“Mon Dieu,” Daisy whispered.
“And then I saw you in the Ritz that day and it was as if—as if the earth fell away beneath me. Your face, it struck me senseless.” He pulled his watch from his pocket and opened the face. “It’s uncanny. You look like my sister. You see? There’s her portrait. Your eyebrows are your mother’s, and the rest is her.”
Daisy looked helplessly at him. The room kept spinning. She was going to vomit. “It’s impossible,” she whispered. She put out her arm, and somebody took it. Grandmère, holding her upright.
“It’s true, my dear,” Grandmère said. “I realized it right away. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell.”
“I thought you would hate me,” said Max. “You should hate me.”
The woman called Opossum stood dumbstruck in the doorway, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Bloody hell,” she said in English. “He’s telling the truth.”
Daisy looked back up at Max, at his warm blue eyes that stared at her beseechingly. His terrible scar. He still held the watch with its open case. She couldn’t look at that; she didn’t need to, didn’t want to. Some woman she would never know. A family she would never know. A father who had never known her, never raised her, never been there when she needed him; when she had wanted a father’s love so terribly, she had married Pierre. Her life, her history, transformed in a flash. She pulled her arm away from Grandmère and covered her mouth. It was the hand that bore Kit’s ring. The two swans dug into her lips.
“Give me the talisman,” he said again, more gently. “Go, get out of Paris. Take care of the children. It’s my turn. I failed your mother. I’ve failed you, my darling girl, but I swear before God, I won’t fail you again.”
Opossum broke in. “For God’s sake. Just go, one of you, before it’s too late! Or I’ll take the damned thing myself!”
Daisy reached inside her pocket, pulled out the talisman, and handed it to Max.
“If you do fail me,” she whispered, “I’ll kill you with my own hands.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Babs
Paris, France
April 1964
If the cancer didn’t kill Margot, the medicinal stink mixed with antiseptic that pervaded the halls of the H?tel-Dieu certainly would. I pressed my nose against Drew’s shoulder as we walked quickly down the long corridor toward Margot’s room, my emotions—anger, guilt, pity—all roly-poly and unable to separate. It was as if a red sock had been tossed in the wash along with the white ones, staining everything.
Drew remained outside the door of the private room, squeezing my shoulder for encouragement as if I were a fellow football player ready to run onto the playing field. And, I thought, perhaps I was.
The woman lying against the white pillow bore little resemblance to the woman whom I had met at the Ritz. But as I stood by the side of her bed and looked down at her, I saw that her light still existed in her eyes, and as long as that wasn’t extinguished, the essence of the woman remained.
“Daisy?” The simple word felt heavy on my tongue.
Her fingers opened, and she smiled. Without hesitation she reached for my hand.
My entire prepared speech evaporated, my thoughts and feelings suddenly unimportant. All that remained of all that was past was two women who’d loved the same man with all of their hearts.
I slid Kit’s ring from my finger and placed it into her open palm, a token of all the guilt I’d been carrying around like a valise for so long. “I’m sorry.” All of my rehearsed words were condensed into just those inadequate two.
“Sorry?” Her voice had faded, too, like the rest of her body. But not those eyes.
“The letter you sent to Kit. I never showed it to him. I don’t . . .” I stopped, knowing we didn’t have enough time for me to try to explain. I wasn’t even sure that I could explain it to myself. Instead, I simply said, “Forgive me.”
She closed her eyes and smiled. “You loved him. You . . . gave him children. Made him happy. Nothing to . . . forgive.”
“He loved you,” I said, the words not hurting as much as I’d thought they would. “He never stopped. Until the day he died, he never stopped loving you.”
She took my hand, the bones of her hand as brittle as a bird’s. “Shh,” she whispered. “He loved us both.” Something warm and hard pressed against my palm as she closed her hand around mine. The indentation of the two swans pressed against my skin. Two swans, meant to mate for life. It made me oddly happy that Kit’s ring had belonged to Daisy for all of these years. It was somehow fitting. “For Kit’s son, yes?”