The bookstore is about to close.
It gets dark early this time of year, and there’s snow in the forecast, which is rare for London. The various clerks bustle about, dismantling old displays and putting up new ones, trying to finish their work before the mist outside turns to frost.
She lingers nearby, thumb skating along the ring at her throat as a pair of teenage girls restock a wall in New Fiction.
“Have you read it yet?” asks one. “Yeah, this weekend,” says the other.
“I can’t believe the author didn’t put their name on it,” says the first. “Must be some kind of PR stunt.”
“I don’t know,” says the second. “I think it’s charming. Makes the whole thing feel real. Like it’s really Henry, telling her story.”
The first girl laughs. “You’re such a romantic.”
“Excuse me,” cuts in an older man. “Could I grab a copy of Addie LaRue?”
Her skin prickles. He says the name with so much ease. Sounds tripping 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.
Or perhaps he saw only what he expected: a woman’s anger, and her need, her fear and hope and lust, all the simpler, more transparent things.
But he never learned to read her cunning, or her cleverness, never learned to read the nuances of her actions, the subtle rhythms of her speech.
And as she looks at him, she thinks of all the things her eyes would say. That he has made a grand mistake.
That the devil is in the details, and he has overlooked a crucial one.
That semantics may seem small, but he taught her once that words were everything. And when she carved the terms of her new deal, when she traded her soul for herself, she did not say forever, but as long as you want me by your side.
And those are not the same at all.
If her eyes could speak, they would laugh.
They would say that he is a fickle god, and long before he loved her, he hated her, he drove her mad, and with her flawless memory, she became a student of his machinations, a scholar of his cruelty. She has had three hundred years to study, and she will make a masterpiece of his regret.
Perhaps it will take twenty years. Perhaps it will take a hundred.
But he is not capable of love, and she will prove it. She will ruin him. Ruin his idea of them.
She will break his heart, and he will come to hate her once again. She will drive him mad, drive him away.
And then, he will cast her off. And she will finally be free.
Addie dreams of telling Luc these things, just to see the shade it turns his eyes, the green of being bested. The green of forfeit, and of losing.
But if he’s taught her anything, it’s patience.
So Addie says nothing of the new game, the new rules, the new battle that’s begun.
She only smiles, and sets the book back on its shelf. And follows him out into the dark.
