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He laughs. I feel the pulse of his exhale against me, just where his tongue is still flickering so, so perfectly. “All in good time, little thief. But first I’m going to taste your tight, wet-”
“Henri,” I warn.
“I know you like it,” he says. “And I want to make sure you know whose tight, wet, delicious-”
“Henri. Stop.”
He laughs again. “Why?”
“Because,” I reply, pulling him toward me. At last he complies. “You’re going to end it before it starts.” I tug his pants down and pull him on top of me before they’re even mid-thigh. He pushes inside me and the two of us groan at the feel of it. I lean toward his ear. “Now,” I whisper, arching upward to meet his thrust. “Now tell me.”
* * *
We are exhausted but unwilling to sleep. I doze off, and when I wake in his moonlit room, I’m certain I am dreaming, convinced I’m still a captive and have time traveled to him the way I used to.
He rolls toward me and holds my face in his hands. “You have no idea how many times I’ve prayed I’d open my eyes to find you here,” he whispers, and it comes to me—Yvette and the pain of finding her here, Cecelia’s birth and the way it healed me. A small burst of anger and pain and forgiveness, emotions I run through so fast it’s hard to tell them apart. I can’t wish it away, not when Cecelia couldn’t exist without it, and while a part of me wishes things were still pure and unsullied between us, the way they were a year ago, I know that we are stronger like this. Even the best foundations have some dirt mixed in. That’s what makes them harden into something solid and unshakeable.
He was sure of me back then, yet worried I would someday choose to leave, and now he knows better. I was sure of him back then, yet a piece of me still wondered if he wouldn’t be better off and happier with some normal girl he could count on. But now I know a part of him belongs to me, craves me, in a way that wouldn’t be satisfied by someone else.
I press my mouth to his. In a moment this will lead to other things—to me, rolled on my back and him pushing inside me. But for right now, just in this moment, our kiss is something else. A seal, a promise. The start of a new, and better, version of us. Coron and Iris may be a part of me, but I will never allow them to take over. With Henri and Cecelia by my side, I can close the door on that side of myself. Forever, I hope.
26
SARAH
For the next month, the war seems so far away it would be easy to forget about it entirely. The Germans don’t advance. The French don’t attack. There is rationing, yes, but it affects us little on the farm—between the canned goods and the livestock we have plenty. Henri and most of the young men in town are considered active duty, forbidden to leave the vicinity, but there’s not much to it at the moment—daily drills out in the fields on the far side of the village and some target practice, nothing more. Henri still can’t quite believe that Marshall Petain, a decorated war hero himself, will just surrender to Hitler with nary a fight after becoming president, but I shudder when I think about what lies ahead. If Henri died during World War II, that means he’ll die again no matter what I do. I comb my memory for the conversations Cecelia and I had during the visits to my own time—will have, in her case—about her father. She was so careful not to give me a single detail. But did she ever speak of him as if he was someone she knew? Did she ever tell me a single thing implying that they’d been together, shared a meal or a conversation?
I don’t think she did.
I try to content myself with the days I have right now and, for the most part, I’m happy, but I still bear scars from my time in captivity that might never depart. I still wake at night with my heart pounding, certain Gustave’s hand is on my ankle, that Mathilde let the babies die.
Henri quietly soothes me on those nights, running a hand down my back until my heart settles again. “What happened to you there?” he always asks, his voice tight.
“Nothing,” I reply each time. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
One night he asks whose body he pulled out of the hole, wearing his mother’s necklace. I lie and tell him I don’t know, because in spite of everything, our lives are good and I’m not that person now, the one who killed with glee. I refuse to feel guilty about it, I will say to myself sometimes. But what troubles me isn’t that I feel guilt—it’s that I feel nothing but a quiet, simmering pleasure when I remember most of the deaths I was responsible for.
And I’m not the only one who bears scars from our time apart. On those afternoons when he walks into a silent home—when Cece is napping and Marie is in town—I get a glimpse of something haunted in his eyes, the ghost of last winter when the house was empty and threatened to remain so. Then he finds me and it’s gone, replaced by his staggering relief, and quickly followed by the suggestion that we should go to the bedroom while we have a few moments to ourselves.
On one of those afternoons though, after he’s silently undressed me and pushed me back to the bed and we’re lying together with my head on his chest, he brings up a topic we haven’t discussed in a long while. “I want you to marry me,” he says.
I lean up on my forearms. “I hate to ruin an otherwise perfect moment by pointing out the obvious, but you’re already married.”
“I filed to have it annulled,” he says. “I’m not sure how long it will take to come through, but when it does, on the day it does, I want you to marry me.”
“Are you going to try to claim it wasn’t consummated?” My laughter is meant to sound lighthearted but comes out bitter instead. The truth is that even the most oblique references to Yvette bother me. “There’s some obvious proof it was.”
“We never once had relations after our wedding. And therefore, the marriage was not consummated.”
I study his face. They were married from March to October, sleeping in the same bed. It’s obvious Yvette was more than willing. “Not once?” I repeat. I want it to be true. The thought of them together is something that never stops eating at me.
“I told her I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of it because of the baby. Thank God she left before I had to come up with a new excuse,” he says with a relieved exhale. “So? Yes or no?”
Once upon a time it seemed too soon. Now it seems like I’ve waited forever for it. I smile and place my head back against his chest. “Yes,” I reply. “There’s nothing I want more.”
* * *
On the last weekend of November, all of us head to town dressed to the nines for the baptism of the newest Durand. Since Cece’s birth, Marie’s been attending mass alone. Cece is too fragile to be taken into crowds just yet, but that’s not the only reason Henri and I have been avoiding mass: in the aftermath of Yvette’s departure, Henri has become the man who threw over his pregnant wife for his own cousin, and I’m now the American who seduced her own cousin away from his pregnant wife. I could live with it, but I’m glad we’re leaving so I won’t have to.
