Chapter 11 Blood and Bone #3
The night air was cold in the way that Bavarian nights were cold even in spring — not hostile, not bitter, just clear and present, the sort of cold that organized your thoughts by sheer insistence.
The fountain was older than the rest of the courtyard furniture, original to the house, its stone worn to the texture of old soap by however many winters had run over it.
Anya sat on the wall beside it and tipped her head back and looked at the sky, which was extraordinary out here — stars in a quantity and clarity that London never permitted, a whole uninterrupted field of them, the Milky Way a faint brushstroke if you looked slightly to the side of the thing you were trying to see.
She thought about Juliette.
Four years old. What was four years old?
She knew four years old the way she knew all the ages — from Petra, from Felix, from the years she'd spent in the houses of other people's children learning the grammar of each developmental stage the way other people learned foreign languages, slowly and by immersion and with a great deal of getting it wrong before getting it right.
Four was the age of fierce, declarative certainty.
This is mine. This is not mine. I want it.
I don't want it. The age of the question why deployed as both philosophical inquiry and tactical delay.
The age when a face that loves you is still the entire geography of your world.
Juliette had Vivienne's face as a reference.
She had her mother's voice in her memory — Delphine had died only recently, recently enough that a four-year-old would be carrying it in ways that were not yet language, not yet narrative, just a gap in the physical geography where a person used to be.
She had whatever Vivienne could give her, and from the hour Anya had spent with Vivienne in the corner of the meeting room over two cups of coffee and a box of tissues that had been produced from somewhere and not commented on, she understood that Vivienne was giving her everything.
But Vivienne was also thirty-eight and grieving and frightened, and a child at this age needed more geography than one person could be.
She was not mapping herself onto this. She was careful to notice that and stop herself from it.
She had not met Juliette. She had no claim on anything that pertained to Juliette.
She was simply — she was already doing what her mother had named: moving toward the fear.
Standing at the edge of the difficult thing and thinking about it directly instead of sideways.
But there was something else happening too, something that sat beneath the practical thinking and the careful self-monitoring. Something that was not logic.
She thought she might love this already.
Not Juliette specifically — she had not met Juliette.
But the fact of her. The small, stubborn fact of a person who had arrived in the world without anyone quite catching her, who had been loved imperfectly and incompletely by the circumstances that surrounded her birth, and who was nevertheless here, in the world, four years old and real and requiring consistency above all things.
That was what children at that age needed most — not resolution, not explanation, not the adult world sorted into comprehensibility.
Consistency. The same face at the same time in the same place.
The daily proof that the world would continue to hold them.
The gate to the courtyard opened behind her.
She heard his footsteps on the stone — unhurried, but deliberate, the particular rhythm of a man who was not sure what he'd find and was pacing himself accordingly.
He crossed the courtyard and came to the fountain wall and sat beside her without speaking, leaving two inches of stone between them, close enough that she could feel his warmth in the cold air.
He was still in his shirt, the collar open now, his jacket gone, and he smelled of the cedar and vetiver she had associated with him so thoroughly by now that the smell registered less as a scent and more as a geographic marker — here.
The silence held.
It was not a tense silence. It was the silence of two people who had learned, over the months of living in the same breathing house, that quiet between them did not require filling.
She had learned that about him before she had learned almost anything else: that he was more himself in silence than in noise.
That the words, when they came, were the ones he had actually meant, because he had had the time to find them.
She looked at the stars for a while longer.
Then she reached between them and found his hand on the cold stone, his fingers long and still, and she folded hers around them and felt him exhale — not dramatically, not a release of held breath, but quietly, the way a room exhales when someone opens a window after a long time.
She turned her head to look at him. His profile against the dark valley, the line of his jaw, the faint crease between his brows that appeared when he was carrying something and was trying not to show it and could not entirely prevent.
He was looking at the fountain. The light caught the watch on his wrist, the one he never removed, its face just visible below his shirt cuff.
She had stopped noticing it as a symbol months ago. Now it was just part of his hand.
"Tell me about Juliette," she said.