ring behind her.
“I don’t mean in that normal, time flies way,” Henry’s saying. “I mean feeling like its surging by so fast, and you try to reach out and grab it, you try to hold on, but it just keeps rushing away. And every second, there’s a little less time, and a little less air, and sometimes when I’m sitting still, I start to think about it, and when I think about it, I can’t breathe. I have to get up. I have to move.”
He has his arms wrapped around himself, fingers digging into his ribs.
It’s been a long time since Addie felt that kind of urgency, but she remembers it well, remembers the fear, so heavy she thought it might crush her.
Blink and half your life is gone.
I do not want to die as I’ve lived.
Born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.
Addie reaches out and grabs his arm. “Come on,” she says, pulling him down the street. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” he asks, and her hand drops to his, and holds on tight.
“To find you something new.”
Paris, France
July 29, 1724
IV
Remy Laurent is laughter bottled into skin. It spills out of him at every turn.
As they walk together through Montmartre, he tips the brow of Addie’s hat, plucks at her collar, slings his arm around her shoulders, and inclines his head, as if to whisper some salacious secret. Remy delights in being part of her charade, and she delights in having someone to share it with.
“Thomas, you fool,” he jeers loudly when they pass a huddle of men.
“Thomas, you scoundrel,” he calls out as they pass a pair of women—girls really, though wrapped in rouge and tattered lace—at the mouth of an alley. They, too, take up the call.
“Thomas,” they echo, teasing and sweet, “come be our scoundrel, Thomas. Thomas, come have some fun.”
They climb the vaulting steps of the Sacré Coeur, are nearly to the top when Remy stops and spreads his coat on the steps, gesturing for her to sit.
They divide the food between them, and as they eat, she studies her strange companion.
Remy is Luc’s opposite, in every way. His hair is a crown of burnished gold, his eyes a summer blue, but more than that, it’s in his manner: his easy smile, his open laugh, the vibrant energy of youth. If one is the thrilling darkness, the other is midday radiance, and if the boy is not quite as handsome, well, that is only because he is human.
He is real.
Remy sees her staring, and laughs. “Are you making a study of me, for your art? I must say, you have mastered the posture and the manners of a Paris youth.”
She looks down, realizes she is sitting with one knee drawn up, her arm hooked lazily around her leg.
“But,” adds Remy, “I fear you are far too pretty, even in the dark.”
He has moved closer, his hand finding hers.
“What is your real name?” he asks, and how she wishes she could tell him. She tries, she tries—thinking maybe just this once, the sounds will make it over her tongue. But her voice catches after the A, so instead she changes course, and says, “Anna.”
“Anna,” Remy echoes, tucking a stray lock behind her ear. “It suits you.”
She will use a hundred names over the years, and countless times, she will hear those words, until she begins to wonder at the importance of a name at all. The very idea will begin to lose its meaning, the way a word does when said too many times, breaking down into useless sounds and syllables. She will use the tired phrase as proof that a name does not really matter—even as she longs to say and hear her own.
“Tell me, Anna,” says Remy, now. “Who are you?”
And so she tells him. Or at least, she tries—spills out the whole strange and winding journey, and then, when it does not even reach his ears, she starts again, and tells him another version of the truth, one that skirts the edges of her story, smoothing the rough corners into something more human.
Anna’s story is a pale shadow of Adeline’s.
A girl running away from a woman’s life. She leaves behind everything she has ever known, and escapes to the city, disowned, alone, but free.
“Unbelievable,” he says. “You simply left?”
“I had to,” she says, and it is not a lie. “Admit it, you think me mad.”
“Indeed,” says Remy with a playful grin. “The maddest. And the most incredible. What courage!”
“It did not feel like courage,” Addie