Die for Me

“Oh, he’s off on his own a lot lately,” she said, trying to sound flippant but not managing very well. Her voice trembled as she continued, “So recently I’ve found myself a bit more on my own than I’m used to.” Her attempt to look brave was ruined by the tear I noticed coursing down her cheek as she turned away.

“Wait!” I said, grabbing her hand, and pulled her back to face me.

Staring at the ground, she brushed away another tear. “I’m sorry. Things have just been kind of . . . hard lately.”

I guess I’m not the only one with problems, I told myself, my resolve crumbling as I saw the sadness on her face. “Okay, yeah. Let’s walk to the river.” Her empty eyes met my own, and she managed a glimmer of a smile as she took my arm and we walked down the street together.

As we neared the water, I pointed out an antique taxidermy shop. “My mom and I used to always go in there,” I said. “It’s like a zoo, except all the animals are dead. Now I can’t even pass by without thinking about Mom. I haven’t dared go in, in case I had a meltdown right there in the middle of all the stuffed squirrels.”

Charlotte laughed—the response I had been hoping for. “That’s how I felt too after my parents died. Everything reminded me of them. Paris felt like a ghost town to me for years after,” she said as we walked down the steps to the quay.

“Your parents died? I mean, before you did?” I asked, the hole in my heart begi

Charlotte nodded. “It was World War Two. During the Occupation. My parents ran a clandestine press out of our apartment near the Sorbo

“We were proud of our parents and wanted to continue in their footsteps. So when we began hearing about the roundups . . .” She paused, then explained, “When the police rounded the Jews up to send them to the concentration camps.” I nodded to show her I understood, and she continued, “We hid some friends from school and their parents in our apartment, in a room with a false wall, where the printing press had been concealed. We secured enough ration cards to feed and clothe the six of us for over a year before a neighbor caught on and reported us.”

I stopped in place. “Who would ever do such a thing?” I said, aghast.

She shrugged and continued, taking my arm and forcing me to move again. “We were able to get the family safely to another hiding place, but Charles and I were caught the next day and shot.”

“I can barely believe that was happening right here in Paris.”

Charlotte nodded. “They say that thirty thousand of us ‘resisters’ were shot during the course of the Occupation. At least, that’s the official number. Some were actually lawbreakers. But others were i

“That was so brave of you and Charles to help that family.”

“Well, wouldn’t you have done the same? How could we have acted differently?”

We neared a stone bench and sat down.

“I don’t know,” I responded finally. “I would hope I would have acted like you did. But there must be very few people who are actually that brave. Maybe that’s why you became one of them. I mean, a revenant,” I said.

“That’s what Jean-Baptiste thinks. That saving lives was preprogrammed into us. That it came naturally. Who knows?” She paused thoughtfully. “What I do know is, now that I can spare others the pain I went through when my parents were killed—by saving lives—it makes the continual trauma of our existence easier to bear.”

I nodded, and watched as she pensively picked at her fingernails. “So what’s up with Charles?” I asked finally.

“It’s all part of the same story,” she said. “He’s had a hard time dealing with his failure to save that little girl’s life in the boat accident. For the last couple of weeks he’s been . . .” She looked like she was weighing how much to tell me and settled for, “. . . obsessing about it.”

“Will he get over it with time?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I finally told Jean-Baptiste about it this morning. He’s going to have a talk with Charles.”

“Maybe that will help,” I offered.

She shook her head, as if unconvinced. “Let’s change the subject.”

“Okay,” I said, grasping for a new topic of conversation. “So what’s so bad about living with a houseful of hot men? Excluding Gaspard and Jean-Baptiste, that is, who I guess could be called ‘hot’ in their own way . . . ,” I trailed off.

She burst out laughing. “Definitely not hot,” she agreed. “There’s so much testosterone packed into that air, I’m surprised I haven’t grown a mustache just from breathing it!”

Now it was my turn to laugh. It felt foreign to me, as if I were suddenly speaking Chinese. It didn’t feel natural, but it didn’t feel bad.

Charlotte shot me a wry grin, proud that she had cracked through my armor. “Honestly,” she conceded, “they’re all like family to me. We’ve lived together for decades.

“The revenants out in the countryside have to constantly relocate so that the locals don’t recognize them once they’ve died saving someone. They’re always on the move from one of Jean-Baptiste’s country homes to another. It suits most of them just fine, but I couldn’t do it. These men are all the family I’ve got, and I could never leave them.”

“Have you ever . . .” I paused, unsure of how probing my questions could be.

“What?” Charlotte asked, intrigued.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

Charlotte sighed. “It would be just as hard for me to have a boyfriend as it is to have girl friends. I guess that in the begi

“So you’ve been in love before?”

She blushed and looked down at her hands. “Yes. But he doesn’t . . . he didn’t feel the same way.” Her words were almost inaudible.

“Then why not date a revenant?”

She leaned forward, a sad smile forming on her lips as she wrapped her arms around herself and looked out over the water. “There aren’t many of us around, so the choices are rather slim.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I took her hand in mine and gave it an encouraging squeeze. She smiled, and then said, “I better be getting back home. For Charles. Thanks for the chat. I can’t even tell you how nice it is to hang out with a girl.”

I felt the same way. I hadn’t made any friends here in Paris. And even though it meant spending time with someone who was practically a member of Vincent’s family, I had to admit I really enjoyed being with Charlotte. “We’ll do it again,” I promised.

If you are friends with Charlotte, you’re bound to run into Vincent at one point or another, a little voice in my mind nudged me. Oh, shut up, I told it, wondering if the pain in my heart would ever subside. It had to, I decided. The longer I spent away from Vincent, the better I would feel. I was sure of it.

Chapter Twenty-Three

INSTEAD OF IMPROVING, THE NEXT WEEK I FELT worse, and by Friday a creeping despair began to engulf me as I realized the entire weekend stretched ahead with not a single activity pla

At lunch, I turned my phone on to see my daily texts from Georgia:

Have you seen you-know-who’s ho outfit?