and lean with a stark profile and long bare feet curled beneath her. She could have been the girl who went to Lille in 1915 . . . except for those maimed and terrible hands lying in her lap. It all came back to those hands. It had all started with those hands. I remembered how the gorge had risen in my throat when I’d first seen them, that night in London.
“Don’t you Yanks know how to knock?” Eve’s cigarette glowed at the tip as she raised it for a long drag.
I folded my arms. “The thing is,” I began, as though we were continuing a discussion already begun, “I don’t know what comes next.”
Eve finally looked at me. She raised her eyebrows.
“I had a plan, all broken down like a simple geometry problem. Find Rose if she was still alive, have my baby, learn to cope. I don’t have a plan, now. But I’m not ready to go home. I’m not ready to go back to my mother and start arguing all over again about how I’m going to live. I’m not ready to sit on a couch knitting booties.”
Above all, I wasn’t ready to lose this little trio that had molded itself around Eve and Finn and me in a dark blue car. Part of me had had enough pain for a lifetime, and that part wanted to pull up stakes and run home rather than take the risk that Finn would reject me tomorrow morning. But another part of me—small but increasingly demanding, just like the Rosebud—wanted to stick this out, whatever this was. I wasn’t sure exactly what had pulled the three of us together, or why it had turned out we were all chasing some variant of the same thing: legacies left by lost women in past wars. I didn’t have a destination anymore, or a goal at the end of this road, but we were headed somewhere and I wasn’t ready to abandon the journey.
“I know what I want, Eve. I want time to figure out what comes next.” I groped my way through this thicket as Eve sat giving me no clue if my words were sinking in. I looked at her hands, taking a deep breath. “And I want to hear the rest of your story.”
Eve exhaled smoke. I heard the honk of a horn outside, some late-night driver.
“You asked me at the café tonight if I had guts.” I heard my own heart pounding. “I don’t know if I do or not. At around my age you were racking up medals in a war zone; I haven’t done anything even remotely in your class. But I’ve got the guts not to go crawling home. I’ve got the guts to hear what happened to you, no matter how bad it was.” I sat down opposite those steady eyes that were afire with remembered pain and savage self-loathing. “Finish the story. Give me a reason to stay.”
“You want a reason?” She passed me her cigarettes. “Revenge.”
The pack was slippery in my hand. “Revenge for who?”
“For Lili’s arrest.” Eve’s voice in the dark was low, graveled, ferocious. “And for what happened to me, the night I was caught.”
And as dark wore on to dawn, Eve told me the rest of it.
CHAPTER 30
EVE
October 1915
It didn’t matter what she said or didn’t say. Whether Eve insulted René, answered him civilly, or refused to answer at all, he brought down the bust of Baudelaire in a sharp, precise movement and broke another finger joint. Even in the throes of agony, Eve could look down at her hands and count.
She had twenty-eight finger joints in total.
René had so far gone through nine of them.
“I am going to give you to the Germans.” His metallic voice was level, but she could hear the emotions running taut below the surface. “First, however, you are going to talk to me. You are going to tell me everything I want to know.”
He sat opposite, one finger tapping the dome of Baudelaire’s head. The once-pristine marble was now flecked with blood. He’d broken her first few joints without skill, clumsy at it, flinching at the noise of shattering bone. He was getting better at it now, though the blood still made his nostrils flare in distaste. You’re as new to this torture business as I am, Eve thought. She had no idea how much time might have passed. Time had turned elastic, molding itself around the pulse of her agony. The fire flickered,