Addie pulls back as if struck. Suddenly the pub is too loud, too full, and she can’t stand there, can’t stand still, so she turns, and storms out.
The moment the night air hits her, she feels ill.
The world rocks, re-steadies … and somewhere between one step and the next, the anger evaporates, and she just feels tired, and sad.
She doesn’t understand how the night went sideways.
Doesn’t understand the sudden weight on her chest until she realizes what it is—fear. Fear that she’s messed up, thrown away the one thing she’s always wanted. Fear that it was that fragile, that it came apart so easily.
But then she hears footsteps, feels Henry coming up beside her.
He doesn’t say anything, only walks, half a step behind, and this is a new kind of silence. The silent aftermath of storms, the damage not yet tallied.
Addie swipes a tear from her cheek. “Did I ruin it?”
“Ruin what?” he asks.
“Us.”
“Addie.” He grabs her shoulder. She turns, expecting to see his face streaked with anger, but it’s steady, smooth. “It was just a fight. It’s not the end of the world. It’s certainly not the end of us.”
Three hundred years she’s dreamed of this.
She always thought it would be easy.
The opposite of Luc.
“I don’t know how to be with someone,” she whispers. “I don’t know how to be a normal person.”
His mouth quirks into a crooked grin. “You’re incredible, and strong, and stubborn, and brilliant. But I think it’s safe to say you’re never going to be normal.”
They walk, arm in arm, through the cool night air.
“Did you go back to Paris?” asks Henry.
It is an olive branch, a bridge built, and she is grateful for it.
“Eventually,” she says.
It had taken far longer to get back there, without Luc’s help, or her naïve drive to reach the city, and she’s embarrassed to say she did not hurry back. That even if Luc meant to abandon her, stranding her there in Florence, in doing so he broke a kind of seal. In yet another, maddening way, he forced her free.
Until that moment, Addie had never conceived of leaving France. It’s absurd to think of now, but the world felt so much smaller then. And then, suddenly, it was not.
Perhaps he meant to cast her into chaos.
Perhaps he thought she was getting too comfortable, growing too stubborn.
Perhaps he wanted her to call for him again. To beg him to come back.
Perhaps perhaps perhaps—but she will never know.
VII
Venice, Italy
July 29, 1806
Addie wakes to sunlight and silk sheets.
Her limbs feel leaden, her head full of muslin. The kind of heaviness that comes with too much sun, and too much sleep.
It is ungodly hot in Venice, hotter than it ever was in Paris.
The window is open, but neither the faint breeze nor the silk bedding are enough to dissipate the stifling heat. It is only morning, and sweat already beads on her bare skin. She is dreading the thought of midday as she drags herself awake, and sees Matteo perched at the foot of the bed.
He is just as beautiful in daylight, sun-kissed and strong, but she is struck less by his lovely features, and more by the strange calm of the moment.
Mornings are usually muddled with apologies, confusion, the aftermath of forgetting. They are sometimes painful, and always awkward.
But Matteo seems utterly unfazed.
He doesn’t remember her, of course, that much is obvious—but her presence there, this stranger in his bed, seems neither to startle nor to bother him. His attention is focused solely on the sketchpad balanced on his knee, the charcoal skating gracefully across the paper. It is only when his gaze flicks up to her, and then down again, that she realizes he is drawing her.
She makes no move to cover herself, to reach for the slip cast off on the chair, or the thin robe at the foot of the bed. Addie hasn’t been shy about her body in a long time. Indeed, she has come to enjoy being admired. Perhaps it is the natural abandon that comes with time, or perhaps it is the constancy of her shape, or perhaps it is the liberation that comes with knowing her spectators won’t remember.
There is a freedom, after all, in being forgotten.
And yet, Matteo is still drawing, the motions swift and easy.
“What are you doing?” she asks gently, and he tears his gaze from the parchment.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “The way you looked. I had to capture it.”
Addie frowns, begins to rise, but he lets out a stifled sound and says, “Not yet,” and it takes all her strength to stay there, on the bed, hands tangled in the sheets until he sighs and sets the work aside, eyes glazed with the afterglow unique to artists.
“Can I see?” she asks in the melodic Italian she has learned.
“It is not finished,” he says, even as he offers her the pad.
Addie stares at the drawing. The marks are easy, imprecise, a quick study by a talented hand. Her face is barely drawn, almost abstract in the gestures of light and shadow.
It is her—and it is not her.
An image, distorted by the filter of someone else’s style. But she can see herself in it. From the curve of her cheek to the shape of her shoulders, the sleep-mussed hair and the charcoal dots scattered across her face. Seven freckles charted out like stars.
She brushes the charcoal toward the bottom edge of the page, where her limbs dissolve into the linens of the bed, feels it smudge against her skin.
But when she lifts her hand away, her thumb is stained, and the line is clean. She has not left a mark. And yet, she has. She has impressed herself upon Matteo, and he has impressed her upon the page.
“Do you like it?” he asks.
“Yes,” she murmurs, resisting the urge to tear the drawing from the pad, to take it with her. Every inch of her wants to have it, to keep it, to stare at the image like Narcissus in the pond. But if she takes it now, then it will find a way to disappear, or it will belong to her, and her alone, and then it will be as good as lost, forgotten.
If Matteo keeps the picture, he will forget the source, but not the sketch itself. Perhaps he will turn to it when she is gone, and wonder at the woman sprawled across his sheets, and even if he thinks it the product of some drunken revel, some fever dream, her image will still be there, charcoal on parchment, a palimpsest beneath a finished work.
It will be real, and so will she.
So Addie studies the drawing, grateful for the prism of her memory, and hands it back to her artist. She rises, reaching for her clothes.
“Did we have a good time?” Matteo asks. “I confess, I cannot remember.”
“Neither can I,” she lies.
“Well then,” he says with a rakish grin. “It must have been a very good time.”
He kisses her bare shoulder, and her pulse flutters, body warming with the memory of the night before. She is a stranger to him now, but Matteo has the easy passion of an artist enamored with his newest subject. It would be simple enough to stay, to start again, enjoy his company another day—but her thoughts are still on the drawing, the meaning of those lines, the weight of them.
“I must go,” she says, leaning in to kiss him one last time. “Try to remember me.”
He laughs, the sound breezy and light as he pulls her close, leaves ghosts of charcoal fingers on her skin. “How could I possibly forget?”
That night, the sunset turns the canals to gold.
Addie stands on a bridge over the water, and rubs at the charcoal still on her thumb, and thinks of the drawing, an artist’s rendition, like an echo of the truth, thinks of Luc’s own words so long ago, when he cast her from Geoffrin’s salon.