Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The question hit her like a blow to her heart. Her eyes flew to his face. Her expression must have reflected her shock because he said, “You called for her in your sleep.”

The room tilted sideways. Oh, no, she thought. Oh no, oh no, oh no.

“Genevieve?” Max frowned at her. Her eyes fastened on him, her anchor, as all around her the world started to spin. “What is it?”

She couldn’t talk. She physically could not make her lips move. It was all she could do to breathe.

As if his speaking her name had conjured them, the images crowded into her head. She could see Vivi, hear her voice, feel the warmth of her little body in her arms. She felt the blood leach from her face.

“Are you ill?”

At the alarm in Max’s voice, she managed to shake her head. Her heart felt like it was caught in a vise that was slowly tightening. The pain was excruciating. She was propped up on her elbow, staring at Max without really seeing him. Her vision was focused inward, on snippets of Vivi’s life playing out on the screen of her mind’s eye, and she was helpless to do anything about it. She was dizzy, aching with loss, terrified that the movie in her head wouldn’t stop until it reached its shattering end.

Max sat up even as she sank bonelessly back against the pillows. Her hand, strictly of its own volition, still clutched the blanket, holding it in place on her chest. She closed her eyes. It was a mistake. The images came faster. The dizziness got worse instead of better. Grimly she concentrated on battling it back.

Max said, “Is this about what happened last night? Touvier? Lafont?”

Of course. Pierre’s death must have brought on the dream. She should have foreseen...

A long shudder racked her.

“Genevieve, talk to me.” He was leaning over her. She knew he was there. She could sense him, feel that tingle akin to an electric charge that, lately, had alerted her to his proximity. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes to find him frowning down at her. Broad shoulders, solid as a rock, blocked out her view of the room still spinning around him. Sturdy and unmoving, the hard-muscled arm propped beside her head served as a bulwark against the encroaching shock waves. She focused on his face, concentrating fiercely on each familiar feature, on the here and now as opposed to the past. His hair was disheveled, his jaw was dark with stubble, and the lines around his eyes and mouth were deep with worry. He looked slightly dangerous, totally disreputable and wholly dependable.

She made a tremendous effort. “I can’t—” She broke off, shook her head.

“Can’t what? Talk to me?” He stroked her cheek. “Whatever it is, you know you can. You can tell me anything.”

Not this, she wanted to say, because even thinking about it hurt too much. To resurrect the memories, to have the images rise up in her head, was to relive them all over again. To put what had happened into words...

She sucked in air, the sound more sob than breath.

“You’re scaring me,” he said. His hand felt warm and strong against her cheek. His thumb feathered the corner of her mouth.

She looked up into his lean, dark face and drew strength. Her chest ached, her throat was tight and the vertigo afflicting her was making her feel sick. But the past was over, was behind her, was composed of ghosts and memories and dreams, and he was real and alive and there. His eyes held hers, encouraged her, willed her, compelled her. She’d given him her loyalty. She’d trusted him with her life.

“Who’s Vivi, angel?” His voice was almost unbearably tender.

She loved him.

Genevieve reached down deep and dragged the words up from what felt like the depths of her soul.

“She was my daughter,” she said, and closed her eyes.

He said something that sounded profane, but she didn’t hear it, not really, because she was battling the fresh upsurge of pain, fighting the sting of tears, resisting them with everything she had.

“God Almighty.” He gathered her up, holding her tightly against him as he rolled onto his back. Draped skin to skin across the width of his chest, she wrapped an arm around his neck and buried her face in the warm curve of his shoulder and reminded herself, fiercely, to breathe. “Tell me what happened, Genevieve.”

Her eyes were hot with tears. Her throat burned with them. But last night she had cried an ocean’s worth to no avail. The dream had come back. The pain once again twisted through her like a knife. The wound still festered. The images lived inside her.

She wanted Max to know. She needed Max to know. This was such a vital part of her, her center, her core. Without knowing the part of her that belonged to her daughter still, he could never really know her. And without knowing her, how could he love her?

Breathe.

“She...” She paused, gritted it out. “Vivi died.”

Her tongue and lips formed the once familiar sounds as if they’d last done so just moments before. The syllables, emerging in her voice for the first time in seven years, were as poignant and as powerful as a nearly forgotten prayer. As her precious little girl’s name hung in the air, waves of emotion crashed into her, threatening to tear her from her moorings and tumble her beneath the surface of grief’s stormy sea. But she held on to Max, held on to the present and, this time, managed to stay above the waves.

She was, she realized, trembling in his arms.

“Can you tell me the rest? You couldn’t have been much more than a child yourself.”

“Eighteen. It was my eighteenth birthday.” She felt him go perfectly still and guessed that he was making the connection between what she was telling him and her too-heavy imbibing on her most recent birthday, as well as on the other birthdays she had spent in his company. But the memory surged forward, assaulting her, ripping at her heart. She almost flinched, almost turned away, almost pushed the past back behind the wall she had so laboriously built over the ensuing years to contain it. Clinging to Max, breathing deeply of his familiar scent, she managed to keep going by shying away from the worst of it and concentrating on the easier, less painful details.

Tilting her head, she slanted a look up at him and adopted a faintly jeering tone. “You didn’t know I was a slut, did you? Pregnant at sixteen.”

His arms tightened around her. His face bent toward hers. His dark eyes took on a fierce gleam. “You were never a slut. You think I don’t know you well enough after all this time to know that? And if anyone else had said that about you, I’d be punching them in the face about now.”

That wrung the smallest of smiles from her. He didn’t smile back. Instead he stroked her hair, kissed her forehead and said, “Go on. Pregnant at sixteen.”

She told him about Phillippe, that she’d loved him, that he’d died. She told him about discovering she was pregnant, about her own and her family’s shock and shame, about being sent away in secret to have her baby.

She told him about the fourteen months of her daughter’s life. About how beautiful her child was, how quick to learn, how funny, how beloved.

As she talked, the other, darker images gathered strength, crowded closer, forced their way toward the forefront of her mind. Vividly colored, sharply real, and devastating.

Until finally she reached that day, her eighteenth birthday, and the handful of moments that divided the before of her existence from the after. Her voice faltered, but he murmured encouragement. Wrapped in the solid strength of his arms, her head resting on his chest so that she could hear the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear, she found the courage to go on. Husky and hesitant at first, the words tumbled out as that last, terrible memory unfolded like a movie reel in her head.

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