That night when I got home, I slipped my laptop out of my desk drawer and turned it on. Using the email account I had set up to write to Charlotte, I sent a message to my three oldest friends. It’s me, Kate, I wrote. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I do love you all. But it still hurts too much to think about my past, and though you don’t mean to, you bring it back too clearly. I wiped a tear away as I typed in one last sentence and then pressed send.
Please wait for me.
THIRTEEN
FOR THE NEXT WEEK, VINCENT WAS TOO BUSY with his project to be able to spend much time with me. Previously, on the rare day we didn’t see each other, we had called to catch up at night, and he would give me a complete rundown of his day. But recently he’d begun to carefully skip over bits.
Now that we had talked, I didn’t feel as bad about it. And knowing that he had asked for my blessing—in a roundabout way—I felt more supportive of him. But I still worried. Because whatever it was, it was taking a toll on him. His skin’s healthy olive tone had begun to look sallow, and dark circles were appearing under his eyes. He was so tired and preoccupied that even when he was next to me, it felt like he wasn’t completely there.
At the same time, I couldn’t complain about him being any less affectionate. Because he seemed even more so. As if he was trying to make up for everything.
“Vincent, you look awful,” I finally said one morning.
“It has to get worse before it gets better,” was all he would say.
After a week and a half of watching him rapidly weaken before my eyes, I was getting to the end of my rope. I didn’t want to force Vincent to give me more information . . . to put any more pressure on him. And Jules and Gaspard were obviously not going to spill the beans. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t ask Violette.
Since her Hitchcockian introduction to the cinema, Violette and I had been to several films, each time on her initiative. A couple of days after our first movie date, I received a bouquet of blue and pink flowers and a copy of Pariscope with a note attached telling me to look on page thirty-seven. Page thirty-seven was a list of movies. I dug my flower dictionary out of my bag.
The blue flower was monkshood, which meant “danger,” and the tiny pinkish flowers were nutmeg geranium: “I expect a meeting.” Danger . . . meeting? I looked at the movie listings again and saw, in the middle of the page, Dangerous Liaisons. This has got to be the first time in history that The Language of Flowers was used to encode movie titles, I thought, laughing to myself as I dialed her phone number.
Violette giggled through the whole film, remarking on how the costumes and mannerisms were all wrong, and drawing angry glares from the moviegoers around us. After I convinced her that it wasn’t okay to speak out loud in a cinema (“But this is a common entertainment—it is not as if we were at the opera,” was her initial response), she limited herself to chuckling and shaking her head at the offending scenes. When I commented afterward about the evilness of the characters, Violette laughed and said, “A perfect example of royal court politics!”
A few days later, the bouquet of bear’s foot (knight), lucerne (life), and asphodel (my regrets follow you to death) took me a whole half hour of looking back and forth between flowers and movie listings. When I finally figured out that Violette was using “knight” as a pun, my jaw dropped at the thought of the ancient revenant choosing Night of the Living Dead, the most famous zombie movie ever.
We fell into a habit of following up the movie with a café session. But instead of chatting, it felt more like we were trading information: Violette didn’t know how to relax. Her default setting was programmed to super intense, and she listened to everything I said with a concentration that intimidated me at first. I finally became used to it, and eventually got her to loosen up to the point where she could laugh about herself.
Violette couldn’t hear enough about me and Vincent, and after my initial hesitation, I could tell that it wasn’t from some kind of weird, voyeuristic jealousy. Obviously her crush was long gone. She explained that love between humans and revenants was so rare that it intrigued her, and apologized if it was intruding on our personal lives. But when I told her I didn’t mind, she enthusiastically dug for every single detail.
It was the way that Vincent and I could communicate while he was volant that seemed to interest her the most. She confessed that she hadn’t heard of contact between humans and dormant revenants, besides the very basic intuition that the rare married couples like Geneviève and Philippe developed after decades of living together.