The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.

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.

The women scorn her from their windows, the men try to buy her on the streets, and the devout, they try to save her soul, as if she hasn’t already sold it.

“I remember you.” Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.

And then Henry smiles. “Well, okay,” he says. “Goodnight, Addie.”

The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.

“Spring,” she says, “when everything is new.” “Fall,” he says, “when everything is fading.”

But Henry is different, he hears her, he remembers, and suddenly every word is full of weight, honesty such a heavy thing.

They’ve left his heart too open. Forgotten to close back up the armor of his chest. And now he feels … too much.

Blink, and you’re twenty-six, and you’re called into the dean’s office because he can tell that your heart’s not in it anymore, and he advises you to find another path, and he assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing.

Two years—and somewhere between a question and an answer, it fell apart.

Bea is the only one who hasn’t changed, the only one who doesn’t seem to treat him differently.

And even though he’s safe, both feet firmly on the ground, Henry feels himself begin to fall.

“I’m sorry you wasted so much time on her.” “It wasn’t a waste,” he says, even though it does kind of feel that way.

“Three hundred years,” she whispers. “And you can still find something new.”

Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?

There was pot, of course, but pot was something you were supposed to share with other people, not sneak away to smoke alone, and anyway, it always made him hungry and sad. Or really, sadder. It didn’t iron out any of the wrinkles in his brain, after too many hits just made them into spirals, thoughts turning in and in and in on themselves forever.

For years, she will lie awake and tell herself stories of the girl she’d been, in hopes of holding fast to every fleeting fragment, but it will have the opposite effect—the memories like talismans, too often touched; like saint’s coins, the etching worn down to silver plate and faint impressions.

“Yes, well, it was easier than telling you I was a three-hundred-and-twenty-three-year-old ghost whose only hobby is inspiring artists.”

“The vexing thing about time,” he says, “is that it’s never enough. Perhaps a decade too short, perhaps a moment. But a life always ends too soon.”

And when it’s time to go, they make their way to the subway, and sink onto the bench, sun-drunk and sleepy, as the train pulls away. Henry takes out a book, but Addie’s eyes are stinging, and she leans against him, savoring his sun-and-paper scent, and the seat is plastic and the air is stale, and she has never been so comfortable. She feels herself sinking into Henry, head lolling on his shoulder. And then he whispers three words into her hair. “I love you,” he says, and Addie wonders if this is love, this gentle thing. If it is meant to be this soft, this kind. The difference between heat, and warmth.

She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat.

And none of them are questions, but she knows he is asking, pleading with her to let it go, to stop fighting, stop trying to change their fates, and just be with him until the end.

And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”

If he holds his breath, he can keep the seconds from moving forward, pin the minutes between their tangled fingers.

This is the last gift she can give him, these moments he will never have. And this is the last gift he can give her, the listening.

It was messy. It was hard. It was wonderful, and strange, and frightening, and fragile—so fragile it hurt—and it was worth every single moment.

The details are simply fading, as all things do, glossing over by degrees, the mind loosening its hold on the past to make way for the future.