Page 50 of Across Eternity

I rise to face him. “So you’ve all been quietly pitying me this whole time. Poor, barren Amelie? And thinking you’re lucky to end up with a child after all.”

I start to walk off and his hand lands heavily on my arm, holding me in place. “Don’t presume to know what is in my heart,” he snaps. “It’s a terrible situation, but if you think for a moment I could be capable of finding a silver lining in all this, you do not give me enough credit.”

I blow out a breath. He’s right. My capacity for self-pity has been endless, but there’s no reason to look at everything in the worst possible light. “I’m sorry.”

He looks at his hand, still gripping my arm. “No one could be more sorry than I am,” he replies, letting me go.

* * *

That’s the first night I hear Yvette and Henri fight. Mostly, it is she who fights. Her words are hissed, inaudible but for their intent.

The next morning, I wake just after sunrise and dress for the hospital. He’s waiting downstairs, looking as if he hasn’t had much sleep.

We ride to Reims and then wait side by side in the pediatric ward. Henri asks if we might be able to see Cecelia today, and the nurse frowns and tells him it’s unlikely, but that she’ll check.

He grips my hand, and he’s still holding it hours later when the doctor we met three days prior finally walks into the hall. The two of us spring to our feet as he approaches. “She’s been off the ventilator for nearly twenty-four hours,” he says, his face breaking into a smile. “I think she can safely go home.”

I burst into tears. Henri’s arms wrap around me. Neither of us care, a single bit, about the fact that we shouldn’t be holding each other so tight or so long.

* * *

The whole ride home I hold her in the back seat, marveling at her perfect fingers, her darling mouth, her steady breaths. Marveling at the fact that there ever could have been a time when I didn’t want her to exist.

Yvette makes a show of being relieved that Cecelia is home, but it’s not long before she’s complained of fatigue and retires to her room. I take the baby and feed her in the parlor while Henri looks on—worried, hopeful. I place her on my shoulder and she gives the loud, satisfied burp of a much older and larger child. Henri and I both grin at each other. When I lay her down in the crib, now deeply asleep, the two of us just stand there, watching her.

“She’s the most beautiful thing,” I whisper.

He turns and his eyes go from my hair to my eyes to my nose to my mouth. “She’s one of them.”

He looks at me as if I’m the world’s only source of light, and it hurts. It hurts so much that I can’t have this. I feel my eyes sting and avert my gaze. I cannot stand here like this with him. I can’t.

“I should—”

He moves toward me and his palm curves along the side of my face as he leans in, pulling me closer. There’s the gust of his breath and then his mouth is on mine. Soft and hungry and desperate and careful all at once.

I should stop him but the part of me that has waited long, long months for this, that spent one night after the next in captivity dreaming of this, does not care. That part of me says take. She hasn’t earned him and you have, so take this while you can.

My mouth opens under his and we tangle, mouths and tongues and hands, and he moves me until I’m pressed to the wall, pinned like a butterfly under his weight. If I’d ever doubted that he might have missed me the way I missed him, I no longer do. It’s in the urgency of his mouth, the pained sounds he makes. His bones, like mine, are hollowed out waiting for this, waiting to be filled again.

When he finally pulls back, his body still pressed to mine, I can feel the restraint it takes. I feel it in the rigidity of his arms, in the bulge that presses hard against my abdomen.

“You can’t—” I begin.

“I know. But I’m not sorry,” he says, stepping away. “God help me but I’m not sorry.”

23

SARAH

Things are different with us in the morning. All along I’ve existed on this raw edge of pain and want and restraint and heartbreak, but now…I can feel him pressed against me. I feel his desire in my cells and hear the pain of his groan no matter what else is going on around me. And each time I look up, his eyes are on me, with a hunger like I’ve never seen in him before. Not even last fall, not even at our most reckless and desperate, did he look at me the way he does now, like he wants me so much he’s sick, mad, with it.

They fight again that night. Yvette’s screaming wakes Cecelia, who still sleeps in the parlor. I creep down the stairs to the crib and bring her to bed with me. She falls back into a contented slumber, and I stare at her in the moonlight, this little girl who feels like mine though she is not, listening to the sound of things being thrown in the room below. “That’s enough,” Henri finally says. The front door slams, but things continue to be thrown.

* * *

The next night, when it starts all over again, I go downstairs to get Cecelia before she wakes. I hear Yvette’s words clearly this time. She tells him she wants me to leave, and that she doesn’t want me around the baby. Whore, she says of me when all her other words get her nowhere. She’s a whore and a witch and you look at her as if she just made the sun rise.

I carry Cecelia upstairs, and wonder if it’s truly time for me to go. I’m the thing making Henri’s life harder right now, creating friction between Cecelia’s parents. How could it possibly be a good thing?