I nodded. He picked up my umbrella and, holding it over our heads, wrapped an arm around my shoulders and held me close the whole way.
As we stepped into the dappled light of the foyer, I faced Vincent and gasped. He was gaunt. He had lost weight, and his hollow eyes had dark circles beneath them. I hadn’t noticed that in La Palette, having other things (like a gorgeous blond revenant) on my mind. But standing here, a couple of feet away from him, his deteriorated state was unmistakable. “Oh, Vincent!” I said, reaching toward his face.
“I haven’t been well,” he explained, catching my hand before I touched him and folding it into his. As soon as his skin touched mine, my insides turned into a warm gooey mess. “Let’s go to my room,” he said, and led me down the servants’ hallway and through his open door.
The curtains had been flung open. Scattered embers glowed in the hearth, and the room smelled like a campfire. I stood and watched Vincent add some kindling to start the fire back up. He piled some logs on before returning to me.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“I don’t know if it’s cold or nerves,” I admitted, and held out my hand to show him how I was trembling. He immediately reached out to take me in his arms. “Oh, Kate,” he breathed, kissing the top of my head. I felt him shiver when his lips brushed my hair.
He took my head in his hands, and his words rushed out in a torrent. “I can’t tell you how I’ve struggled during the last few weeks. I tried to disappear out of your life. To let you go. I wanted you to be able to live a normal life, a safe life. And I was almost convinced I had done the right thing until I came to see you.”
“You came to see me? When?” I asked.
“Starting a week ago. I had to see if you were okay. I watched you come and go for days. You didn’t look like you were doing better. You actually seemed worse. And then when Charlotte overheard your sister and grandmother talking at the café, I knew I had been wrong to let you go.”
“What did she hear?” I asked, a bad feeling forming in the pit of my stomach.
“They were worried about you. They talked about depression. About what they should do for you. About whether Georgia should take you back to New York.”
Seeing my shock, Vincent settled me on the couch and sat down next to me. His fingers kneaded mine absentmindedly as he spoke, and the motion and the pressure made me feel more grounded.
“I’ve been talking to Gaspard about this. He knows as much, or maybe more, than Jean-Baptiste about us. About our situation as revenants. I feel I’ve arrived at a solution that we could live with. That wouldn’t demand as much from you. An almost normal existence. Can you listen?”
I nodded and tried to contain my feeling of hope. I had no idea what he was about to say.
“I apologize for not telling you more about myself from the start. I just didn’t want to scare you off. I think that placed a barrier between the two of us. So I want to start from scratch.
“First: my story. I was born in 1924, as I told you, in a little town in Brittany. Our town was occupied soon after the Germans invaded in 1940. We didn’t even try to fight them off. We didn’t have the weapons, and it all happened too quickly to prepare a defense.
“I was in love with a girl named Hélène. We had grown up together, and our parents were best friends. A year after the Occupation began, I asked her to marry me. We were just seventeen, but age didn’t seem to matter in the unpredictable atmosphere of war we lived in. My mother urged us to wait until we were eighteen, so we did.
“Our town was at the mercy of the German garrison stationed nearby, and we were expected to provide them with food, drink, and supplies. As well as . . . other, unofficial services.” I could hear the fury rising in Vincent’s voice as he continued, but I remained silent, knowing that revisiting these memories must be hard for him.
“My parents and I were eating dinner at Hélène’s house the night that two drunk German officers showed up at her family’s door, demanding wine. Hélène’s father explained that they had already turned over the entire contents of their wine cellar to the army, and had nothing left to offer them.
“‘We’ll see about that!’ one of them said, and taking out their guns, they ordered Hélène and her younger sister to strip. Their mother rushed toward the officers, screaming her protest. They shot her, and then turned and shot my mother, who had jumped up to defend her friend. My father was the next to be killed.