I let the afternoon slip away as light bleeds out of the sky.

Oliver walks me right up to the door to Maxine’s apartment and hovers for a moment. Neither of us quite knows what to say.

“I’ll see you tonight,” I say at the same time he says, “I missed you.”

I look up at him, his skin golden in fading daylight. I pause, taking him in. He’s looking at me too, not like he sees right through me, but just because he wants to look at me.

“I missed you too, you know I missed you,” I say a little too quietly.

He smiles sadly. “Pfft, what am I, compared to magic?”

Everything, I want to say. You’re everything.

“What am I compared to French girls?”

This isn’t a dance either of us were ever good at, and distance has only caused us to forget the steps more. We’re stumbling over our own feet, but we’re trying. He makes me want to try.

He shakes his head. “You’re Frances.”

“And you’re Oliver.” His name feels like magic, but I don’t tell him so.

He leans in, his eyebrows knit together, but pulls back at the last second, as if thinking better of it.

He places an awkward hand on my shoulder but only briefly. “Tonight.” He pulls a pen and paper out of his pocket and scribbles down a time and address.

“Tonight,” I agree. I take the address. I don’t tell him about the other address in my pocket. He’s good like Lena and Maxine. He wouldn’t understand either.

CHAPTER FIVE

I blink hard a few times, attempting to focus on my own face in the mirror as Maxine’s lady’s maid pins my hair for the evening. Lena and Maxine are already dressed, Lena in a pale purple gown with a modern sort of bustle and Maxine in an emerald-green dress with a lapel collar like a man’s suit.

They’ve put me in a dress of gray-blue, with delicate pearl beading along the trim. “You’ll take Oliver’s breath away,” Maxine said when she handed it to me.

It’s profoundly silly, the warring anxieties in my brain.

Is my magic gone forever? Have I done something that’s destroyed my very soul? chimes right alongside Will Oliver think I look nice? Will he try to kiss me tonight?

Maxine’s family driver takes us across the river, the three of us piled in the back, crammed in with our skirts around us, giggling every time the automobile takes a turn too sharply. Lena’s sharp elbows dig into my ribs. I savor the reminder that she’s right here beside me.

I take a deep breath and push magic and death and the address from my mind.

The driver turns onto Boulevard de Clichy, and I am immediately transported to another world.