Page 74 of Our Strange Duet

“Did you see anyone else? Anyone who shouldn’t have been there? Maybe up in Box Five?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Do you mean the Phantom?”

I nodded.

Meg sat back against the seat cushions, looking uncomfortable. “Mother was at the meeting with the managers the other day, back when they were all trying to decide how to go forward with the season and the repairs, and…” She swallowed. “They think he’s dead.”

I was stunned. It had never occurred to me that Erik could have been caught in the disaster. It seemed too incredible to believe.

Erik, dead.

Even as the terrible thought took root in my mind, I dismissed it. That was an impossibility. I’d seen him on the railing of Box Five. He’d been nowhere near the floor. And had he somehow been struck by the falling fixtures, the papers would have certainly reported finding someone with his visage among the dead. Such a face could not have gone unnoticed.

“I don’t believe it,” Meg said, her voice now hushed and low. She glanced at me and offered a tiny smile. “I don’t think he’s dead.”

“You don’t?”

I couldn’t decide which scenario was worse. Erik, and all his genius, lost to the world forever, or Erik alive and still enraged. Erik seeking vengeance and the settling of scores.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. How could a ghost be killed? He was already dead to begin with.”

“Oh, Meg,” I laughed. There was nothing else I could do.

There was so much I needed to tell her. So much that I had to explain and confess.

And I would. One day.

“I shall miss you, so much,” I swore, sensing the conversation’s end.

“Promise me you’ll write? Once you’re all settled in at your very fine house, like some very fine lady?”

“Only if you swear to write back.”

Meg nodded. “Of course I will.” She let out a small snort. “Well, at least until some suitor of my own comes along and sweeps me off my feet.”

I cupped her cheek, memorizing her face. I wanted to remember her exactly as she was now, before our paths diverged, before our lives began to change too much. “I don’t doubt that’s exactly what will happen, Meg Giry.”

“It had better.”

Chapter 24

My dearest Meg, I began. The pen’s nib made soft scratches as it jotted across the creamy blank page before me. I paused, wishing there were a way to capture everything which had happened since arriving at our beautiful manor by the sea.

Deauville is a dream. Every morning dawns with golden possibility and the promise of adventure and fun. We’ve visited so many restaurants and shows I can’t keep track of them all. Every day we take a stroll down the boardwalk and look for seals and porpoises. Raoul always gets a paper cone of pink pralines and then presents me with a new pair of gloves—a joke from our first summer here. We visit the racetrack in the afternoons, and I have so much fun choosing which horses to place bets on. I like to pick the ones with the most unusual names. Yesterday, I won fifteen francs betting on Perplexe for the first race and Admetus in the third. Evenings are spent in casinos or nightclubs. Raoul has been trying to teach me vingt-et-un, but I’m quite hopeless at it. Chemin de fer and la boule are much more to my liking.

I so wish you were here to enjoy it all with me, Meg. I miss you and I miss your wise counsel.

Raoul has been an absolute gentleman, most of the time. He makes sure to keep a careful distance between us on our promenades and is quick to share our boxes and tables with other couples, surrounding me in a sea of respectable chaperones. Our bedrooms are even in separate wings of the house, and there is almost always staff present.

But at night…

Oh, Meg, at night!

When the servants retire and the rooms fill with enough shadows to hide away in, his kisses fall on me like embers, scorching and igniting me in equal measure. His hands roam across my body, learning my curves and which spots will best make me gasp.

We’ve never gone any further than this, I swear to you, Meg, but I know he wants to, and, honestly, I do as well. The voice of reason and propriety, which always has ruled my mind, seems to grow smaller and smaller every night we stay in Deauville.

How I wish you were here. I feel I’m quite out of my depth, in over my head, and whatever other platitudes would best describe this exquisite burning, this yearning ache, this terrible—