* * *
The week before Christmas, the children are all struck down with some mysterious ailment that involves a sore throat and fatigue. It may be strep throat, but it lingers and all three of them have flushed cheeks and glassy eyes that don’t seem to improve. I call Dr. Nadeau, asking if I can bring Cecelia in.
“I cannot see you,” he replies. “Don’t call my home again.”
Coward, I think, fury bleeding from my pores. He would let an infant he personally delivered die simply because she’s a quarter Jewish. And yet I can’t say a word to him about it because, like the rest of this town, he holds us in the palm of his hand. Eventually, he, or someone else, will suggest to the Germans that they look more closely at us than they have been.
“He refused?” asks Henri, his voice quiet but livid as he walks in behind me. I nod, so angry that I don’t dare speak.
“When he stands before God,” he hisses, “he will regret the decisions he made during this war.”
Not soon enough, I think. It would be so easy to make Nadeau pay for this now. And why shouldn’t I? The man doesn’t deserve the comfortable life he has, and he’ll clearly never be of use to us again.
Henri is watching my face. “What are you not telling me?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I lie.
He grabs his coat. “You know what I miss?” he asks softly, heading for the door. “The days when I was certain you were telling me the truth.”
What he said bothers me, and the tension between us that lingers afterward, even more so. It’s as if a part of him has closed off to me. And yet, I suppose, he feels as if a part of me has closed to him as well. It’s there when we go to sleep at night, and the next day, even though nothing seems to have changed.
It’s just the stress, I tell myself. It’s just that the children are sick. But I’m not sure it’s true, and when he leaves the next day to get a Christmas tree, hoping to buoy everyone’s spirits, my stomach sinks as I watch him walk away. I don’t want to lose him to the war, but I don’t want to lose him to me either, to this piece of me I’d rather he not know.
When Cecelia and Lucien go down for a nap, I pull my coat on and cross the yard to feed the single chicken now in the coop. I’ve just reached for the feed when I hear the low purr of a vehicle approaching and freeze, fear flooding my system.
Henri is gone. The gun is inside, on the high shelf. I could time travel to warn us, but what if something goes wrong and by the time I fix things, one of them is dead?
I take a single step out of the coop just as the jeep pulls up to the front door. Three German soldiers, in crisp new uniforms, medals gleaming. Their eyes lock on me, and I panic. I want to race inside for the gun, but I would be leading them straight to my family.
I need to get them out of here before Henri returns. Alerting them to his presence is as good as signing his death warrant.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” says the one who climbs from the back of the car. He’s older than the others, clearly in charge. “You’re alone here on this farm?”
“No, my daughter is inside sleeping,” I tell them. “But she’s quite ill.”
“Perhaps a visit from the doctor is required,” he says. I glance at him, wondering if he’s toying with me, if he’s already aware the doctor won’t come. My anger begins to coalesce, sharpen.
Even if I were able to get the gun, I could only kill two before the third killed me. So, whatever I do, I can’t let them into the house.
“Perhaps,” I reply. “Is there something I can help you with?”
He looks at me as if it’s an invitation, his eyes roaming from my mouth to my chest to my legs, capping it all off with a small smirk. I grow colder inside, watching it. He’ll die first.
“We are surveying the properties here,” he says. “How many rooms have you?”
“Three rooms,” I reply crisply. “All taken, I’m afraid.”
He laughs. “My math skills are failing me, madame. Explain to me how a child and a woman require three rooms?”
“My sister-in-law will return soon from Paris. The third room is hers.”
He raises a brow and begins to approach. “In these difficult times, I’m sure two women and a child could share a room.” He circles me. “Or my men would be happy to share with you if you’d rather.” His baton lowers, slides just beneath the hem of my skirt. It reminds me of Gustave, and my hands begin to shake with fear and rage at once. That coldness inside me grows—the part that hates them for making me scared. I picture how they will die when this is over, the same way I used to picture the guards’ deaths. It makes me feel powerful, except attacking them could bring more problems than it solves, and the driver is just a boy, unable to meet my eye. Nearly as much a victim here as me.
The commander’s baton goes to my palm, pushing my right hand in the air. “No ring, I see, but you claim to have a daughter. Are you married?”
The ring is still packed, waiting for the trip it appears we will never take. The soldiers behind him shift uncomfortably. Obviously, they’ve dealt with him before. They’re well aware that no answer I can provide will satisfy him.
“Yes,” I reply. “I lost the ring.”
“Let’s go inside and have a look around, madame,” he says with a smirk. “Perhaps together we’ll find it.”
I brace myself, ready to spring for the door if necessary. “No.”
“No?” he repeats. His hand flies out, striking the side of my head, and then he pushes me to the ground. “Do you really think you can just tell me no?”
He plants one boot on my chest and shouts something in German to the others that makes them both freeze in place. It’s not until he withdraws his gun that the youngest comes forward, with absolute dread on his face, and drops to his knees between my legs, pushing my skirt around my waist. With eyes shut, he whispers something in German that sounds like an apology. He is a child following orders. His pants fall to my bare thighs, and then two things happen so close together it’s hard for me to determine which is first: the blast of a gun, and the spray of something solid and damp across my face. The soldier’s eyes go wide and he falls on me—his eyes now sightless—as the gun blasts again and again.
Suddenly, Henri is there, pulling the soldier off me, his eyes as wide and shocked as my own. The three Germans lie dead on the ground around me. “Are you alright?”
The rage is still so strong inside me I shake with it. I nod, wrapping my arms around myself.
His hands go to the top of his head and he tugs at his hair. He’s furious, but not only with the soldiers. “You didn’t even jump!” he explodes. “You told me you’d leave if something went wrong and you didn’t move a muscle!”
I close my eyes and try to hold myself together. “I panicked,” I reply, grinding my jaw. “And I couldn’t just leave the children inside, undefended. I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to say that you won’t panic next time!” he shouts. “That you’ll use your head!”
My arms fold around me again, but when I feel the dampness of the blood on my sleeves I jerk them away. It’s smeared now, all over my coat. There’s a vicious piece of me that likes it. That likes that they’re all dead, even the innocent one.
Henri goes to the German soldiers on the ground and lifts one up by his hair. The man’s eyes are still open, his jacket so soaked with blood it appears to be black. He’s the one who was polite, initially. Just following orders. I can’t look at his face.
“Grab his knife,” he says. “If you’re going to survive this war, you’ve got to stop being so precious about death and the idea of harming anyone. He’d have raped you and killed all of us, given the chance, but you panicked and now you’re standing there, unable even to look at his corpse.”
I press my hands to my face. “You don’t understand,” I hiss. “Just leave this alone. I’ll be fine when the time comes.”
He drops the German and grabs the knife himself, pushing it into my hands. “Th
e time just came and you failed!” he cries. “Stop making promises you won’t keep. If you’ll be fine, then prove it. Show me how you’ll kill him the next time.”
The adrenaline and rage inside me gather to a head, then explode. I grab the knife from him and slice the soldier’s jugular vein. Blood pours from the wound and I feel absolutely nothing. I grip the knife harder and bury it in the soldier’s back, hearing the slight hiss of air as his lung punctures. I pull it out and send it whistling ten feet away, where it buries into the base of the commander’s neck.
Henri’s jaw hangs open.
“What just happened?” he asks.
“I did what you wanted,” I reply. My voice doesn’t sound like my own. “Put them in the jeep. I’ll be right back.”
I go inside and get the keys to the truck. When I return, he’s loaded all three bodies into the jeep and waits for me, still astonished, still wanting answers to questions I wish he wouldn’t ask. I’m made of the ugliest things, Henri. Please don’t make me say it aloud.
I push away my self-pity. I don’t deserve his forgiveness and there’s not time for it anyway. If this isn’t executed perfectly, it will blow up in our faces, and it needs to be done before the children wake. I throw him the keys to the truck. “Follow me,” I tell him, climbing into the jeep.
“What are you doing?” he demands. “If anyone sees you...”
“I can time travel away and the jeep will crash.” I don’t wait for him to continue questioning me but push down the clutch and take off, heading for an embankment about a mile down the road.
I’m terrified, my heart beating too fast, but that feeling is pushed down hard as the jeep picks up speed. Something cold and methodical comes over me—maybe it’s the Coron blood. Maybe it’s simply that a part of me thinks it might be easier to die right now than tell Henri the truth. Either way, it’s a relief to feel something other than fear. I drive toward the sharp turn at the top of the hill and focus hard on the embankment. The car slows as my feet disappear but has enough momentum to continue without me. I fade entirely just as the jeep tips over the side of the hill and land, naked, twenty feet away.
Henri’s brakes screech to a stop nearby. “Sarah!” he cries as the jeep rolls into the ravine and lands upside down at its base.
I ignore him, scrambling toward my clothes, which flew out of the jeep before it rolled over, thank God. I clutch them to my chest and reach into my coat pocket for the matches I placed there. The match is struck and thrown toward the brush near the jeep. There’s a risk that it will die out before it reaches the gas tank, but I’m hoping to give myself some time to get away. I run hard up the hill, feeling the heat of the fire behind me. For a moment, I’m back in 1918, climbing a ladder in the pantry that may or may not lead to safety. Henri pulls me over the edge just as the jeep explodes, staring at me like I’m someone he doesn’t know, a demon who’s possessed the girl he thought he loved.
“What in God’s name were you thinking?” he shouts. “If that jeep had caught fire a moment sooner you’d have been blown to bits!”
Now that it’s over, my hands are shaking. I cut it close—ridiculously close. I lean over, certain I’m going to vomit but simply shake instead, cold sweat dripping from my forehead. “There will be an investigation into the deaths,” I reply, forcing myself to pull it together. I grab the dress and tug it over my head. “If they found bullet holes, they’d be looking for culprits. Now they might believe it was just a dangerous turn taken too fast.”
“I thought you were dead!” he shouts, grabbing my arm. “I watched the jeep go over the edge and I was certain—”
“Yell at me later,” I say, jerking away from his grip. “The smoke will attract eyes. We’ve got to get out of here.”
He follows me to the truck and drives home in silence, but once we arrive, he slams his hands against the steering wheel. “I want answers,” he says, his jaw tight. “I’ve known you for two years. You stay awake all night worrying when our daughter has a cough. You can’t watch me break a chicken’s neck, and gag at the sight of dead rabbits, but suddenly you know how to kill, and how to disguise a killing, with ruthless efficiency. How is that possible?”
Finally, I feel something. Despair. Because the truth is vast and ugly and he’s making it unavoidable.
“I don’t have time for this,” I reply. I channel my mother, using that haughty, imperious tone she intimidated me with a thousand times as a child. “The children are going to wake soon and I’m covered in blood.”
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.”
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