, ajar onto a new and undiscovered room.

The air changes at her back, the crisp scent of trees, impossible and out of place in the rank Venetian heat.

Her eyes drift open. “Good evening, Luc.”

“Adeline.”

She turns to face him, this man she made real, this darkness, this devil brought to life. And when he asks if she has had enough, if she is tired yet, if she will yield to him tonight, she smiles, and says, “Not tonight.”

Rubs her finger anew against her thumb, and feels the charcoal there, and thinks of telling him about her discovery, just to savor his surprise.

I have found a way to leave a mark, she wants to say to him. You thought you could erase me from this world, but you cannot. I am still here. I will always be here.

The taste of the words—that triumph—is sweet as sugar on her tongue. But there is a warning tint to his gaze tonight, and knowing Luc, he would find a way to turn it against her, to take this small solace from her before she’s found a way to use it.

So she says nothing.

VIII

New York City

April 25, 2014

A wave of applause rolls across the grass.

It’s a gorgeous spring day, one of the first where the warmth lingers as the sun goes down, and they’re sitting on a blanket at the edge of Prospect Park as performers file on and off a pop-up stage across the green.

“I can’t believe you remember it all,” he says as a new singer climbs the steps.

“It’s like living with déjà vu,” she says, “only you know exactly where you’ve seen or heard or felt a thing before. You know every time, and place, and they sit stacked on top of each other like pages in a very long and complicated book.”

Henry shakes his head. “I would have lost my mind.”

“Oh, I did,” she says blithely. “But when you live long enough, even madness ends.”

The new singer is … not good.

A teenage boy whose voice is equal parts growl and screech. Addie hasn’t been able to catch more than a word or two of the lyrics, let alone detect a melody. But the lawn is full, the audience brimming with enthusiasm, less for the performance than the chance to wave their numbered cards.

It’s Brooklyn’s answer to an open mic: a charity concert where people pay to perform, and others pay to judge them.

“Seems kind of cruel,” she pointed out when Henry handed her the cards.

“It’s for a good cause,” he said, cringing at the final notes of a flat saxophone.

The song ends to a wave of weak applause.

The field is a sea of 2s and 3s. Henry holds up a 9.

“You can’t give them all nines and tens,” she says.

Henry shrugs. “I feel bad for them. It takes a lot of guts to get up there and perform. What about you?”

She looks down at the cards. “I don’t know.”

“You told me you were a talent scout.”

“Yes, well, it was easier than telling you I was a three-hundred-and-twenty-three-year-old ghost whose only hobby is inspiring artists.”

Henry reaches out and runs his finger down her cheek. “You’re not a ghost.”

The next song starts, and ends, and scattered applause falls like rain across the lawn.

Henry gives it a 7.

Addie holds up a 3.

Henry looks at her, aghast.

“What?” she says. “It wasn’t very good.”

“We were rating on talent? Well, shit.”

Addie laughs, and there’s a lull between acts, some dispute about who is supposed to go up next. Canned music spills from the speakers, and they lie back in the grass, Addie’s head resting against his stomach, the soft in and out of his breath like a shallow wave beneath her.

Here is a new kind of silence, rarer than the rest. The easy quiet of familiar spaces, of places that fill simply because you are not alone within them. A notebook sits beside them on the blanket. Not the blue one; that is already full. This new one is an emerald green, nearly the same shade as Luc’s eyes when he is showing off.

A pen juts up between the pages, holding Henry’s place.

Every day, Addie has told him stories.

Over eggs and coffee, she recounted the torturous walk to Le Mans. In the bookstore one morning, as they unpacked new releases, she relived that first year in Paris. Tangled in the sheets last night, she told him of Remy. Henry has asked for the truth, her truth, and so she is telling it. In pieces, fragments tucked like bookmarks between the movement of their days.

Henry is like bottled lightning, unable to sit still for long, full of nervous energy, but every moment there’s a lull, a sliver of peace and quiet, he grabs the latest notebook, and a pen, and even though she always thrills at the sight of the words—her words—spilling across the page, she teases him for the urgency with which he writes them.

“We have time,” she reminds him, smoothing his hair.

Addie stretches out against him, and looks up at the dying light, the sky streaked purple and blue. It is almost night, and she knows that a roof would do nothing if the darkness looked her way, but lying here, beneath the open sky, she still feels exposed.

They’ve been lucky, so lucky, but the trouble with luck is that it always ends.

And perhaps it is just the nervous tapping of Henry’s fingers on the journal.

And perhaps it is just the moonless sky.

And perhaps it is just that happiness is frightening.

The next band takes the stage.

But as the music rings out across the lawn, she can’t take her eyes from the dark.

IX

London, England

March 26, 1827

She could live in the National Gallery.

Indeed, she has spent a season here, wandering from room to room, feasting on the paintings and the portraits, the sculptures and the tapestries. A life spent among friends, among echoes.

She moves through marble halls, and counts the pieces she has touched, the marks left by other hands, but guided by her own.

At last count, there were six in this particular collection.

Six pillars, holding her aloft.

Six voices, carrying her through.

Six mirrors, reflecting pieces of her back into the world.

There is no sign of Matteo’s sketch, not among these finished works, but she sees those early lines reflected in his masterpiece, The Muse, sees them again in the sculpture of a face resting on a hand, the painting of a woman sitting by the sea.

She is a ghost, a gossamer, laid like film across the work.

But she is there.

She is there.

An attendant informs her they will be closing soon, and Addie thanks him, and continues on her round. She could stay, but the vast halls are not as cozy as the flat in Kensington, a gem left unattended in the winter months.

Addie pauses in front of her favorite piece, a portrait of a girl before a looking glass. Her back is to the artist, the room and girl rendered in high detail, but her reflection little more than streaks. Her face rendered only in the silver smudges of the mirror. And yet, up close, anyone would see the scattering of freckles, like floating stars against the warped grey sky.

“How clever you are,” says a voice behind her.

Addie was alone in the gallery, and now she is not.

She glances left, and sees Luc staring past her at the painting, his head inclined as if admiring the work, and for a moment, Addie feels like a cabinet, the doors flung open. She is not coiled, not wound tight with waiting, because there are still months until their anniversary.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

His mouth twitches once, relishing her surprise. “I am everywhere.”

It has never occurred to her that he could come as he pleased, that he is not bound in some way by the dates of their deal. That his visits, just like the absence of them, have always been by design—by choice.

“I see you’ve been busy,” he says, those green eyes trailing over the portrait.

She has. She has scattered herself like breadcrumbs, dusted across a hundred works of art. It would not be a simple thing for him to erase them all. And yet, there is a darkness to his gaze, a mood she distrusts.

He reaches out, trails a finger along the frame.

“Destroy it,” she says, “and I will make more.”

“It does not matter,” he says, hand falling. “You do not matter, Adeline.”

The words bite, even now.

“Take your echoes and pretend they are a voice.”

She is no stranger to Luc’s foul moods, his streaks of ill temper, brief and bright as lightning. But there is a violence to his tone tonight. An edge, and she does not think it is her cunning that’s upset him, this glimpse of her folded between the layers of the art.

No, this dark mood is one that he’s brought with him.

A shadow dragging in his wake.

But it’s been almost a century since she struck him, that night in Villon, when he struck back, reduced her to a gnarled corpse on the floor of Estele’s house. And so instead of retreating at the sight of teeth, she rises to the bait.

“You said it yourself, Luc. Ideas are wilder than memories. And I can be wild. I can be stubborn as the weeds, and you will not root me out. And I think you are glad of it. I think that’s why you’ve come, because you are lonely, too.”

Luc’s eyes flash a sickly, stormy green. “Don’t be absurd,” he sneers. “Gods are known to everyone.”

“But remembered by so few,” she counters. “How many mortals have met you more than twice—once to make a deal and once to pay the price? How many have been a part of your life as long as I have?” Addie flashes a triumphant smile. “Perhaps that’s why you cursed me as you did. So you would have some company. So someone would remember you.”

He is on her in an instant, pressing her back against the museum wall. “I cursed you for being a fool.”

And Addie laughs.

“You know, when I imagined the old gods, as a child, I thought of you as grand immortals, above the petty worries that plagued your worshipers. I thought that you were bigger than us. But you’re not. You’re just as fickle and wanting as the humans you disdain.” His hands tighten on her, but she does not quiver, does not cower, simply holds his gaze. “We are not so different, are we?”

Luc’s anger hardens, cools, the green of his eyes plunging into black. “You claim to know me so well now. Let us see…” His hand drops from her shoulder to her wrist, and too late, she realizes what he means to do.

It has been forty years since he last dragged her through the dark, but she hasn’t forgotten the feeling, the primal fear and the wild hope and the reckless freedom of doors thrown open onto night.

It is infinite—

And then it is over, and she is on her hands and knees on a wooden floor, limbs trembling from the strangeness of the journey.

A bed lies, disheveled and empty, the curtains have been flung wide, and the floor is covered in sheets of music, and there is a stale air of sickness to the space.

“What a waste,” murmurs Luc.

Addie rises unsteadily to her feet. “Where are we?”

“You mistake me for some lonesome mortal,” he says. “Some heartsick human in search of company. I am neither.”

Movement, across the room, and she realizes they are not alone. A ghost of a man, white-haired and wild-eyed, sits on a piano bench, his back to the keys.

He is pleading in German.

“Not yet,” he says, clutching a handful of music to his chest. “Not yet. I need more time.”

His voice is strange, too loud, as if he cannot hear. But Luc’s, when he answers, is a smooth hard tone, a low bell, a sound felt as much as heard.

“The vexing thing about time,” he says, “is that it’s never enough. Perhaps a decade too short, perhaps a moment. But a life always ends too soon.”

“Please,” begs the man, sinking to his hands and knees before the darkness, and Addie flinches for him, knows his pleas won’t work.

“Let me make another deal!”

Luc forces the man to his feet. “The time for deals is done, Herr Beethoven. Now, you must say the words.”

The man shakes his head. “No.”

And Addie cannot see Luc’s eyes, but she can feel his temper changing. The air ripples in the room around them, a wind, and something stronger.

“Surrender your soul,” says Luc. “Or I will take it by force.”

“No!” shouts the man, hysterical now. “Begone, Devil. Begone, and—”

It is the last thing he says, before Luc unfolds.

That is the only way to think of it.

The black hair rises from his face, climbing through the air like weeds, and his skin ripples and splits, and what spills out is not a man. It is a monster. It is a god. It is the night itself, and something else, something she has never seen, something she cannot bear to look at. Something older than the dark.

“Surrender.”

And now the voice is not a voice at all, but a medley of snapping branches and summer wind, a wolf’s low growl, and the sudden shifting of rocks underfoot.

The man burbles and pleads. “Help!” he cries out, but it is no use. If there is anyone beyond the door, they will not hear.

“Help!” he cries again, uselessly.

And then the monster plunges its hand into his chest.

The man staggers, pale and gray, as the darkness plucks his soul like a piece of fruit. It comes loose with a tearing sound, and the composer stumbles, and falls to the floor. But Addie’s eyes are locked on the bloom of light in the shadow’s hand, jagged and unsteady. And before she can study the ribbons of color curling on its surface, before she can wonder at the images coiling inside, the darkness closes its fingers around the soul, and it crackles through him like lightning, and plunges out of sight.

The composer sits slumped against his piano bench, head back, and eyes empty.

Luc’s hand, she will learn, is always subtle. They will see his work and call it sickness, call it heart failure, call it madness, suicide, overdose, accident.

But tonight, she only knows that the man on the floor is dead.

The darkness turns on Addie, then, and there is no vestige of Luc in the roiling smoke. There are no green eyes. No playful smirk. Nothing but a menacing void, a shadow filled with teeth.

It has been a long time since Addie felt true fear. Sadness, she knows; loneliness and grief. But fear belongs to those with more to lose.

And yet.

Staring into that dark, Addie is afraid.

She wills her legs to stay, wills herself to hold her ground, and she does, as it takes its first step, and its second, but by the third, she finds herself retreating. Away from the writhing dark, the monstrous night, until her back comes to rest against the wall.

But the darkness keeps coming.

With every forward step it draws itself together, the edges firming until it is less a storm than smoke bottled into glass. The face finds form, shadows twisting into loose black curls, and the eyes—there are eyes again now—lighten like a drying stone, and the cavernous maw narrows to a cupid’s bow, the lips curving into sly content.

And he is Luc again, wrapped in the guise of flesh and bone, close enough that she can feel the cool night air wafting off him like a breeze.

And this time, when he speaks, it is with the voice she knows so well.

“Well, my darling…” he says, one hand rising to her cheek. “Are we so different now?”

She does not have the chance to answer.

He gives the barest push, and the wall opens up behind her, and she is not sure if she falls, or if the shadows reach out and pull her down, only that Luc is gone, and the composer’s room is gone, and for an instant, the dark is everywhere, and then she is standing outside, on the cobblestone banks, and the night is full of laughter and lights shining on the water, and the soft, melodic strain of a man singing somewhere along the Thames.

X

New York City

May 15, 2014

It is Addie’s idea to bring the cat home.

Perhaps she has always longed for a pet.

Perhaps she simply thinks he must be lonely.

Perhaps she thinks it will do Henry good.

She does not know. It does not matter. All that does is that one day, as he is closing up the store, she appears next to him on the stoop, a novel under one arm and the ancient tabby in the other, and that is that.

They carry Book back to Henry’s place, and introduce him to the blue door, and go up to the narrow Brooklyn apartment, and despite Henry’s superstition, he does not turn to dust, severed from his store. He simply toddles around for an hour before leaning up against a philosophy stack, and he is home.

And so is she.

They are curled together on the couch when she hears the click of the Polaroid, catches the sudden flash, and there’s a moment when she wonders if it will work, if Henry will be able to take her photo, the way he wrote her name.

But even the writing in his journals isn’t entirely hers. It’s her story in his pen, her life in their words.

And sure enough, when the film exposes, and the Polaroid appears, it’s not of her, not really. The girl in the frame has her wavy brown hair. The girl in the frame wears her white shirt. But the girl in the frame has no face. If she does, it’s turned from the camera, as if caught in the process of spinning away.

And she knew it wouldn’t work, but her heart still sinks.

“I don’t get it,” says Henry, turning the camera in his hands.

“Can I try again?” he asks, and she understands the urge. It is harder to manage, when the impossible is so obvious. Your mind can’t make sense of it, so you try again and again and again, convinced that this time, it will be different.

This, she knows, is how you go mad.

But Addie indulges Henry as he tries a second time, and a third. Watches as the camera jams, spits out a blank card, comes back overexposed, underexposed, blurred, until her head is swimming with flashes of white.

She lets him try different angles, different light, until photos litter the floor between them. She’s there, and not there, real, and a ghost.

He must see her fraying a little more with every flash, the sadness rising through the cracks, and forces himself to put the camera down.

Addie stares at the photos, and thinks of the painting in London, of Luc’s voice in her head.

It does not matter.

You do not matter.

She picks up the latest attempt, studies the shape of the girl in the frame, her features blurred beyond recognition. She closes her eyes, reminds herself there are many ways to leave a mark, reminds herself that pictures lie.

And then she feels the solid body of the camera being placed into her hands, and she is drawing in the breath to tell him it will not work, it will not, but then Henry is there, behind her, folding her fingers over his, lifting the viewfinder to her eye. Letting her guide the pressure of his hands the way she did the paint on the glass wall. And her heart quickens as she lines up a shot of the photos littering the floor, her own bare feet at the bottom of the frame.

She holds her breath, and hopes.

A click. A flash.

This time, the picture comes out.

Here is a life in still frames.

Moments like Polaroids. Like paintings. Like flowers pressed between the pages of a book. Perfectly preserved.

The three of them, napping in the sun.

Addie, stroking Henry’s hair while she tells him stories, and he writes, and writes, and writes.

Henry, pressing her down into the bed, their fingers tangled, their breath quick, her name an echo in her hair.

Here they are, together in his galley kitchen, his arms threaded through hers, her hands over his as they stir béchamel, as they knead bread dough.

When it is in the oven, he cups her face with floury hands, leaves trails everywhere he touches.

They make a mess, as the room fills with the scent of freshly baking bread.

And in the morning it looks like ghosts have danced across the kitchen, and they pretend there were two instead of one.

XI

Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

July 29, 1854

Villon was not supposed to change.

When she was growing up, it was always so painfully still, like summer air before a storm. A village carved in stone. And yet, what was it Luc said?

Even rocks wear away to nothing.

Villon has not worn away. Instead, it has shifted, grown, new roots thrown out, and others cut. The woods have been forced back, trees on the forest edge all felled to feed hearth fires and make way for fields and crops. There are more walls now than there were before. More buildings. More roads.

As Addie makes her way through town, hair tucked beneath a well-trimmed bonnet, she marks a name, a face, a ghost of a ghost of a family she once knew. But the Villon of her youth has finally faded, and she wonders if this is what memory feels like for others, this slow erasure of details.

For the first time, she does not recognize every path.

For the first time, she is not sure she knows her way.

She takes a turn, expecting to find one house, but instead finds two, divided by a low stone wall. She goes left, but instead of an open field, she finds a stable, surrounded by a fence. At last, she recognizes the road home, holds her breath as she makes her way down the path, feels something inside her loosen at the sight of the old yew tree, still bent and knotted at the edge of the property.

But beyond the tree, the place is changed. New clothes laid over old bones.

Her father’s workshop has been cleared away, the footprint of the shed marked only by a shadow on the ground, the weedy grass long filled in, a slightly different shade. And though Addie braced herself for the stale stillness of abandoned places, she is met instead by motion, voices, laughter.

Someone else has moved into her family home, one of the new arrivals in the growing town. A family, with a mother who smiles more, and a father who doesn’t, and a pair of boys running in the yard, their hair the color of straw. The older one chases a dog who has absconded with a sock, and the younger one climbs the old yew tree, his bare feet finding the same knots and crooks as hers, back when she was a girl, the drawing pad tucked under her arm. She must have been his age … or was she older?

She closes her eyes, tries to catch hold of the image, but it slips and slides between her fingers. Those early memories, not trapped within the prism. Those years before, lost to that other life. Her eyes are only closed a moment, but when she opens them, the tree is empty. The boy is gone.

“Hello,” says a voice, somewhere behind her.

It is the younger one, his face open and upturned.

“Hello,” she says.

“Are you lost?”

She hesitates, torn between yes and no, unsure which is closer to the truth.

“I am a ghost,” she says. The boy’s eyes widen in surprise, delight, and he asks her to prove it. She tells him to close his eyes, and when he does, she slips away.

In the cemetery, the tree Addie transplanted has taken root.

It looms over Estele’s grave, bathing her bones in a pool of shade.

Addie runs her hand over the bark, marvels at how the sapling has grown into a wide-trunked tree, its roots and branches escaping to every side. A hundred years since it was planted—a span of time once too long to fathom, and now, too hard to measure. So far, she has counted time in seconds, and in seasons, in cold snaps and in thaws, in uprisings and in aftermaths. She has seen buildings fall and rise, cities burn and be remade, the past and present blurred together into a fluid, ephemeral thing.

But this, this is tangible.

The years marked in wood and bark, root and soil.

Addie sits back against the woman’s grave and rests her own aged bones in the dappled shade, and recounts the time since her last visit. She tells Estele stories of England, and Italy, and Spain, of Matteo, and the gallery, of Luc, and her art, and all the ways the world has changed. And even though there is no answer, save the rustle of leaves, she knows what the old woman would say.

Everything changes, foolish girl. It is the nature of the world. Nothing stays the same.

Except for me, she thinks, but Estele answers, dry as kindling.

Not even you.

She has missed the old woman’s counsel, even in her head. The voice has gone brittle, worn away in the intervening years, smudged like all those mortal memories.

But here, at least, it returns to her.

The sun has crossed the sky by the time she rises and walks to the edge of the village, to the edge of the woods, to the place the old woman once called home. But time has claimed this place as well. The garden, once overgrown, has been swallowed up by the encroaching woods, and the wild has won its war against the hut, dragged it down, saplings jutting up among the bones. The wood has rotted, the stones have slipped, the roof is gone, and weed and vine are in the slow process of dismantling the rest.

The next time she comes, there will be no trace, the remains swallowed by the advancing woods. But for now, there is still the skeleton, being slowly buried by the moss.

Addie is halfway to the decaying hut when she realizes it is not entirely deserted.

A shiver of motion in the ruined mound, and she squints, expecting to find a rabbit, or perhaps a young deer. Instead, she finds a boy. He is playing amid the ruins, climbing the remains of the old stone walls, swatting at weeds with a switch pulled from the woods.

She knows him. It is the older son, the boy she first saw chasing a dog through her yard. He is maybe nine, or ten. Old enough for his eyes to narrow in suspicion when he sees her.

He holds out his switch as if it were a sword.

“Who are you?” he demands.

And this time she is not content to be a ghost. “I am a witch.”

She doesn’t know why she says it. Perhaps simply to humor herself. Perhaps because when truth is not an option, fiction takes on a mind of its own. Or perhaps because it is what Estele would say, if she were here.

A shadow crosses the boy’s face. “No such thing as witches,” he says, but his voice is unsteady as he says it, and when she steps forward, shoes cracking over sun-dried branches, he begins to back away.

“Those are my bones you’re playing on,” she warns. “I suggest you get down before you fall.”

The boy stumbles in surprise, nearly slips on a patch of moss.

“Unless you’d rather stay,” she muses. “I’m sure there’s room for yours as well.”

The boy makes it back to the ground, and takes off running. Addie watches him go, Estele’s crow-like laughter cawing in her ears.

She doesn’t feel bad for scaring the child; she does not expect him to remember. And yet, tomorrow, he will come again, and she will stand hidden at the edge of the woods and watch him begin to climb the ruins, only to hesitate, a nervous shadow in his eyes. She will watch him back away, and wonder if he is thinking of witches and half-buried bones. If the idea has grown like a weed in his head.

But today, Addie is alone, and her mind is only on Estele.

She runs her hands along a half-fallen wall, and thinks of staying, of becoming the witch by the woods, the figment of someone else’s dream. She imagines rebuilding the old woman’s house, even kneels to stack a few small stones. But by the fourth, the pile crumbles, the rocks landing in the weedy grass exactly as they were before she lifted them.

The ink unwrites.

The wound uncuts.

The house unbuilds.

Addie sighs as a handful of birds take flight from the nearby woods, croaking laughter. She turns toward the trees. There is still light left, an hour maybe until night, and yet, staring into the forest, she can feel the darkness staring back. She wades between the half-buried stones and steps into the shade beneath the trees.

A shiver slides through her.

It is like stepping through a veil.

She weaves between the trees. Once, she would have been afraid of getting lost. Now, the steps are carved into her memory. She could not lose her way even if she tried.

The air is cooler here, the night closer beneath the canopy. It is easy to see, now, how she lost track of time that day. How the line between dusk and dark became so blurred. And she wonders, would she have called out, had she known the hour?

Would she have prayed, knowing which god would answer?

She does not answer herself.

She does not need to.

She doesn’t know how long he’s been there, at her back, if he followed her some time in quiet. Only knows the moment she hears branches crack behind her.

“What a strange pilgrimage you insist on making.”

Addie smiles to herself. “Is it?”

She turns to see Luc leaning back against a tree.

It is not the first time she’s seen him since the night he reaped Beethoven’s soul. But she still hasn’t forgotten what she saw. Nor has she forgotten that he wanted her to see it, to look at him, and know the truth of his power. But it was a foolish thing to do. Like tipping a hand of cards when the highest bets are on the table.

I see you, she thinks as he straightens from the tree. I have seen your truest form. You cannot scare me now.

He steps into a shallow pool of light.

“What drives you back here?” he asks.

Addie shrugs. “Call it nostalgia.”

He lifts his chin. “I call it weakness. To only walk in circles when you could make new roads.”

Addie frowns. “How am I supposed to make a road when I cannot even raise a pile of stones? Set me free, and see then how well I fare.”

He sighs, and dissolves into the dark.

When he speaks again, he is behind her, his voice a breeze through her hair. “Adeline, Adeline,” he chides, and she knows that if she turns again, he will not be there, and so she holds her ground, keeps her eyes on the forest. Does not flinch when his hands slide over her skin. When his arm snakes around her shoulders.

Up close, he smells of oak, and leaf, and rain-soaked field.

“Aren’t you tired?” he whispers.

And she flinches at the words.

She braced for his attack, his verbal barbs, but she was not braced for that question, not braced for the almost gentle way he asks.

It has been a hundred and forty years. A century and a half, living as an echo, as a ghost. Of course she is tired.

“Wouldn’t you like to rest, my dear?”

The words drag like gossamer against her skin.

“I could bury you here, beside Estele. Plant a tree, make it grow over your bones.”

Addie closes her eyes.

Yes, she is tired.

She may not feel the years weakening her bones, her body going brittle with age, but the weariness is a physical thing, like rot, inside her soul. There are days when she mourns the prospect of another year, another decade, another century. There are nights when she cannot sleep, moments when she lies awake and dreams of dying.

But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world.

And she does not want to miss it—any of it.

Addie turns in the circle of Luc’s arms, and looks up into his face.

She doesn’t know if it’s the creeping night, or the nature of the woods themselves, but he looks different. These last few years, she has seen him bound in velvet and lace, done up in the latest fashion. And she has seen him as the void, unbridled and violent. But here, he is neither.

Here, he is the darkness she met that night. Feral magic in a lover’s form.

His edges blur into shadow, his skin the color of moonlight, his eyes the exact shade of the moss behind him. He is wild.

But so is she.

“Tired?” she says, summoning a smile. “I am just waking up.”

She braces for his displeasure, the feral shadow, the flash of teeth.

But there is no trace of yellow in his eyes.

In fact, they are a new and lurid shade of green.

It will take years for her to learn the meaning of that color, to understand it as amusement.

Tonight, there is only that brief glimpse, and then the brush of his lips against her cheek.

“Even rocks,” he murmurs, and then he’s gone.

XII

New York City

June 13, 2014

A boy and a girl walk arm in arm.

They’re heading to the Knitting Factory, and like most things in Williamsburg, it isn’t what it sounds like, not a craft store or a place for yarn, but a concert venue on the northern edge of Brooklyn.

It is Henry’s birthday.

Earlier, when he asked her when her birthday was, and when she told him it was back in March, a shadow crossed his face.

“I’m sorry I missed it.”

“That’s the great thing about birthdays,” she said, leaning against him. “They happen every year.”

She’d laughed a little then, and so had he, but there was something hollow in his voice, a sadness she mistook for mere distraction.

Henry’s friends have already staked out a table near the stage, small boxes stacked on the table between them.

“Henry!” shouts Robbie, a pair of bottles already empty in front of him.

Bea ruffles his hair. “Our literal sweet summer child.”

Their attention slides past him, and lands on her.

“Hi guys,” he says, “this is Addie.”

“Finally!” says Bea. “We’ve been dying to meet you.”

Of course, they already have.

They’ve been asking for weeks to meet the new girl in Henry’s life. They keep accusing him of hiding her, but Addie has met them over beers at the Merchant, been for movie nights at Bea’s, crossed paths with them at galleries and parks. And every time, Bea talks of déjà vu, and then again of artistic movements, and every time Robbie sulks, despite Addie’s best efforts to placate him.

It seems to bother Henry more than it does her. He must think she has made peace with it, but the truth is, there is none to be found. The endless cycle of hello, who is this, nice to meet you, hello wears at her like water against stone—the damage slow, but inevitable. She has simply learned to live with it.

“You know,” says Bea, studying her, “you look so familiar.”

Robbie rises from the table to get a round of drinks, and Addie’s chest tightens at the thought of him resetting, of having to start it all again, but Henry steps in, touches Robbie’s arm. “I’ve got it,” he says.

“Birthday doesn’t pay!” protests Bea, but Henry waves her off and wades away through the growing crowd.

And Addie is left alone with his friends. “It’s really great to meet you both,” she says. “Henry talks about you all the time.”

Robbie’s eyes narrow in suspicion.

She can feel the wall rising up between them, again, but she’s no stranger to Robbie’s moods, not anymore, and so she presses on. “You’re an actor, right? I’d love to come to one of your performances. Henry says you’re amazing.”

He picks at the label on his beer. “Yeah, sure…” he mumbles, but she catches the edge of a smile when he says it.

And then Bea cuts in. “Henry seems happy. Really happy.”

“I am,” says Henry, setting down a round of beers.

“To twenty-nine,” says Bea, raising her glass.

They proceed to debate the merits of the age, and agree it is a fairly useless year, as far as birthdays go, falling just shy of the monumental thirty.

Bea collars Henry. “But next year, you’ll officially be an adult.”

“I’m pretty sure that was eighteen,” he says.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Eighteen is old enough to vote, twenty-one is old enough to drink, but thirty is old enough to make decisions.”

“Closer to a midlife crisis than a quarter-life one,” teases Robbie.

The microphone flares, whining slightly as a man takes the stage and announces a special opening act.

“He’s a rising star, I’m sure you’ve heard his name, but if you haven’t you will soon. Give it up for Toby Marsh!”

Addie’s heart lurches.

The crowd whoops and cheers, and Robbie whistles, and Toby steps onto the stage, that same beautiful, blushing boy, but as he waves to the crowd, his chin lifts, his smile is steady, proud. The difference between the first questing lines of a sketch and the finished drawing.

He sits down at the piano and begins to play, and the first notes hit her like longing. And then he begins to sing.

“I’m in love with a girl I’ve never met.”

Time slips, and she is in his living room, perched on the piano bench, tea steaming on the windowsill as her absent fingers pick out the notes.

“But I see her every night, it seems…”

She is in his bed, his broad hands playing out the melody on skin. Her face flares hot at the memory as he sings.

“And I’m so afraid, afraid that I’ll forget her, even though I’ve only met her in my dreams.”

She never gave him the words, but he found them anyway.

His voice is clearer, stronger, his tone more confident. He just needed the right song. Something to make the crowd lean in and listen.

Addie squeezes her eyes shut, the past and present tangling together in her head.

All those nights at the Alloway, watching him play.

All the times he found her at the bar, and smiled.

All those firsts that were not firsts for her.

The palimpsest bleeding up through the paper.

Toby looks up from the piano, and there’s no way he can see her in a place this big, but she is sure his eyes meet hers, and the room tilts a little, and she doesn’t know if it’s the beers she drank too fast or the vertigo of memory, but then the song ends, replaced by a warm wave of applause, and she is on her feet, moving toward the door.

“Addie, wait,” says Henry, but she can’t, even though she knows what it means to walk away, knows that Robbie and Bea will forget her, and she will have to start again, and so will Henry—but in that moment, she doesn’t care.

She cannot breathe.

The door swings open and the night rushes in, and Addie gasps, forcing air into her lungs.

And it should feel good to hear her music, it should feel right.

After all, she has gone to visit pieces of her art so many times.

But they were only pieces, stripped of context. Sculptured birds on marble plinths, and paintings behind ropes. Didactic boxes taped to whitewashed walls and glass boxes that keep the present from the past.

It is a different thing when the glass breaks.

It is her mother in the doorway, withered to bone.

It is Remy in the Paris salon.

It is Sam, inviting her to stay, every time.

It is Toby Marsh, playing their song.

The only way Addie knows how to keep going is to keep going forward. They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.

“Addie?” Henry is right behind her. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. She wipes the tears away and shakes her head because the story is too long, and too short. “I can’t go back in there, not now.”

Henry looks over his shoulder, and he must have seen the color drop from her face during the show because he says, “Do you know him? That Toby Marsh guy?”

She hasn’t told him that story—they haven’t gotten there yet.

“I did,” she says, which isn’t strictly true, because it makes it sound like something in the past, when the past is the one thing Addie’s not entitled to, and Henry must hear the lie buried in the words, because he frowns. He laces his hands behind his head.

“Do you still have feelings for him?”

And she wants to be honest, to say that of course she does. She never gets closure, never gets to say good-bye—no periods, or exclamations, just a lifetime of ellipses. Everyone else starts over, they get a blank page, but hers are full of text. People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it’s not a full fire, but Addie’s hands are full of candles. How is she supposed to set them down, or put them out? She has long run out of air.

But it is not love.

It is not love, and that is what he’s asking.

“No,” she says. “He just—it caught me off guard. I’m sorry.”

Henry asks if she wants to go home, and Addie doesn’t know if he means both of them, or only her, doesn’t want to find out, so she shakes her head, and they go back in, and the lights have changed, and the stage is empty, the house music filling the air until the main act, and Bea and Robbie are chatting, heads bent just the way they were when they walked in. And Addie does her best to smile as they reach the table.

“There you are!” says Robbie.

“Where did you run off to?” asks Bea, eyes flicking from Henry to her. “And who’s this?”

He slides his arm around her waist. “Guys, this is Addie.”

Robbie looks her up and down, but Bea only beams.

“Finally!” she says. “We’ve been dying to meet you…”

XIII

En Route to Berlin, Germany

July 29, 1872

The glasses rattle faintly on the table as the train rolls through the German countryside. Addie sits in the dining car, sipping her coffee and staring out the window, marveling at the speed with which the world goes past.

Humans are capable of such wondrous things. Of cruelty, and war, but also art and invention. She will think this again and again over the years, when bombs are dropped, and buildings felled, when terror consumes whole countries. But also when the first images are impressed on film, when planes rise into the air, when movies go from black-and-white to color.

She is amazed.

She will always be amazed.

Lost in her thoughts, she doesn’t hear the conductor until he is beside her, one hand coming to rest lightly on her shoulder.

“Fräulein,” he says, “your ticket, please.”

Addie smiles. “Of course.”

She looks down at the table, pretends to shuffle through her purse.

“I’m sorry,” she says, rising, “I must have left it in my room.”

It is not the first time they have done this dance, but it is the first time the porter has decided to follow her, trailing like a shadow as she makes her way toward a car she does not have, for a ticket that she never bought.

Addie quickens her pace, hoping to put a door between them, but it is no use, the conductor is with her every step, and so she slows, and stops before a door that leads to a room that is certainly not hers, hoping that at least it will be empty.

It is not.

As she reaches for the handle, it escapes, sliding open onto a dim compartment, an elegant man leaning in the doorway, black curls drawn like ink against his temples.

Relief rolls through her.

“Herr Wald,” says the conductor, straightening, as if the man in the door were a duke, and not the darkness.

Luc smiles. “There you are, Adeline,” he says in a voice as smooth and rich as summer honey. His green eyes slide from her to the conductor. “She has a way of running off, my wife. Now,” he says, a sly smile on his lips, “what’s brought you back to me?”

Addie manages a smile of her own, cloyingly sweet.

“My love,” she says. “I forgot my ticket.”

He chuckles, drawing a slip of paper from the pocket of his coat. Luc draws Addie close. “What a forgetful thing you are, my dear.”

She bristles, but holds her tongue, leans instead into the weight of him.

The conductor surveys the slip, and wishes them a pleasant night, and the moment he is gone she pulls away from Luc.

“My Adeline.” He clicks his tongue. “That is no way to treat a husband.”

“I am not yours,” she says. “And I did not need your help.”

“Of course not,” he answers dryly. “Come, let’s not quarrel in the hall.”

Luc draws her into the compartment, or at least, that is what she thinks he is doing, but instead of stepping into the familiar confines of the cabin, she finds only the darkness, vast and deep. Her heart catches on the missed step, the sudden drop, as the train falls away, the world falls away, and they are back in the nothing, the hollow space between, and she knows she will never fully know it, never be able to wrap her mind around the nature of the dark. Because she realizes now, what it is, this place.

It is him.

It is the truth of him, the vast and savage night, the darkness, full of promise, and violence, fear, and freedom.

And when the night shudders back into shape around them, they are no longer on the German train, but on a street, in the center of a city she does not yet know is Munich.

And she should be mad at the abduction, the sudden change in the direction of her night, but she cannot stifle the curiosity blossoming in the wake of her confusion. The sudden flush of something new. The thrill of adventure.

Her heart quickens, but she resolves not to let him see her marvel.

She suspects he does anyway.

There is a pleased glint in those eyes, a thread of darker green.

They are standing on the steps of a pillared opera house, her traveling clothes gone, replaced by a far finer dress, and Addie wonders if the gown is real, as far as anything is real, or simply the conjurings of smoke and shadow. Luc stands beside her, a gray scarf around his collar, green eyes dancing beneath the brim of a silk top hat.

The evening bustles with movement, men and women climbing the steps arm in arm to see the show. She learns that it is Wagner, it is Tristan und Isolde, though these things mean nothing to her yet. She does not know it is the height of his career. She does not know it has become his masterpiece. But she can taste the promise, like sugar in the air, as they pass through a lobby of marble columns and painted arches, and into a concert hall of velvet and gold.

Luc rests a hand on the small of her back, guiding her forward to the front of a balcony, a low box with a perfect view of the stage. Her heart quickens with excitement, before she remembers Florence.

Do not mistake this for kindness, he said. I simply want to be the one who breaks you.

But there is no mischief in his eyes as they take their seats. No cruel twist to his smile. Only the languid pleasure of a cat in the sun.

Two glasses arrive, brimming with Champagne, and he holds one out to her.

“Happy anniversary,” he says as the lights dim, and the curtain rises.

It begins with music.

The rising tension of a symphony, notes like waves: rolling through the hall, crashing against the walls. The inversion of a storm against a ship.

And then, the arrival of Tristan. Of Isolde.

Their voices larger than the stage.

She has heard musicals, of course, heard symphonies and plays, voices so pure they bring her to tears. But she has never heard anything like this.

The way they sing. The scope and scale of their emotions.

The desperate passion in their movements. The raw power of their joy, and pain.

She wants to bottle this feeling, to carry it with her through the dark.

It will be years before she hears a record of this symphony and turns the volume up until it hurts, surrounds herself with sound, though it will never be the same as this.

Once, Addie tears her gaze from the players on the stage, only to see that Luc is watching her instead of them. And there it is again, that peculiar shade of green. Not coy, or chiding, not cruel, but pleased.

She will realize later that this is the first night he does not ask for her surrender.

The first time he makes no mention of her soul.

But right now, she is thinking only of the music, the symphony, the story. She is drawn back to the stage by the anguish in a note. By the tangle of limbs in an embrace, by the look of lovers on the stage.

She leans forward, breathes the opera in until it aches inside her chest.

The curtain falls on the first act, and Addie is on her feet, ringing with applause.

Luc laughs, soft as silk, as she sinks back into her seat. “You are enjoying it.”

And she doesn’t lie, even to spite him. “It is wonderful.”

A smile plays across his face. “Can you guess which ones are mine?”

At first, she does not understand, and then, of course, she does.

Her spirits sink. “Are you here to claim them?” she asks, relieved when Luc shakes his head.

“No,” he says, “not tonight. But soon.”

Addie shakes her head. “I don’t understand. Why end their lives as they’re reaching their peak?”

He looks at her. “They made their deal. They knew the cost.”

“Why would anyone trade a lifetime of talent for a few years of glory?”

Luc’s smile darkens. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because vision weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades.” He leans close, twists a lock of her hair around one finger. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”

The words are a knife, cutting swift and deep.

Addie knocks his hand away, and turns her attention back to the stage as the opera resumes.

It is a long play, and yet, it is over too soon.

Hours, gone in moments. Addie wishes she could stay, tucked in this seat, and start the opera again, fold herself between the lovers and their tragedy, lose herself in the beauty of their voices.

And yet, she cannot help but wonder. If all the things that Addie has loved, she loved because of them—or him.

Luc stands, offering his arm.

She does not take it.

They walk, side by side, through the Munich night, and Addie still feels buoyant in the wake of the opera, the voices ringing through her like a bell.

But Luc’s question echoes, too.

Which of them are mine?

She looks at him, the elegant shape beside her in the dark.

“What is the strangest deal you’ve ever done?”

Luc tips his head back, and considers. “Joan of Arc,” he says. “A soul for a blessed sword, so that she could not be struck down.”

Addie frowns. “But she was.”

“Ah, but not in battle.” Luc’s smile goes sly. “Semantics may seem small, Adeline, but the power of a deal is in its wording. She asked for the protection of a god while it was in her hands. She did not ask for the ability to keep hold of it.”

Addie shakes her head, bemused.

“I refuse to believe that Joan of Arc made a deal with the dark.”

The smile splits, showing teeth. “Well, perhaps I let her believe I was a little more … angelic? But deep down, I think she knew. Greatness requires sacrifice. Who you sacrifice to matters less than what you sacrifice for. And in the end, she became what she wanted to be.”

“A martyr?”

“A legend.”

Addie shakes her head. “But the artists. Think of all they could have done. Don’t you mourn their loss?”

Luc’s face darkens. And she remembers his mood the night he met her in the National, remembers his first words, in Beethoven’s room.

What a waste.

“Of course I do,” he says. “But all great art comes with a cost.” He looks away. “You should know that. After all, we are both patrons, in our way.”

“I am nothing like you,” she says, but there is not much venom in the words. “I am a muse, and you are a thief.”

He shrugs. “Give and take,” he says, and nothing more.

But when it’s late, and he is gone, and she is left to wander, the opera plays on, perfectly preserved inside the prism of her memory, and Addie wonders, softly, silently, if their souls were a fair price for such fine art.

XIV

New York City

July 4, 2014

Lights explode over the city.

They’ve gathered on the roof of Robbie’s building along with twenty other people to watch the fireworks go off, paint the Manhattan skyline pink and green and gold.

Addie and Henry stand together, of course, but it’s too hot to touch. His glasses keep fogging, and he seems less interested in drinking his beer than holding the can against his neck.

A breeze trickles through the air, carrying as much relief as a dryer vent, and everyone on the roof make exaggerated noises, letting out oohs and ahhs that might be for the fireworks, or simply the limp gust of air.

A kiddie pool sits in the center of the roof surrounded by lawn chairs, a huddle of people sloshing their feet in the tepid water.

The fireworks finish, and Addie looks around for Henry, but he’s wandered off.

He’s been in a strange mood all day, but she assumes it’s the heat, sitting like a weight on everything. The bookstore was closed, and they spent most of the day stretched together on the sofa in front of a box fan, Book pawing at an ice cube as they watched TV, the heat enough to temper even Henry’s manic energy.

She was too tired to tell him stories.

He was too tired to write them down.

The rooftop doors burst open and Robbie appears, looking as if he’s raided an ice-cream truck, his arms full of melting ice pops. People whoop and cheer, and he makes his rounds of the roof, doling out once-frozen treats.

Twelfth time’s the charm, she thinks as he hands her a fruit bar, but even though he doesn’t remember her, Henry’s obviously said enough, or perhaps Robbie simply recognizes everyone else, and makes the deduction.

One of these things is not like the others.

Addie doesn’t lose a second. She breaks into a sudden grin. “Oh my god, you must be Robbie.” She throws her arms around his neck. “Henry’s told me all about you.”

Robbie pulls free. “Did he?”

“You’re the actor. He said you’re amazing. That it’s only a matter of time before you’re on Broadway.” Robbie blushes a little, looks away. “I’d love to come to one of your shows. What are you performing in right now?”

Robbie hesitates, but she can feel him faltering, torn between shunning her and sharing his news. “We’re doing a spin on Faust,” he says. “You know, man makes a deal with the devil…”

Addie bites into the ice pop, sending a wave of shock through her teeth. It is enough to mask the grimace as Robbie goes on.

“But it’s going to be set against a stage that’s more Labyrinth. Think Mephistopheles but by way of the Goblin King.” He gestures at himself when he says it. “It’s a really cool spin. The costumes are amazing. Anyway, it doesn’t open until September.”

“It sounds wonderful,” she says. “I can’t wait to see.”

At that, Robbie almost smiles. “I think it will be pretty cool.”

“To Faust,” she says, lifting her ice pop.

“And the devil,” answers Robbie.

Her hands have gone sticky, and she dunks them in the kiddie pool and goes in search of Henry. She finally finds him alone in a corner of the roof, a stretch where the lights don’t reach. He’s staring out—not up, but down over the edge.

“I think I finally cracked Robbie,” she says, wiping her hands on her shorts.

“Hm?” he says, not really listening. A bead of sweat runs down his cheek, and he closes his eyes into the faint summer breeze and sways a little on his feet.

Addie pulls him away from the edge. “What’s wrong?”

His eyes are dark, and for a moment, he looks haunted, lost.

“Nothing,” he says softly. “Just thinking.”

Addie has lived long enough to recognize a lie. Lying is its own language, like the language of seasons, or gestures, or the shade of Luc’s eyes.

So she knows that Henry is lying to her now.

Or at least, he’s not telling her the truth.

And maybe it is just one of his storms, she thinks. Maybe it is the summer heat.

It is not, of course, and later, she will know the truth, and she will wish she’d asked, wish she’d pressed, wish she’d known.

Later—but tonight, he pulls her close. Tonight, he kisses her, deeply, hungrily, as if he can make her forget what she saw.

And Addie lets him try.

That night, when they get home, it is too hot to think, to sleep, so they fill the bathtub with cold water, turn off the lights, and climb inside, shivering at the sudden, merciful relief.

They lie there in the dark, bare legs intertwined beneath the water. Henry’s fingers play a melody across her knee.

“When we first met,” he muses, “why didn’t you tell me your real name?”

Addie looks up at the darkened ceiling tiles, and sees Isabelle as she was, that last day, sitting at the table, her eyes gone empty. She sees Remy in the café, staring dreamily past her words, unable to hear them.

“Because I didn’t think I could,” she says, running her fingers through the water. “When I try to tell people the truth, their faces just go blank. When I try to say my name, it always gets stuck in my throat.” She smiles. “Except with you.”

“But why?” he asks. “If you’re going to be forgotten, what does it matter if you tell the truth?”

Addie closes her eyes. It’s a good question, one she’s asked herself a hundred times. “I think he wanted to erase me. To make sure I felt unseen, unheard, unreal. You don’t really realize the power of a name until it’s gone. Before you, he was the only one who could say it.”

The voice curls like smoke inside her head.

Oh Adeline.

Adeline, Adeline.

My Adeline.

“What an asshole,” says Henry, and she chuckles, remembering the nights she screamed up at the sky, called the darkness so much worse.

And then he asks, “When’s the last time you saw him?” and Addie falters.

For an instant, she is in a bed, black silk sheets twisted around her limbs, the New Orleans heat oppressive even in the dark. But Luc is a cool weight, wrapped around her limbs, his teeth skating along her shoulder as he whispers the word against her skin.

Surrender.

Addie swallows, pushes the memory down like bile in her throat.

“Almost thirty years ago,” she says, as if she doesn’t count the days. As if the anniversary isn’t rushing up to meet them.

She glances sideways at the clothes piled on the bathroom floor, the indent of the wooden ring in the pocket of her shorts. “We had a falling-out,” she says, and it is the barest version of the truth.

Henry looks at her, clearly curious, but he doesn’t ask what happened, and for that, she is grateful.

There is an order to the story.

She will tell him when she gets there.

For now Addie reaches up, and turns the shower on, and it falls down on them like rain, soothing and steady. And this is the perfect kind of silence. Easy, and empty. They sit across from each other beneath the icy stream, and Addie closes her eyes and tips her head back against the tub, and listens to the makeshift storm.

XV

The Cotswolds, England

December 31, 1899

It is snowing.

Not a patina of frost, or a few wayward flakes, but a dousing of white.

Addie sits curled in the window of the little cottage, a fire at her back, and a book open on her knee, as she watches the sky fall.

She has ushered in the change of years so many ways.

Perched on London rooftops holding bottles of Champagne, and torch in hand through the cobbled roads of Edinburgh. She has danced in the halls of Paris, and watched the sky go white with fireworks in Amsterdam. She has kissed strangers, and sung of friends she’ll never meet. Gone out with bangs and with whispers.

But tonight she is content to sit, and watch the world go white beyond the window, every line and curve erased by snow.

The cottage is not hers, of course. Not in the strictest sense.

She found it more or less intact, a place abandoned, or simply forgotten. The furniture was threadbare, the cupboards almost empty. But she has had a season to make it hers, to gather wood from the copse of trees across the field. To tend the wild garden, and steal what she could not grow.

It is simply a place to rest her bones.

Outside, the storm has stopped.

The snow lies quiet on the ground. As smooth and clean as unmarked paper.

Perhaps that is what drives her to her feet.

She pulls the cloak tight around her shoulders and surges out, boots sinking instantly into the snow. It is light, whipped into a sugar film, the taste of winter on her tongue.

Once, when she was five, or six, it snowed back in Villon. A rare sight, a film of white several inches deep that coated everything. In hours, it was ruined by horses and carts, and people trudging to and fro, but Addie found a small expanse of untouched white. She rushed out into it, leaving a trail of shoes. She ran bare hands over the frozen sheets, left fingers in her wake. She ruined every inch of the canvas.

And when she was done, she looked around at the field, now covered in tracks, and mourned that it was over. The next day, the frost broke, and the ice melted, and it was the last time she played in snow.

Until now.

Now, her steps crunch the perfect snow, and it rises in her wake.

Now, she runs her fingers through the gentle hills, and they smooth behind her touch.

Now she plays in the field, and does not leave a mark.

The world remains unblemished, and for once she is grateful.

She spins and twirls, and dances partner-less across the snow, laughing at the strange and simple magic of the moment, before stepping wrong, a patch deeper than she thought.

She loses her balance, and crashes down into the pile of white, gasping at the sudden cold along her collar, the snow that creeps inside her hood. She looks up. It has begun to snow again, lightly now, flakes falling like stars. The world goes muffled, a cotton kind of quiet. And if it were not for the icy damp leaching through her clothes, she thinks she could stay here forever.

She decides she will at least stay here for now.

She sinks into the snow, lets it swallow the edges of her sight, until there is nothing but a frame around the open sky, the night cold and clear and full of stars. And she is ten again, stretched in the tall grass behind her father’s workshop, dreaming she is anywhere but home.

How strange, the winding way a dream comes true.

But now, gazing up into the endless dark, she does not think of freedom, but of him.

And then, he’s there.

Standing over her, haloed by the dark, and she thinks perhaps she is going mad again. It would not be the first time.

“Two hundred years,” Luc says, kneeling beside her, “and still behaving like a child.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I could ask the same of you.”

He holds out his hand, and she takes it, lets him draw her up out of the cold, and together they walk back to the little house, leaving only his steps in the snow.

Inside, the fire has gone out, and she groans a little herself, reaching for the lantern, hoping it will be enough to coax the fire back to life.

But Luc only looks at the smoking ruins and flicks his fingers in an absent way, and the flames surge up inside the hearth, a bloom of heat, casting shadows over everything.

How easily he moves through the world, she thinks.

How hard he’s made it for her.

Luc considers the little cottage, the borrowed life. “My Adeline,” he says, “still longing to grow up and become Estele.”

“I am not yours,” she says, though by now the words have lost their venom.

“All the world, and you pass your time playing the part of a witch in the wild, a crone praying to old gods.”

“I did not pray to you. And yet you’re here.”

She takes him in, dressed in a wool coat and cashmere scarf, the collar high against his cheeks, and realizes this is the first she has seen Luc in winter. It suits him, as well as summer did. The fair skin of his cheeks gone marble white, the black curls the color of the moonless sky. Those green eyes, as cold and bright as stars. And the way he looks, standing before the fire, she wishes she could draw him. Even after all this time, her fingers itch for charcoal.

He runs a hand over the mantel.

“I saw an elephant, in Paris.”

Her words to him, so many years before. It is such a strange answer now, filled with unspoken things. I saw an elephant, and thought of you. I was in Paris, and you were not.

“And you thought of me,” she says.

It is a question. He does not answer. Instead, he looks around and says, “This is a pitiful way to usher out a year. We can do better. Come with me.”

And she is curious—she is always curious—but tonight, she shakes her head. “No.”

That proud chin lifts. Those dark brows draw together. “Why not?”

Addie shrugs. “Because I’m happy here. And I do not trust you to bring me back.”

His smile flickers, like firelight. And she expects that to be the end of that.

To turn and find him gone, stolen back into the dark.

But he’s still there, this shadow in her borrowed home.

He lowers himself into the second chair.

He conjures cups of wine from nothing, and they sit before the fire like friends, or at least, like foes at rest, and he tells her of Paris at the close of a decade—the turn of the century. Of the writers, blooming like flowers, of the art, and the music, and the beauty. He has always known how to tempt her. He says it is a golden age, a time of light.

“You would enjoy it,” he says.

“I’m sure I would.”

She will go, in the spring, and see the World’s Fair, witness the Eiffel Tower, the iron sculpture climbing toward the sky. She will walk through buildings made of glass, ephemeral installations, and everyone will talk of the old century and the new one, as if there is a line in the sand between present and past. As if it does not all exist together.

History is a thing designed in retrospect.

For now, she listens to him talk, and it is enough.

She does not remember drifting off, but when she wakes, it is early in the morning, and the cottage is empty, the fire little more than embers. A blanket has been cast over her shoulders, and beyond the window, the world is white again.

And Addie will wonder if he was ever there.