Page 34 of Across Eternity

“Your stitching is atrocious,” she says, clicking her tongue at my handiwork as I bring my bleeding thumb to my mouth. She pulls it from my lap and rips the seams out. “Try again.”

She hands it back to me, regarding me with those cat eyes of hers. We’ve fooled her not at all with our pretense of being cousins. She knows Henri and I were more. How could she not? Some piece of us exists in every glance he and I exchange.

“What do you think of the name Andre?” she asks, watching me carefully for a reaction. “Or Pierre? Pierre Durand. He sounds like a politician, does he not?”

I look up from the gown, wondering what, exactly, she wants from me. Does she want me to weep and beg her to give him back? Does she want me to lash out in a jealous frenzy? If she knew what I was capable of, what I’m tempted to do, she’d stop pushing me.

“I like Ted Bundy for a boy,” I reply, focusing once more on my stitches.

“Tedbundy?” she asks, as if it’s all one word. “It’s an American name?”

“Yes.” I’m not completely evil. I’d stop them if she actually considered it. Probably. “It’s really popular.”

“What an odd name,” she replies. “I think I prefer Pierre.”

* * *

I’m in the barn when Henri finds me. He pauses before walking in. “Dinner is ready,” he says.

I don’t glance up from the cow I’m milking. The mere sight of him hurts. I will stay until the end of October, as I promised, but if I avoid him, avoid looking at him, maybe I can stop wanting him too. “I’ll be in when I’m done.”

He goes nowhere, however, and I’m finally forced to glance up. His brow is arched, and he’s looking at me in the old way, not as if I’m a victim or a torturer, but as if I’m a naughty child in need of a spanking, one he’s too amused by to deliver. “Who is Ted Bundy?” he asks.

“A serial killer. He murders a bunch of women in the 1970s and has sex with their corpses.”

His mouth twitches. “Yes, I suspected as much. Please stop offering my wife input.”

That word—wife—siphons every ounce of joy from this conversation. “Then tell her to stop asking for it,” I reply.

He still stands there. “You shouldn’t be doing so much,” he says quietly. “You’re still too thin.” I rise—not because I’m done but because I have to get away from him.

“Do me a favor,” I reply, handing him the half-full pail. “Don’t try to pretend you care. I think you’ve proven quite conclusively you don’t.”

I enter the kitchen with Henri on my heels. He hands the pail to Marie, mumbling something about how I shouldn’t be working as hard as I am. He looks as if he should be working less hard himself. Exhaustion is etched into the corners of his face and he walks away with his hand pressed, as always to his side.

Yvette looks at me as I take a seat, her eyes raising slowly, cunning as always. “He’s right, of course. You do work too hard, but I understand it. We are just scraping by here. It must be awful to feel like you’re another mouth to feed at a time like this, when our family is growing.”

She wants to hurt me. The smartest thing I could do right now is not give her the satisfaction of knowing she’s succeeded. But I lash out instead. “If times are so hard and you’re barely scraping by, perhaps you shouldn’t have decided to grow a family right now. That seems like a far larger problem than my temporary visit.”

Her cheeks suck in and her eyes narrow, just for a moment, before she stretches like a cat and looks at me from beneath her long lashes. “Henri does not give me a moment’s rest, even now, in that regard. Pregnancy is unavoidable with a man like him.”

She wanted to hurt me and she has. My God, she has.

I realize only now the lies I’ve still been telling myself to dull the pain. I wanted to believe he’d used her to drown his sorrows, but that wasn’t it at all. I close my eyes and push away from the table. I can’t sit here. I can’t remain across from them for another meal, watching Yvette’s eyes dancing across his broad shoulders, counting the moments until she gets him alone.

“I think I’ll go for a walk,” I tell Marie. “I’m not really hungry.”

I ignore Yvette’s Cheshire-cat smile and walk out the door. Marie finds me a short time later, sitting by the hay bale, and places bread and cheese and ham on a plate in front of me. “Eat,” she says. “You still look as if you’re a moment from death’s door.”

I brush the tears off my face. “Unlike the luscious Yvette, who is blooming.”

She laughs. “Even as starved as you are, Yvette’s face can’t hold a candle to yours, which you must realize. If it could, she wouldn’t be so tediously jealous.”

“Jealous?” I scoff. “What’s she got to be jealous of? She’s married to Henri and having his child. He apparently rushed off to Paris to beg her to marry him and can’t keep his hands off her now.”

Her smile fades. “Surely you realize that Yvette stretches the truth a bit?” she asks. “Does Henri strike you as being unable to keep his hands off her? They’re rarely even in the same place.”

“Because the grapes are coming in and he’s busy.” I think about the day he undressed me in the middle of the vineyard, during Madame Beauvoir’s visit. How desperate he was, how reckless. Yvette was right. Pregnancy is unavoidable with a man like him. “Believe me, he finds a way to work around that.”