someone,” she whispers. “I don’t know how to be a normal person.”
His mouth quirks into a crooked grin. “You’re incredible, and strong, and stubborn, and brilliant. But I think it’s safe to say you’re never going to be normal.”
They walk, arm in arm, through the cool night air.
“Did you go back to Paris?” asks Henry.
It is an olive branch, a bridge built, and she is grateful for it.
“Eventually,” she says.
It had taken far longer to get back there, without Luc’s help, or her naïve drive to reach the city, and she’s embarrassed to say she did not hurry back. That even if Luc meant to abandon her, stranding her there in Florence, in doing so he broke a kind of seal. In yet another, maddening way, he forced her free.
Until that moment, Addie had never conceived of leaving France. It’s absurd to think of now, but the world felt so much smaller then. And then, suddenly, it was not.
Perhaps he meant to cast her into chaos.
Perhaps he thought she was getting too comfortable, growing too stubborn.
Perhaps he wanted her to call for him again. To beg him to come back.
Perhaps perhaps perhaps—but she will never know.
Venice, Italy
July 29, 1806
VII
Addie wakes to sunlight and silk sheets.
Her limbs feel leaden, her head full of muslin. The kind of heaviness that comes with too much sun, and too much sleep.
It is ungodly hot in Venice, hotter than it ever was in Paris.
The window is open, but neither the faint breeze nor the silk bedding are enough to dissipate the stifling heat. It is only morning, and sweat already beads on her bare skin. She is dreading the thought of midday as she drags herself awake, and sees Matteo perched at the foot of the bed.
He is just as beautiful in daylight, sun-kissed and strong, but she is struck less by his lovely features, and more by the strange calm of the moment.
Mornings are usually muddled with apologies, confusion, the aftermath of forgetting. They are sometimes painful, and always awkward.
But Matteo seems utterly unfazed.
He doesn’t remember her, of course, that much is obvious—but her presence there, this stranger in his bed, seems neither to startle nor to bother him. His attention is focused solely on the sketchpad balanced on his knee, the charcoal skating gracefully across the paper. It is only when his gaze flicks up to her, and then down again, that she realizes he is drawing her.
She makes no move to cover herself, to reach for the slip cast off on the chair, or the thin robe at the foot of the bed. Addie hasn’t been shy about her body in a long time. Indeed, she has come to enjoy being admired. Perhaps it is the natural abandon that comes with time, or perhaps it is the constancy of her shape, or perhaps it is the liberation that comes with knowing her spectators won’t remember.
There is a freedom, after all, in being forgotten.
And yet, Matteo is still drawing, the motions swift and easy.
“What are you doing?” she asks gently, and he tears his gaze from the parchment.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “The way you looked. I had to capture it.”
Addie frowns, begins to rise, but he lets out a stifled sound and says, “Not yet,” and it takes all her strength to stay there, on the bed, hands tangled in the sheets until he sighs and sets the work aside, eyes glazed with the afterglow unique to artists.
“Can I see?” she asks in the melodic Italian she has learned.
“It is not finished,” he says, even as he offers her the pad.
Addie stares at the drawing. The marks are easy, imprecise, a quick study by a talented hand. Her face is barely drawn, almost abstract in the gestures of light and shadow.
It is her—and it is not her.
An image, distorted by the filter of someone else’s style. But she can see herself in it. From the curve of her cheek to the shape of her shoulders, the sleep-mussed hair and the charcoal dots scattered across her face. Seven freckles charted out like stars.
She brushes the charcoal toward the bottom edge of the page, where her limbs dissolve into the linens of the bed, feels it smudge against her skin.
But when she lifts her hand away, her thumb is stained, and the line is clean. She has not left a mark. And yet, she has. She has impressed herself upon Matteo, and he has impressed her upon the page.
“Do you like it?” he asks.
“Yes,” she