“He’s gone?” It seemed impossible. Her father, the warrior. The autocrat.
“In the fire.” She felt her mother lean against her for a moment, felt the force of her mother’s own sorrow, before her mother straightened, automatically setting her hair and dress to rights. “You understand, we have no real news from the occupied territory. It’s all rumor—but I have friends.”
Oh yes. Her mother always had friends. And her friends were generally to be believed.
Aurélie drew in a deep breath, her chest tight. “I shouldn’t have gone. I should have stayed with him.”
“And died, too?” She couldn’t remember ever seeing her mother look so fierce. Regaining her urbane mask, her mother said, “For what it’s worth, there were German officers gone, too. Several of them. Your father would have considered that worth the sacrifice, I imagine. He always wanted to die in battle rather than in someone’s bed.”
German officers gone. Max.
Aurélie’s gorge rose. “Oh no.”
Her mother mistook her expression. “Darling, I didn’t mean—I wasn’t making light of it. We all have different ways of mourning, I suppose. And I do mourn your father.”
“You are right. He would be proud,” said Aurélie numbly. “How many German officers died with him?”
“Several. I don’t believe there was anyone left to take charge. I heard all was chaos. That was why they thought—they thought you had died, too.”
“I didn’t,” said Aurélie flatly. No. She had run away. To keep the talisman safe.
The talisman that would never have been there if she hadn’t brought it. The talisman that had cost her father and her lover their lives. She had cost them their lives.
“My father sent me away. With this.” Fumbling in her chemise, beneath the multiple layers of clothes bundled about her, she drew out the talisman, drawing the chain up over her head. She had removed it from her hair and returned it to her neck once she had crossed into France.
“The talisman.” Her mother took it from her, holding it delicately by the chain, the relic swaying gently, still warm from Aurélie’s skin, like a living thing, winking at her in the electric light. “You scared me half to death when you ran away with that, you know. I was afraid you meant to go into battle with it, as your father had. I was so relieved when your father told me you’d come to Courcelles.”
“I know. He told me. I found one of your messages.” All of that seemed so far away now. “I hadn’t realized you were on corresponding terms.”
“When it mattered.” The carefully painted line of her mother’s lip rouge trembled, just a bit. “He was very proud of you.”
Aurélie lifted her hands to her temples, as though she could hold in the memories, the pain. “I did so little.”
“That’s not what your father said. He said you were a symbol of hope—and an excellent distraction.”
She had been so upset by that, being a distraction. She had been so angry at her father. But now she would give anything to go back, to have him alive again. And Max . . . Max, who had betrayed everything, had killed his own superior for her. Max, who was meant to be playing on the banks of a lake with a brood of children with silver-gilt hair, not killed in a chateau in France. He would never even have been there but for her.
Max, who had once come to her mother’s salon with daisies in his buttonhole. She wanted to close her eyes and turn back time, here, in her old room. She wanted to make them all whole again.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t change any of it. And it hurt, it hurt so terribly much.
“It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.” Aurélie pressed her hands over her mouth, but the sobs escaped anyway, not pretty, graceful tears, but horrible, ugly gulping sobs, torn from her gut, ripping her insides out. “If I’d never gone . . . if I’d never brought the talisman . . . I should have stayed with him. Why didn’t I stay with him?”
Her mother chafed her wrists. “And die, as well? Your father would have wanted you safe,” she said. “Safe and working for France.”
Her father? Oh yes. Her father. It was on the tip of her tongue to pour out the truth about Max, but something held her back. What would people say? That she had been a German officer’s whore. Never mind that he loved her, that she loved him, that he had come to her mother’s salon with daisies.
She couldn’t soil it. She wouldn’t let them soil it.