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But desire was not passion and passion was not love.
He’d been a heedless boy who had turned into a man full of rancor and discontent, sensing that life had betrayed him, stolen from him what he ought to have possessed. He had thought the missing piece was Valérie—and he had been right, but not in the manner he expected.
A sea roared inside her and made demands, but she waded it, she bobbed up, took a breath, and opened her eyes to the cold winter morning. Then she rose because the day was there, the world was there, and she wanted to be part of it.
This is one of the very greatest lines about heartbreak recovery I have ever read.
The man in the mirror was not him. It could not be him because that man looked like a fool, hunched over in pain, and years ago he had decided, in the quiet of a bare, cold room, that this could never, ever be him. That he was the great Hector Auvray, performer extraordinaire, and it was wonderful being that Hector Auvray who loved Valérie Véries because as long as he was that man, he was safe. There was certainty there.
“You have no idea, Nina, what it is like to love someone so much, it tears you apart, that you think you will die when you lose them. And after experiencing such awful pain, you never want to feel it again any more than a man wants another limb hacked off.” “I have some idea,” she whispered.
Each word she had spoken to him since they met, he thought, had been like kindling, until in wonder, he had to admit he was on fire,
he had also been drifting toward her since the beginning, magnetized, a compass that had spun wildly and then gently settled upon a true north. Not love at first sight, because those fancies were best left for books and songs, but she had extended her hand and invited him to follow her into a dance, and he had found after a few steps that though he had never danced it before, he did not want to stop.
He knew that in the years to come, even when they were old and gray and their spines were bent by the weight of time, he would remember her as she was in that moment, with a couple of stray yellow flowers in her hair, her lips parted. He stood still, holding the moment against his heart. Then she turned her head and smiled at him.
