The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,189
off a foreign tongue.
She waits until the three of them have moved off to the till, and then, at last, she approaches the display. It is not just a table, but a full shelf, thirty copies of the book, faced out, the pattern repeating down the wall. The covers are simple, most of the space given over to the title, which is long and large enough to fill the jacket. It’s written in cursive, just like the notes in the journals by the bed, a more legible version of her words in Henry’s hand.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
She runs her fingers over the name, feels the embossed letters arc and curve beneath her touch, as though she had written them herself.
The shop girls are right. There is no author’s name. No photo on the back. No sign of Henry Strauss, beyond the simple, beautiful fact that the book is in her hands, the story real.
She peels back the cover, turns past the title to the dedication.
Three small words rest in the center of the page.
I remember you.
She closes her eyes, and sees him as he was that first day in the store, elbows leaning on the counter as he looked up, and frowned at her behind his glasses.
I remember you.
Sees him at Artifact, in the mirrors and then in the field of stars, sees his fingers tracing her name on the glass wall, and peering over a Polaroid, whispering across Grand Central and head bowed over the journal, black curls falling into his face. Sees him lying next to her in bed, in the grass upstate, on the beach, their fingers hooked like links in a chain.
Feels the warm circle of his arms as he pulled her back beneath the covers, the clean scent of him, the ease in his voice when she said, Don’t forget, and he said, Never.
She smiles, brushing away tears, as she sees him on the roof that final night.
Addie has said so many hellos, but that was the first and only time she got to say good-bye. That kiss, like a piece of long-awaited punctuation. Not the em dash of an interrupted line, or the ellipsis of a quiet escape, but a period, a closed parenthesis, an end.
An end.
That is the thing about living in the present, and only the present, it is a run-on sentence. And Henry was a perfect pause in the story. A chance to catch her breath. She does not know if it was love, or simply a reprieve. If contentment can compete with passion, if warmth will ever be as strong as heat.
But it was a gift.
Not a game, or a war, not a battle of wills.
Just a gift.
Time, and memory, like lovers in a fable.
She thumbs through the chapters of the book, her book, and marvels at the sight of her name on every page. Her life, waiting to be read. It is bigger than her now. Bigger than either of them, humans, or gods, or things without names. A story is an idea, wild as a weed, springing up wherever it is planted.
She begins to read, makes it as far her first winter in Paris when she feels the air change at her back.
Hears the name, like a kiss, at the nape of her neck.
“Adeline.”
And then Luc is there. His arms fold around her shoulders, and she leans back against his chest. They do fit together. They always have, though she wonders, even now, if it’s simply the nature of what he is, smoke expanding to fill whatever space it is given.
His eyes drop to the book in her hands. Her name splashed across the cover.
“How clever you are,” he says, murmuring the words into her skin. But he does not seem angry.
“They can have the story,” he says. “So long as I have you.”
She twists in his arms to look at him.
Luc is beautiful when he is gloating.
He shouldn’t be, of course. Arrogance is an unattractive trait, but Luc wears it with all the comfort of a tailored suit. He glows with the light of his own work. He is so used to being right. To being in control.
His eyes are a bright, triumphant green.
Three hundred years she’s had to learn the color of his moods. She knows them all by now, the meaning of every shade, knows his temper, wants, and thoughts, just by studying those eyes.
She marvels, that in the same amount of time, he never learned to read her own.