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So don’t tell me how hard and sad it was for you here on the farm for a few months before you forgot me. Because I never forgot you. Not for a single day.”
“I gave you a lot of things,” I snap. “And now I’m taking every one of them back, and I’m giving them to someone else. Don’t ever use my name again. You didn’t deserve it after all.”
Even the best foundations have some dirt mixed in. That’s what makes them harden into something solid and unshakeable.
I was sure of him back then, yet a piece of me still wondered if he wouldn’t be better off and happier with some normal girl he could count on. But now I know a part of him belongs to me, craves me, in a way that wouldn’t be satisfied by someone else.
“I know you. Killing might make you feel powerful, but it’s not your driving force, and even if it were, God help me, but I’d love you all the same. If you are soft and sweet and need protection, I will love you. And if you are a weapon capable of destroying people in ways I haven’t even dreamed of, I will love that version of you as well. Whatever it is you are, I want you and I wouldn’t change it.”
I feel split open, mentally and physically. He knows the ugliest things in my soul and he loves me in spite of them. It is more than I could have hoped for, and it changes something between us. Being with him tonight is more than love or lust. For the first time ever, it feels holy.
“I can’t imagine a life without you, little thief,” he says, reading into my words and my sudden melancholy. “I refuse to believe that’s what’s in store for us.”
“I never dreamed that in the middle of a war, my life could be so perfect,” he says.
“I love you,” he says. “Wherever the other side is, I’ll be waiting for you there.”
I fight it for only a moment. It’s what Henri wanted. It’s what I already knew I had to do. I press my lips to Henri’s, one last time. And then I’m gone.
Like Luna Reilly, the time traveler who tried to fight off Coron in 1918 and died for it. My hands grip the steering wheel. I want to tell myself it isn’t possible. But as I look at the two of them there, my daughter and this little boy, so spellbound by each other, I know what I’m seeing. Two of the first families in my daughter, and—I am guessing—the other two in him. Four pieces of the puzzle, in the same place at last.
We all, in the end, have to give up the things we love, and I am no exception. Even so, I would not change a thing.
“I came back to go on to the next place with you,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “But even if there isn’t one, it’s enough, the time we had. You and our family—they were worth all of it.”
