casting shadows over everything.
How easily he moves through the world, she thinks.
How hard he’s made it for her.
Luc considers the little cottage, the borrowed life. “My Adeline,” he says, “still longing to grow up and become Estele.”
“I am not yours,” she says, though by now the words have lost their venom.
“All the world, and you pass your time playing the part of a witch in the wild, a crone praying to old gods.”
“I did not pray to you. And yet you’re here.”
She takes him in, dressed in a wool coat and cashmere scarf, the collar high against his cheeks, and realizes this is the first she has seen Luc in winter. It suits him, as well as summer did. The fair skin of his cheeks gone marble white, the black curls the color of the moonless sky. Those green eyes, as cold and bright as stars. And the way he looks, standing before the fire, she wishes she could draw him. Even after all this time, her fingers itch for charcoal.
He runs a hand over the mantel.
“I saw an elephant, in Paris.”
Her words to him, so many years before. It is such a strange answer now, filled with unspoken things. I saw an elephant, and thought of you. I was in Paris, and you were not.
“And you thought of me,” she says.
It is a question. He does not answer. Instead, he looks around and says, “This is a pitiful way to usher out a year. We can do better. Come with me.”
And she is curious—she is always curious—but tonight, she shakes her head. “No.”
That proud chin lifts. Those dark brows draw together. “Why not?”
Addie shrugs. “Because I’m happy here. And I do not trust you to bring me back.”
His smile flickers, like firelight. And she expects that to be the end of that.
To turn and find him gone, stolen back into the dark.
But he’s still there, this shadow in her borrowed home.
He lowers himself into the second chair.
He conjures cups of wine from nothing, and they sit before the fire like friends, or at least, like foes at rest, and he tells her of Paris at the close of a decade—the turn of the century. Of the writers, blooming like flowers, of the art, and the music, and the beauty. He has always known how to tempt her. He says it is a golden age, a time of light.
“You would enjoy it,” he says.
“I’m sure I would.”
She will go, in the spring, and see the World’s Fair, witness the Eiffel Tower, the iron sculpture climbing toward the sky. She will walk through buildings made of glass, ephemeral installations, and everyone will talk of the old century and the new one, as if there is a line in the sand between present and past. As if it does not all exist together.
History is a thing designed in retrospect.
For now, she listens to him talk, and it is enough.
She does not remember drifting off, but when she wakes, it is early in the morning, and the cottage is empty, the fire little more than embers. A blanket has been cast over her shoulders, and beyond the window, the world is white again.
And Addie will wonder if he was ever there.
PART SIX
DO NOT PRETEND THAT THIS IS LOVE
Title: “Dream Girl”
Artist: Toby Marsh
Date: 2014
Medium: sheet music
Location: on loan from the Pershing family
Description: This piece of original sheet music, signed by singer/songwriter Toby Marsh, captures the beginnings of the song “Dream Girl” and was auctioned off as part of the Music Notes annual gala to fund public school arts programs in New York City. While some of the lyrics differ from the final song, the most famous lines—“I’m so afraid, afraid that I’ll forget/Her, even though I’ve only met her in my dreams”—are clearly legible in the center of the page.
Background: This is largely considered to be the song that launched Marsh’s career. The musician has only added to the mythology surrounding the subject by claiming the song came to him over the course of several dreams. “I would wake up with bars of music in my head,” he said in a 2016 interview with Paper Magazine. “I’d find lyrics scribbled on notepads and receipts, but I had no memory of writing them. It was like sleepwalking. Sleep-making. The whole thing was a dream.”
Marsh denies being under the influence of any drugs at the time.
Estimated Value: $15,000
Villon-sur-Sarthe
July 29, 1914
I
It is pouring in Villon.
The Sarthe swells against its banks, and the rain turns footpaths into muddy