Page 76 of Across Eternity

He’s out of the truck and blocking my path before I can reach the door. “Enough evasions!” he shouts, gripping my arm. “Talk to me! Tell me what this is!”

A choked laugh escapes my throat. After everything we’ve been through, after fighting so hard to get back to him and so much time spent hiding what I am, he’s going to force me to ruin it.

“Let me ask you something,” I say, brushing angry tears away with my free hand. “Those people who held us captive, who killed your mother—what if I told you I was like them? What if I told you I was one of them?”

He shakes his head. “Why are you asking me this? You’re neither of those things!”

“I’m both of those things,” I reply. “The man in charge was my grandfather. The woman helping him was my aunt.”

There is horror on his face. I’d held out the tiniest shred of hope that he might look past it, might be able to forgive me. Now I know, looking at him, how naïve that was.

His hand releases me. I turn and walk into the house before he sees me cry.

* * *

By the time I emerge from the room in clean clothes, Henri’s got Cecelia in his arms, and Lucien and Charlotte are both sitting at the table with mugs of powdered milk. He looks at me for a long moment when I walk in. I can’t tell if it’s disgust or despair I see in his face. I suppose it doesn’t matter. Neither is good.

I throw my clothes into the fire and then, without saying a word, he hands me Cecelia and goes outside. A few minutes later he brings in the fir he cut down, which I’d forgotten about entirely. The children, still so ill, rouse a little at the sight, and we feed them dinner and help them string popcorn and cranberries for the tree, saying not a single unnecessary word to each other.

Perhaps I should be grateful for the silence, but I’m not. It feels like the lull before the storm. Does he hate me now? Does the revelation make me someone he won’t want around his daughter? I swallow hard at the thought. I have no idea what I’ll do if he asks me to leave.

Cecelia falls asleep in my arms. “I’ll put Lucien and Charlotte to bed,” he says, without looking at me.

I lay Cece in her crib and then go to the bathroom, shutting the door behind me. I wait for the tub to fill, my heart beating hard. What will I do if he tells me to leave? How will I keep all of them safe through the war if he won’t let me near them? If he were anyone else, threatening to separate me from him and the children, I’d be planning his death. But my Coron blood is nowhere to be found at the moment.

I wash my hair, listening for the sound of his heavy tread all the while. I never dreamed the day would come when I’d be more frightened by the sound of Henri’s footsteps than a stranger’s, but I am right now. He holds everything I care about in the palm of his hands.

When I finally hear him coming down the stairs, my forehead presses to my knees. Don’t cry, I tell myself. Use your head. But the part of me that was so sharp and certain earlier has abandoned me. I feel like the child I once was—small, alone, despised, defenseless.

The door opens. His eyes are cold and hard. “Is your bath done?” he asks.

He’s going to throw me out. It seemed possible before. Now it feels certain. Inside, I am scrambling, wondering how I can prevent this from happening. But the voice that comes out is my mother’s again. Cold and careless. “I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

“You’re done,” he snaps, striding across the room. He lifts me from the tub as if I’m a child, while I fight, slippery and desperate, pounding at his chest but getting nowhere. His grip tightens.

Tears run down my face. “You can’t make me leave!” I scream. “You can’t!”

His body jerks and stills, suddenly. “Leave?” he asks. He places me on my feet, holding onto me with one arm. “You think I want you to leave?”

“Why else are you pulling me out of the tub?” I cry, still tense and braced for a fight.

To my utter shock, he laughs. A small, slight sound, but a laugh nonetheless. He wraps a towel around me. “I’m tempted to question your sanity right now. How could you possibly think that?”

“I told you everything and you—” my anger gives way and my voice breaks – “you couldn’t even look at me afterward. You didn’t even speak to me all night. What else was I supposed to think?”

He pulls me to him with the towel, which he holds tight around me. “I didn’t speak tonight because sometimes, in anger, it’s best to say nothing. And I’m still angry. First, because you didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth about all this. Most of all, though, because I had to watch today as you were very nearly raped and then very nearly incinerated, and both were entirely your fault. You took unnecessary risks, and I’m furious at you for it, but that’s the opposite of wanting you to leave, isn’t it?”

“I did what I had to do to keep us all safe,” I reply. “But it’s as if you haven’t even heard what I said. You saw what I’m capable of today and you know who I’m descended from. How can you still want to be anywhere near me? How can you still care what happens to me?”

“You stabbed a man who was already dead,” he replies. “That hardly makes you Hitler.”

I stare at his chest, no longer able to meet his eye. “I’ve killed before this. It was my aunt you found in the pit, wearing your mother’s necklace. I probably didn’t even have to kill her, but I wasn’t sure I’d have the strength to time travel home without her spark. I set the fire that killed all the guards. And I helped them. I started working in the kitchen, and I was the one who poisoned the other women. I didn’t know it was poison, but I knew something was wrong and I did it anyway.”

“And it’s the reason you’re here now,” he says. “So I’m glad you did it.”

He takes the towel and crouches, drying my legs, between my toes. As if I’m still something he treasures. Tears run down my face, watching him, and then he rises and wraps his arms around me.

“My mind works the way theirs did, Henri,” I whisper. “It’s cold and methodical, and killing made me feel...powerful.”