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“I’m what?”
He closes his eyes and gives me the smallest shake of his head. “Nothing. I know how this looks. You just need to believe that I was in a bad place when you and my sister were gone. And I did wait. I did. Marie was certain you’d died and I insisted you hadn’t. I hunted for you. I dragged her back to Paris to find that house. And then I found your body. I held your skeleton in my hands. I—” His voice breaks and he stops talking entirely.
My heart gives an unfortunate lurch of sympathy. I’m incapable of seeing the bad in him even when I’m the victim of it. I’m angry at us both for that fact.
“Do not ask me to feel sorry for you,” I say between my teeth. “You waited less than three months after I left to fuck someone else, Henri.” My voice trembles. “Do not expect me to believe for a single moment that you were devastated by my loss.”
“I was,” he says. His hold on my arms tightens. “I still am. Look at me. Do I look well to you? Happy and healthy?”
I shake free of him, swiping an angry hand over the tears that are in my eyes. “I will not feel sorry for you!” I cry. “I won’t. You’ve been sitting here married and planning for your new family, while I—do you even have any idea what it was like, where we were held? Or did Marie spare you all that?”
He stiffens, bracing himself. “She didn’t remember, mostly.”
I look him in the eye. “We were drugged and beaten. I had to pretend for months that I was asleep so I wouldn’t be raped. I had to let the guards hit me and put their hands down my dress and maul me as I passed, without ever reacting once. And I had to watch all the other women die off, one by one. You know what they were doing there?”
The cords of his neck stand out with tension. “Marie thought they were raising children who time travel.”
“No,” I correct. “They were hoping to breed children who time travel. They assumed those of us able to fight off the drug were more powerful, and the rest were expendable. I finally had to give myself up simply so they didn’t kill me off.”
He staggers backward and leans against the wall, holding his side. “God,” he groans, dragging a hand through his hair. “Please tell me they didn’t…” He can’t even say the word.
“No. But how could it possibly matter at this point?” I reply. “You have a new, unsullied wife.”
His shoulders slump, and a kinder person would stop right now, but I can’t. That anger inside me isn’t abated at all by what I’ve said. It’s like a fire, finding more things to burn, taking on new life.
“They were drugging the food, so I starved myself to keep a clear head. I was so weak from hunger toward the end, but do you know what kept me going, Henri? You know what kept me from eating, kept my feet moving each day no matter how hard it got? It was you. It was the idea of getting back to you. And I could visit you in part, but not without changing your memories of our time together, so I came while you slept. I would lie down, half this past version of me and half the present one, and weep at how much I missed you. So don’t tell me how hard and sad it was for you here on the farm for a few months before you forgot me. Because I never forgot you. Not for a single day.”
His hand goes to my shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen, Sarah.”
His apology is a slap in the face. I never meant for any of this to happen. How many weak, worthless men have used that phrase before, and how dare he offer it to me now?
“Don’t use my name.”
“You already gave it to me,” he says.
I stand up straighter, buoyed by my rage. “I gave you a lot of things,” I snap. “And now I’m taking every one of them back, and I’m giving them to someone else. Don’t ever use my name again. You didn’t deserve it after all.”
I walk away and he lets me. Everything I said was perfectly cutting. It made me feel no better at all.
17
SARAH
The next day, Henri is absent. Yvette stays in with us, knitting baby booties while Marie-Therese and I cut and chop and can. She spends the entire afternoon musing aloud about baby names for the child she’s convinced is a boy, until I think I can’t stand it anymore.
“Shall I name him Henri?” she asks us. “Would my husband like a junior around the house?” I picture Henri as a toddler—that adorable, rosy-cheeked boy I once saw chasing chickens through the yard, plump-legged and gleeful—and suppress a shudder of pain. That little boy should be mine, not hers. That child wouldn’t be mine regardless, I remind myself.
I don’t answer the question so Marie-Therese replies for me. “As long as he’s healthy, I doubt Henri will care what you name him.”
“And you, Amelie?” asks Yvette. “What do you think Henri would like?”
My eyes raise to hers. “I’d have to care what Henri likes in order to form an opinion.”
She smiles then. It’s so obvious that I’m wounded by this situation and she enjoys that fact. She feeds on my unhappiness like a monster. I can’t hold it against her, entirely, because I’d happily feed on hers as well.
In the afternoon, when we’re done with the canning, Yvette enlists me to help her sew small, adorable little baby gowns in white linen. I think of refusing her, and yet a piece of me now seeks out the pain, as if something might break inside me once there’s been too much of it.
So, I sit with her while she muses aloud about Henri and the baby and their blissful future. My needle jabs into the fabric haphazardly, and jabs into my own thumb more than once. I almost enjoy that pain too. I like feeling something other than the wound she and Henri have created.
