She is in his bed, his broad hands playing out the melody on skin. Her face flares hot at the memory as he sings.
“And I’m so afraid, afraid that I’ll forget her, even though I’ve only met her in my dreams.”
She never gave him the words, but he found them anyway.
His voice is clearer, stronger, his tone more confident. He just needed the right song. Something to make the crowd lean in and listen.
Addie squeezes her eyes shut, the past and present tangling together in her head.
All those nights at the Alloway, watching him play.
All the times he found her at the bar, and smiled.
All those firsts that were not firsts for her.
The palimpsest bleeding up through the paper.
Toby looks up from the piano, and there’s no way he can see her in a place this big, but she is sure his eyes meet hers, and the room tilts a little, and she doesn’t know if it’s the beers she drank too fast or the vertigo of memory, but then the song ends, replaced by a warm wave of applause, and she is on her feet, moving toward the door.
“Addie, wait,” says Henry, but she can’t, even though she knows what it means to walk away, knows that Robbie and Bea will forget her, and she will have to start again, and so will Henry—but in that moment, she doesn’t care.
She cannot breathe.
The door swings open and the night rushes in, and Addie gasps, forcing air into her lungs.
And it should feel good to hear her music, it should feel right.
After all, she has gone to visit pieces of her art so many times.
But they were only pieces, stripped of context. Sculptured birds on marble plinths, and paintings behind ropes. Didactic boxes taped to whitewashed walls and glass boxes that keep the present from the past.
It is a different thing when the glass breaks.
It is her mother in the doorway, withered to bone.
It is Remy in the Paris salon.
It is Sam, inviting her to stay, every time.
It is Toby Marsh, playing their song.
The only way Addie knows how to keep going is to keep going forward. They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.
“Addie?” Henry is right behind her. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. She wipes the tears away and shakes her head because the story is too long, and too short. “I can’t go back in there, not now.”
Henry looks over his shoulder, and he must have seen the color drop from her face during the show because he says, “Do you know him? That Toby Marsh guy?”
She hasn’t told him that story—they haven’t gotten there yet.
“I did,” she says, which isn’t strictly true, because it makes it sound like something in the past, when the past is the one thing Addie’s not entitled to, and Henry must hear the lie buried in the words, because he frowns. He laces his hands behind his head.
“Do you still have feelings for him?”
And she wants to be honest, to say that of course she does. She never gets closure, never gets to say good-bye—no periods, or exclamations, just a lifetime of ellipses. Everyone else starts over, they get a blank page, but hers are full of text. People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it’s not a full fire, but Addie’s hands are full of candles. How is she supposed to set them down, or put them out? She has long run out of air.
But it is not love.
It is not love, and that is what he’s asking.
“No,” she says. “He just—it caught me off guard. I’m sorry.”
Henry asks if she wants to go home, and Addie doesn’t know if he means both of them, or only her, doesn’t want to find out, so she shakes her head, and they go back in, and the lights have changed, and the stage is empty, the house music filling the air until the main act, and Bea and Robbie are chatting, heads bent just the way they were when they walked in. And Addie does her best to smile as they reach the table.
“There you are!” says Robbie.
“Where did you run off to?” asks Bea, eyes flicking from Henry to her. “And who’s this?”
He slides his arm around her waist. “Guys, this is Addie.”
Robbie looks her up and down, but Bea only beams.
“Finally!” she says. “We’ve been dying to meet you…”
XIII
En Route to Berlin, Germany
July 29, 1872
The glasses rattle faintly on the table as the train rolls through the German countryside. Addie sits in the dining car, sipping her coffee and staring out the window, marveling at the speed with which the world goes past.
Humans are capable of such wondrous things. Of cruelty, and war, but also art and invention. She will think this again and again over the years, when bombs are dropped, and buildings felled, when terror consumes whole countries. But also when the first images are impressed on film, when planes rise into the air, when movies go from black-and-white to color.
She is amazed.
She will always be amazed.
Lost in her thoughts, she doesn’t hear the conductor until he is beside her, one hand coming to rest lightly on her shoulder.
“Fräulein,” he says, “your ticket, please.”
Addie smiles. “Of course.”
She looks down at the table, pretends to shuffle through her purse.
“I’m sorry,” she says, rising, “I must have left it in my room.”
It is not the first time they have done this dance, but it is the first time the porter has decided to follow her, trailing like a shadow as she makes her way toward a car she does not have, for a ticket that she never bought.
Addie quickens her pace, hoping to put a door between them, but it is no use, the conductor is with her every step, and so she slows, and stops before a door that leads to a room that is certainly not hers, hoping that at least it will be empty.
It is not.
As she reaches for the handle, it escapes, sliding open onto a dim compartment, an elegant man leaning in the doorway, black curls drawn like ink against his temples.
Relief rolls through her.
“Herr Wald,” says the conductor, straightening, as if the man in the door were a duke, and not the darkness.
Luc smiles. “There you are, Adeline,” he says in a voice as smooth and rich as summer honey. His green eyes slide from her to the conductor. “She has a way of running off, my wife. Now,” he says, a sly smile on his lips, “what’s brought you back to me?”
Addie manages a smile of her own, cloyingly sweet.
“My love,” she says. “I forgot my ticket.”
He chuckles, drawing a slip of paper from the pocket of his coat. Luc draws Addie close. “What a forgetful thing you are, my dear.”
She bristles, but holds her tongue, leans instead into the weight of him.
The conductor surveys the slip, and wishes them a pleasant night, and the moment he is gone she pulls away from Luc.
“My Adeline.” He clicks his tongue. “That is no way to treat a husband.”
“I am not yours,” she says. “And I did not need your help.”
“Of course not,” he answers dryly. “Come, let’s not quarrel in the hall.”
Luc draws her into the compartment, or at least, that is what she thinks he is doing, but instead of stepping into the familiar confines of the cabin, she finds only the darkness, vast and deep. Her heart catches on the missed step, the sudden drop, as the train falls away, the world falls away, and they are back in the nothing, the hollow space between, and she knows she will never fully know it, never be able to wrap her mind around the nature of the dark. Because she realizes now, what it is, this place.
It is him.
It is the truth of him, the vast and savage night, the darkness, full of promise, and violence, fear, and freedom.
And when the night shudders back into shape around them, they are no longer on the German train, but on a street, in the center of a city she does not yet know is Munich.
And she should be mad at the abduction, the sudden change in the direction of her night, but she cannot stifle the curiosity blossoming in the wake of her confusion. The sudden flush of something new. The thrill of adventure.
Her heart quickens, but she resolves not to let him see her marvel.
She suspects he does anyway.
There is a pleased glint in those eyes, a thread of darker green.
They are standing on the steps of a pillared opera house, her traveling clothes gone, replaced by a far finer dress, and Addie wonders if the gown is real, as far as anything is real, or simply the conjurings of smoke and shadow. Luc stands beside her, a gray scarf around his collar, green eyes dancing beneath the brim of a silk top hat.
The evening bustles with movement, men and women climbing the steps arm in arm to see the show. She learns that it is Wagner, it is Tristan und Isolde, though these things mean nothing to her yet. She does not know it is the height of his career. She does not know it has become his masterpiece. But she can taste the promise, like sugar in the air, as they pass through a lobby of marble columns and painted arches, and into a concert hall of velvet and gold.
Luc rests a hand on the small of her back, guiding her forward to the front of a balcony, a low box with a perfect view of the stage. Her heart quickens with excitement, before she remembers Florence.
Do not mistake this for kindness, he said. I simply want to be the one who breaks you.
But there is no mischief in his eyes as they take their seats. No cruel twist to his smile. Only the languid pleasure of a cat in the sun.
Two glasses arrive, brimming with Champagne, and he holds one out to her.
“Happy anniversary,” he says as the lights dim, and the curtain rises.
It begins with music.
The rising tension of a symphony, notes like waves: rolling through the hall, crashing against the walls. The inversion of a storm against a ship.
And then, the arrival of Tristan. Of Isolde.
Their voices larger than the stage.
She has heard musicals, of course, heard symphonies and plays, voices so pure they bring her to tears. But she has never heard anything like this.
The way they sing. The scope and scale of their emotions.
The desperate passion in their movements. The raw power of their joy, and pain.
She wants to bottle this feeling, to carry it with her through the dark.
It will be years before she hears a record of this symphony and turns the volume up until it hurts, surrounds herself with sound, though it will never be the same as this.
Once, Addie tears her gaze from the players on the stage, only to see that Luc is watching her instead of them. And there it is again, that peculiar shade of green. Not coy, or chiding, not cruel, but pleased.
She will realize later that this is the first night he does not ask for her surrender.
The first time he makes no mention of her soul.
But right now, she is thinking only of the music, the symphony, the story. She is drawn back to the stage by the anguish in a note. By the tangle of limbs in an embrace, by the look of lovers on the stage.
She leans forward, breathes the opera in until it aches inside her chest.
The curtain falls on the first act, and Addie is on her feet, ringing with applause.
Luc laughs, soft as silk, as she sinks back into her seat. “You are enjoying it.”
And she doesn’t lie, even to spite him. “It is wonderful.”
A smile plays across his face. “Can you guess which ones are mine?”
At first, she does not understand, and then, of course, she does.
Her spirits sink. “Are you here to claim them?” she asks, relieved when Luc shakes his head.
“No,” he says, “not tonight. But soon.”
Addie shakes her head. “I don’t understand. Why end their lives as they’re reaching their peak?”
He looks at her. “They made their deal. They knew the cost.”
“Why would anyone trade a lifetime of talent for a few years of glory?”
Luc’s smile darkens. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because vision weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades.” He leans close, twists a lock of her hair around one finger. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”
The words are a knife, cutting swift and deep.
Addie knocks his hand away, and turns her attention back to the stage as the opera resumes.