The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.

When Adeline told the girl about her trip, Isabelle had only shrugged, and said, “I like it here.” As if you couldn’t like one place and want to see another.

She will not remember the stories themselves, but she will recall the way he tells them; the words feel smooth as river stones, and she wonders if he tells these stories when he is alone, if he carries on, talking to Maxime in this easy, gentle way. Wonders if he tells stories to the wood as he is working it. Or if they are just for her.

Her hand goes to it now and then, thumb running over the surface the way her mother’s runs over a rosary. She clings to it now, an anchor in the storm, as she perches on the back of the cart, and watches

she settles on a journal, parchment bound with waxy thread. It is the blankness of the paper that excites her, the idea that she might fill the space with anything she likes.

who says the greatest danger in change is letting the new replace the old.

“The old gods are everywhere,” she says. “They swim in the river, and grow in the field, and sing in the woods. They are in the sunlight on the wheat, and under the saplings in spring, and in the vines that grow up the side of that stone church. They gather at the edges of the day, at dawn, and at dusk.”

No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath

the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.

She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.

“A dreamer,” warns Estele. Still, it does not seem such a bad word. Until Adeline wakes up.

There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone. You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.

Her father had called it the secret in the wood. He knew how to reduce a thing, sliver by sliver, piece by piece, until he found its essence; knew, too, when he’d gone too far. One stroke too many, and the wood went from delicate to brittle in his hands. Addie has had three hundred years to practice her father’s art, to whittle herself down to a few essential truths, to learn the things she cannot do without.

And this is what she’s settled on: she can go without food (she will not wither). She can go without heat (the cold will not kill her). But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad. What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

She knows he is a widower who lives upstairs, knows the books belonged to his wife, Candace, knows that when she died, he packed up all her books and brought them down to sell, and it’s like letting her go in pieces. Selling off his grief.

He is a gruff old man, but Addie likes him. Sees the sadness in his anger, the guardedness of grief. Addie suspects he doesn’t really want the books to sell.

He wanys to hold onto his grief

Her fingers graze the wooden ring and she clenches her teeth at the feel of it. Like a nagging thought, impossible to shed.

greedy mortals who want too much, and then fail to understand what they’ve lost. Until the price is paid, and it’s too late to claim it back.

a second life at the cost of Adeline’s one and only.

She said no, and learned how much the word was worth.

Her dress is simple and light, but it might as well be made of mail for how it weighs on her.

This woman who taught her of wild dreams and willful gods, who filled Adeline’s head with thoughts of freedom, blew on the embers of hope and let her believe a life could be her own.

There is still time, Adeline tells herself, but it is fleeting, faster now with every breath.

A quiet heaviness fills her chest when the credits roll. For a while she was weightless, but now she returns to herself, sinking until her feet are back on the ground.

he looks at her as if he knows her, but the truth is simply that he wants to; attraction can look an awful lot like recognition in the wrong light.

The rise isn’t worth the fall.

belonged to the class of young men who dressed like their fathers, the charade of those too eager to grow old.

It is so much easier to share a secret than to keep one,

Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vécu. Already seen. Already known. Already lived.

“Are you hurt?” Yes, she thinks. Grievously. But she forces herself to shake her head and answer, “I will live.” She has no choice.

A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.

It is easier to be alone among so many people.

Palimpsest.

the idea of the past blotted out, written over by the present,

How foolish to think it would stay the same, when everything else has changed.

The darkness has granted her freedom from death, perhaps, but not from this. Not from suffering.

Addie takes the first step, and feels the ground give way, feels herself tip forward, but this time, she does not fall.

The Last Word. A used bookstore,

Her favorite kind of store, one that’s easy to get lost in.

What a luxury, to tell one’s story. To be read, remembered.

Seven small white dots stand out against the backdrop.

Henry would rather be a storykeeper than a storyteller.

Sure, she dreams of sleepy mornings over coffee, legs draped across a lap, inside jokes and easy laughter, but those comforts come with the knowing.

There can be no slow build, no quiet lust, intimacy fostered over days, weeks, months. Not for them. So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.

It’s quiet up here—not silent, that is a thing she’s yet to find in a city, a thing she is beginning to think lost amid the weeds of the old world—but as quiet as it gets in this part of Manhattan. And yet, it is not the same kind of quiet that stifled her at James’s place, not the empty, internal quiet of places too big for one. It is a living quiet, full of distant shouts and car horns and stereo bass reduced to an ambient static.

“These days, everyone’s looking down,” muses Sam. “It’s nice to see someone looking up.”

Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

Beauty in cracks

The evening is quiet, and she is alone, but for once it is not the same as being lonely.