He imagined her sitting in this room every night while he worked late or went out without her and he realized she was wrong; he was capable of hatred and he hated himself right now. “The most important thing is that Victorine be happy,” he reiterated. “Her life, up till now, has been a shambles. She’s had nothing that could be called stability or consistency and she’s seen things that children shouldn’t know anything about.”

“And you’ll do anything for her, won’t you?” Amelia spoke to her hands folded in her lap and he knew she understood perfectly well that yes, he would do anything for Victorine, but he would certainly not do anything for his wife.

“I will,” he said.

“Well then.” She looked up and met his gaze and he realized she’d flung the incendiary right back at him. It was up to him, what happened now. He’d been blaming everything on her and sure, some of it was her fault but he was an adult and he’d made a decision and he had to accept the consequences of that decision. Right now, the consequences were hurting Victorine.

And Jess had vanished. It seemed she had no intention, ever, of coming back. So should he blow up everything, continue arguing with and shrinking from Amelia, keep exposing Victorine to a household empty of love, keep loathing himself for what he’d done to Amelia and what he’d done to himself? Or should he do what he could to defuse the grenade before the precious remnants of Victorine’s childhood shattered forever?

Thirty-two

Later, as he left Amelia’s room, head pounding, wanting to lie down in the dark and—yes, he could admit it—cry, he knew that in trying to fix it, something had shattered after all. His soul.

“Damn you, Jess,” he muttered for the millionth time since Germany. One day, this will fade. You once told me that everything does. Why should this be any different? But he’d been wrong. Like the coal seam fires burning beneath the earth’s surface for thousands of years, flameless, persistent, the slow burn making them almost impossible to extinguish, what he felt for Jess would never fade.

He would have to pretend, for Victorine’s sake, that he was happy. But he didn’t know if he could ever do again what he’d just done with Amelia.

“Papa!” The cry made him swivel and turn into Victorine’s room. Her face was wet with tears and he held her and shushed her until she stopped sobbing.

“Did you have a dream?” he asked.

And, not for the first time, she nodded and said, “The man was there again.”

“What man? What did he do?”

But Victorine just shook her head as she always did, unable to articulate anything more about the man and why he had frightened her so. He slid her back down onto her pillow and straightened her sheets, frowning at a noise like rustled paper.

“What do you have in there?” He expected to see one of her many war souvenirs, the ribbons and peg dolls and scraps of khaki that she’d collected from nurses and soldiers alike but what he found were sheets of newspaper. He couldn’t help smiling at her peculiar and endearing ways and he lay down on the bed beside her, wanting to keep her safe from dreams. He fell asleep himself, only to be plagued by dreams of his own, dreams about Jess.