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March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.
It was new then, but it is broken in now, shows its wear in all the ways she can’t. It reminds her of Dorian Gray, time reflected in cowhide instead of human skin.
and there will be a moment, as brief as a yawn, when she won’t know where she is, and her heart will quicken—first with fear, and then with something else. Something she does not have the words for yet.
But she prays the way her father turns loaves of bread upright, the way her mother licks her thumb to collect stray flakes of salt. As a matter of habit, more automatic than faith.
Adeline was going to be a tree, and instead, people have come brandishing an ax.
“You are so beautiful, and kind, and fun.” “But?” she pressed, sensing the turn. “I’m gay.”
They were nothing like the beasts of her imagination. So much grander, and so much less, their majesty diminished by the dimensions of their cells. Addie went a dozen times to see them, studied their mournful gazes, looking past the visitors to the gap in the tent, the single sliver of freedom.)
diffiscult?”
Addie takes a deep breath, trying to steady her nerves. And then, because she has decided to tell the truth, that’s what she does. “My name is Addie LaRue. I was born in Villon in the year 1691, my parents were Jean and Marthe, and we lived in a stone house just beyond an old yew tree .
“I believe you,” he says again. Three small words, as rare as I remember you, and it should be enough—but it’s not. Nothing makes sense, not Henry, not this; it hasn’t since the start and she’s been too afraid to ask, to know, as if knowing would bring the whole dream crashing down, but she can see the cracks in his shoulders, can feel them in her chest.
She sinks into the snow, lets it swallow the edges of her sight, until there is nothing but a frame around the open sky, the night cold and clear and full of stars. And she is ten again, stretched in the tall grass behind her father’s workshop, dreaming she is anywhere but home.
They teach you growing up that you are only one thing at a time—angry, lonely, content—but he’s never found that to be true. He is a dozen things at once. He is lost and scared and grateful, he is sorry and happy and afraid. But he is not alone.
