He is gravity.

He is three hundred years of history.

He is the only constant in her life, the only one who will always, always remember.

Luc is the man she dreamed of when she was young, and then the one she hated most, and the one she loved, and Addie missed him every night that he was gone from her, and he deserved none of her pain because it was his fault, it was his fault no one else remembered, it was his fault that she lost and lost and lost, and she does not say any of that because it will change nothing, and because there is still one thing she hasn’t lost. One piece of her story that she can save.

Henry.

So Addie makes her gambit.

She reaches across the table and takes Luc’s hand, tells him the truth.

“I missed you.”

His green eyes shimmer and shift at the words. He brushes the ring on her finger, traces the whorls in the wood.

“How many times did you almost put it on?” he asks. “How often did you think of me?” And she assumes he is baiting her—until his voice softens to a whisper, the faintest roll of thunder in the air between them. “Because I thought of you. Always.”

“You didn’t come.”

“You didn’t call.”

She looks down at their tangled hands. “Tell me, Luc,” she says. “Was any of it real?”

“What is real to you, Adeline? Since my love counts for nothing?”

“You are not capable of love.”

He scowls, his eyes flashing emerald. “Because I am not human? Because I do not wither and die?”

“No,” she says, drawing back her hand. “You are not capable of love because you cannot understand what it is to care for someone else more than yourself. If you loved me, you would have let me go by now.”

Luc flicks his fingers. “What nonsense,” he says. “It is because I love you that I won’t. Love is hungry. Love is selfish.”

“You are thinking of possession.”

He shrugs. “Are they so different? I have seen what humans do to things they love.”

“People are not things,” she says. “And you will never understand them.”

“I understand you, Adeline. I know you, better than anyone in this world.”

“Because you let me have no one else.” She takes a steadying breath. “I know you won’t spare me, Luc, and perhaps you are right, we do belong together. So if you love me, spare Henry Strauss. If you love me, let him go.”

His temper flashes through his face. “This is our night, Adeline. Do not ruin it with talk of someone else.”

“But you said—”

“Come,” he says, pushing back from the table. “This place no longer suits my taste.”

The server has just set a pear tart on the table, but it turns to ash as Luc speaks, and Addie marvels, the way she always has, at the moodiness of gods.

“Luc,” she starts, but he is already on his feet, casting the napkin off onto the ruined food.

New Orleans, Louisiana

July 29, 1970

XII

“I love you.”

They are in New Orleans when he says it, dining in a hidden bar in the French Quarter, one of his many installations.

Addie shakes her head, amazed the words do not turn to ash in his mouth. “Do not pretend that this is love.”

Annoyance flashes across Luc’s face. “What is love, then? Tell me. Tell me your heart doesn’t flutter when you hear my voice. That it doesn’t ache when you hear your name on my lips.”

“It’s my own name I ache for, not your lips.”

The edge of his mouth curls up, his eyes now emerald. A brightness born of pleasure. “Once, perhaps,” he says. “But now it’s more.”

She is afraid that he is right.

And then, he sets a box before her.

It is simple, and black, and if Addie were to reach for it, it would be small enough to fit within her palm.

But she doesn’t, not at first.

“What is it?” she asks.

“A gift.”

Still she does not take it.

“Honestly, Adeline,” he says, sweeping the box from the table. “It will not bite.”

He opens it, and sets it back before her.

Inside, there is a simple brass key, and when she asks him where it leads, he says, “Home.”

Addie stiffens.

She has not had a home, not since Villon. Has never, in fact, had a place of her own, and she is almost grateful, before she remembers, of course, that he is the reason why.

“Do not mock me, Luc.”

“I am not mocking you,” he says.

He takes her hand and leads her through the Quarter, to a place at the end of Bourbon Street, a yellow house with a balcony, and windows as tall as doors. She slides the key into the lock, and listens to the heavy sound of the turn, and realizes, if it belonged to Luc instead of her, the door would simply open. And suddenly, the brass key feels real and solid in her hand, a treasured thing.

The door swings open onto a house with high ceilings, and wooden floors, with furniture, and closets, and spaces to be filled. She steps out onto the balcony, the layered sounds of the Quarter rising to meet her on the humid air. Jazz spills through the streets, crashing, overlapping, a chaotic melody, changing and alive.

“It is yours,” says Luc, “a home,” and the old warning sounds, deep in the marrow of her bones.

But these days, it is a shrinking beacon, a lighthouse viewed too far from port.

He pulls her back against him, and Addie notices again the perfect way they fit together.

As if he was made for her.

Which, of course, he was. This body, this face, these features, made to make her feel at ease.

“Let’s go out,” he says.

Addie wants to stay in, to christen the house, but he says there will be time, there will always be time. And for once, she doesn’t dread the idea of forever. For once, the days and nights don’t drag, but race ahead.

She knows that, whatever this is, it will not last.

It cannot last.

Nothing ever does.

But in the moment, she is happy.

They make their way through the Quarter, arm in arm, and Luc lights a cigarette, and when she tells him it’s bad for his health, he lets out a breathy, noiseless laugh, smoke pouring between his lips.

Her steps slow before a shop window.

The store is closed, of course, but even through the darkened glass, she can see the leather jacket, black with silver buckles, draped over a mannequin.

Luc’s reflection shimmers behind her as he follows her gaze.

“It is summer,” he says.

“It won’t always be.”

Luc smooths his hands over her shoulders and she feels the soft leather settling against her skin, the mannequin in the window now bare, and tries not to think of all the years she went without, forced to suffer through the cold, of all the times she had to hide, and fight, and steal. She tries not to think of them, but she does.

They are halfway back to the yellow house when Luc peels away.

“I have work to do,” he says. “Go on home.”

Home—the word rattles through her chest as he walks away.

But she does not go.

She watches Luc round the corner, and cross the street, and then she lingers in the shadow as he approaches a shop with a luminescent palm painted on the door.