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It must show in my face.
He grins at me. “I can work with this position, but I sort of pictured us starting off in bed.”
* * *
I wake nestled against him. He is too warm and too perfect to be a dream, yet it still doesn’t feel quite real. Will there ever come a time when I don’t wake grateful to find him here? It’s hard to imagine.
Lucien rises and comes into the room before our clothes are on. “This will be an adjustment,” says Henri with a raise of his brow, holding the blanket to cover himself as he searches for clean clothes.
By the time I’ve dressed, Henri has a fire roaring on the hearth, and sits at the table with Lucien in his lap while Cecelia is being helped down the stairs by her adoring big sister.
“We don’t have coffee anymore,” I tell him. “Or sugar, I’m afraid.”
He smiles at me. “I have my family,” he replies. “That’s all I need.”
I feed him eggs and bread and the last of the canned ham and watch him eat with the same sort of delight I once felt when Cecelia was finally taking a full bottle. When he’s done, he plays with the children: chasing Lucien around the room on all fours, growling, swinging Cece up in the air and catching her in his arms, and teaching Charlotte to play jeu de barbichette, a horrible game that involves reciting a rhyme—and hitting the first person to laugh.
I frown. “What kind of game encourages children to hit each other?”
“French games,” he replies with a grin, “and this one was always my favorite.”
“And what happens when she plays that at school and gets expelled for slapping someone?”
He laughs. “Are all people in your time so soft?”
“Yes,” I tell him, but it feels like a lie as soon as I say it, and my smile falters. People in my time are soft, but I no longer am, not the way he thinks.
* * *
“You’re happy again,” says Charlotte when I put her to bed that night.
I smile. “Wasn’t I always happy?”
She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “You were waiting to be happy.”
A chill runs up my spine. She’s right. I had moments of happiness here with them, but they were brief. I was waiting for Henri to come home until I took a full breath, and once we’re settled in England and he leaves to fight, I’ll wait once more. If he dies, I’ll wait forever because there’ll be no other option.
“I don’t want you to fight,” I whisper to him much later, as we both lie awake in the dark, unwilling to be separated by sleep. “Once we are settled in England, I want you to stay with us.”
He rolls to face me. “I can’t hide like a coward and let others fight for my country. But I’d never have gone if I’d known you would remain here, so defenseless.”
I laugh unhappily. “Defenseless? You know what I can do. There isn’t a woman in France better defended than me.”
“Except you’re no longer interested in defending yourself,” he replies. “You’re defending them, and in that you are as vulnerable as the rest of us.”
I want to argue but a part of me can’t deny what he’s saying. “There’s not much to be done for it now,” I tell him. “We’re here and we’ll have to deal with it as it comes.”
“Yes, but you can be prepared if nothing else,” he argues. “You need to know how to defend yourself. And how to kill.”
I freeze. Henri can’t conceive of the version of me who stabbed her own aunt in the chest or allowed people to burn alive, who wanted Yvette to die and even considered killing Dr. Nadeau when I discovered he’d lied to us about the penicillin, and I hope he never does. That part of me was successfully locked down when Cece was born, and I’m not letting her back into the light.
“I don’t want to learn how to kill,” I reply.
“And I don’t want to have to teach you how, but now it’s necessary,” he says. “We’ll start small. I’ll go hunting and you can come with me.”
My heart pounds in my chest. How would he look at me if he knew? Would he forgive me? He might. He’d excuse it as self-defense. But what if he really understood where it came from? My grandfather and aunt are the reason his mother is dead. They’re people who wanted to hurt others, who enjoyed it. And there is a part of me, a part I sometimes feel pulsing just under my skin, that wants that too.
“No,” I reply. “I can’t leave the children to go, and I’m not interested anyway. That’s just not who I want to be.”
