Page 40 of Across Eternity

“You have so much influence over him,” she continues. “But I guess you’ve known the family a long time. Did you ever meet Henri’s mother?”

I’m slow to answer. I don’t know what Marie and Henri have told her and it feels like a trap of some kind, but captivity has left me suspicious of everyone.

“Yes,” I reply cautiously.

“What was she like?” she asks. “Henri gets distressed when I ask about her. Her death is such a sore subject with him, even now.”

“I’m not sure anyone fully recovers from the death of a parent,” I reply mildly, hoping she drops it.

“I want him to give me her wedding band and he will not,” she says. “He says it’s an heirloom and should go to Marie.”

Ah, this is what she’s after. “I doubt the ring was anything to write home about,” I reply. “They married in the early 1900s and had no money.”

“His father had a Cartier watch. Henri wore it the night we met. You know how much a Cartier watch costs? Besides, you don’t keep trinkets in a safe deposit box,” she argues, her voice laced with irritation.

My head jerks up as a sudden memory sweeps over me.

Just days before I left for 1918, Henri went to Paris. I’d asked if I could come and he’d said no, that it would be a dull trip and also a dangerous one, since part of the day involved being around the unseemly sort of men who forge documents and procure things—by which I’d assumed he meant condoms—from the black market.

Marie asked him, grinning, if he’d be going by the safe deposit box, and his face lit up with a sweet, boyish smile, quickly suppressed.

“Yes,” he’d told her. “I thought I might.”

It could have meant anything, but even at the time it felt odd. Even at the time I’d asked what was in the safe deposit box and …what was it he said to me?

That’s for me to know and you to find out.

Was Henri going to give me the ring? And if so, why is he refusing to give it to his wife?

* * *

Yvette is already in bed, after a long day of doing nothing, when Marie comes into the kitchen with the red dress in hand.

“That won’t fit,” I tell her. I’ve gained weight since I arrived and was glad to see the return of my cleavage, but I’m still much thinner than I was the last time. “And I don’t think I’m going anyway.” I’m not spending the whole damn night watching Henri care for his pregnant wife, watching Yvette with her proprietary hands all over him.

“Oh, but you must,” urges Marie. “It won’t be the same without you. The dress can be taken in.”

“I’m just not in the mood to—”

“Henri won’t feel comfortable leaving you here alone,” she says, wincing. “If you don’t go, none of us go.”

“Why would he care if I’m here alone?” I ask.

Her smile is brief, and sad. “Because he’s scared you’ll leave.”

It makes little sense, but I don’t push her on it. I try on the dress and she pins it along the sides and the hips so that it skims the curve of my waist rather than obscuring it entirely. I’m standing on a chair while she touches up the hem when Henri walks in.

He stands in the threshold of the door with a look of pain and want on his face, and I wonder if he’s remembering the last time I wore it. That night when he came up behind me in this dress, his breath along the shell of my ear, and told me I was exquisite. When he told me he’d been worried about what would happen that night.

What did you think would happen? I’d asked him.

That everyone would discover a secret I wanted to keep for myself, he replied.

Our gaze locks and the memories of it swirl between us, and then I jump from the chair without a word and go to my room, where I weep into my pillow, still wearing the dress, the pins digging into my skin.

I cry for all the moments in our past that meant nothing. How deeply I felt them all and how badly I wish I had never left. I suppose I should consider myself lucky to learn just how shallow his feelings for me actually were, but I’m not. If someone would allow me to go back to those days, to return to my ignorance, I’d accept the offer gladly.

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