The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,85
on that perfect face.
His hand falls away, the weight of him vanishing like smoke, and Addie is left alone once more in the dark.
* * *
There is a point when the night breaks.
When the darkness finally begins to weaken, and lose its hold over the sky. It’s slow, so slow she doesn’t notice until the light is already creeping in, until the moon and stars have vanished, and the weight of Luc’s attention lifts from her shoulders.
Addie climbs the steps of the Sacré Coeur, sits at the top, with the church at her back and Paris sprawling at her feet, and watches the 29th of July become the 30th, watches the sun rise over the city.
She has almost forgotten the book she took from Remy’s floor.
She has clutched it so tight, her fingers ache. Now, in the watery morning light, she puzzles over the title, silently sounding out the words. La Place Royale. It is a novel, that new word, though she doesn’t yet know it. Addie peels back the cover, and tries to read the first page, manages only a line before the words crumble into letters, and the letters blur, and she has to resist the urge to cast the cursed book away, to fling it down the steps.
Instead, she closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath, and thinks of Remy, not his words, but the soft pleasure in his voice when he spoke of reading, the delight in his eyes, the joy, the hope.
It will be a grueling journey, full of starts and stops and myriad frustrations.
To decipher this first novel will take her almost a year—a year spent laboring over every line, trying to make sense of a sentence, then a page, then a chapter. And still, it will be a decade more before the act comes naturally, before the task itself dissolves, and she finds the hidden pleasure of the story.
It will take time, but time is the one thing Addie has plenty of.
So she opens her eyes, and starts again.
New York City
March 16, 2014
VII
Addie wakes to the smell of toast browning, the sizzle of butter hitting a hot skillet. The bed is empty beside her, the door almost closed, but she can hear Henry moving in the kitchen beneath the soft burble of talk radio. The room is cool, and the bed is warm, and she holds her breath and tries to hold the moment with it, the way she has a thousand times, clutching the past to the present, and warding off the future, the fall.
But today is different.
Because someone remembers.
She throws off the blankets, scavenges the bedroom floor, looking for her clothes, but there’s no sign of the rain-soaked jeans or shirt, just the familiar leather jacket draped over a chair. Addie finds a robe beneath and wraps it around her, buries her nose in the collar. It is worn and soft, smells like clean cotton and fabric softener and the faint hint of coconut shampoo, a smell she will come to know as his.
She pads barefoot into the kitchen as Henry pours coffee from a French press.
He looks up, and smiles. “Good morning.”
Two small words that move the world.
Not I’m sorry. Not I don’t remember. Not I must have been drunk.
Just good morning.
“I put your clothes in the dryer,” he says. “They should be done soon. Grab yourself a mug.”
Most people have a shelf of cups. Henry has a wall. They hang from hooks on a mounted rack, five across and seven down. Some of them are patterned and some of them are plain and no two are the same.
“I’m not sure you have enough mugs.”
Henry casts her a sidelong look. He has a way of almost smiling. It’s like light behind a curtain, the edge of the sun behind clouds, more a promise than an actual thing, but the warmth shines through.
“It was a thing, in my family,” he says. “No matter who came over for coffee, they could choose the one that spoke to them that day.”
His own cup sits on the counter, charcoal gray, the inside coated in something that looks like liquid silver. A storm cloud and its lining. Addie studies the wall, trying to make her choice. She reaches for a large porcelain cup with small blue leaves, weighs it in her palm before she notices another. She’s about to put it back when Henry stops her.
“I’m afraid all selections are final,” he says, scraping butter over toast. “You’ll have to try again tomorrow.”