Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Kristina

Nice, June 1946

The lights in some of the rooms in the villa were still working, and Kristina listened as Lorenzo showed Eve to one of the guest rooms on the third floor. She was glad he had done so. It would have been rude to have sent the young woman away late in the evening when she would have had no hope of finding accommodation in town, but it also meant Kristina would have a chance to speak with her the following day. She picked up her pet rabbit, Flora, and turned to her own bed in the corner of the ballroom that now served as her studio. It was a four-poster with leaf finials and the linens were pink toile de Jouy. It made her feel like Sleeping Beauty when she climbed into it – the princess cursed to sleep for a hundred years until awakened by the kiss of a handsome prince. The villa was too high above the bay for her to hear the waves, but she liked to imagine that she could. There were no curtains in the room, and Kristina could see the moon through the tall French windows. Its luminescent brightness gave her some peace. The ocean and the moon had been formed billions of years ago and could not be erased. Those elements existed before humankind, and they would remain long after the last person disappeared from the earth.

She turned off the bedside lamp and settled into the pillows. Memories floated towards her but as she was about to grasp them, they floated away again. That first kiss with Max was where her memory stopped. It was like a line, a precipice, a border. But there was one other memory that sat right on the edge of the abyss. Max was laughing, telling a joke, and Kristina sensed a glimmer of a figure next to him. Tall and with an air of distinction. A tenderness rose within her, but it was fleeting and gone. She knew it was Serge Lavertu but she could not recall his face.

She looked to the stars. When she was a child, her father had told her that what she was seeing in the night sky was not the actual stars, but the light those stars had emitted decades earlier and that had taken years to reach Earth. ‘Whenever you are looking at starlight, you are looking at the past.’

What has been can never not have been , Kristina thought. Surely everything that had happened to her still existed somewhere besides her damaged brain? The same way that Nice would still exist even if she caught a train and went to Paris.

Yes, the past still existed somewhere, even if she couldn’t remember it. That was a hope to hold on to.