Chapter XXVIII - The affair

Lucas widened his eyes as he realizes he managed to convince her. He quickly leaned his body forward to listen everything she would say. “I know your father. Not just acquaintance but we were closer than that... but, it doesn't matter...” Madam Celine stuttered again and this time she looks like she feels so guilty. Lucas frowned his forehead. “Are you his lover?” he guessed. Madam Celine startled as she heard that and more nervous than before. It seems like Lucas's guess was right. “It was. But, not anymore. Yeah, I'm not trying to hide it from you. Of course you need to know the truth,” her voice hoarse than before so she tried to clear it. “We have known each other when we were young. You can mad at me or you can curse me... because I am a woman who seduced him first. I admit it th “Madam Celine.” “Please, let me finish. If I stop now I will not start again.” Lucas closed his mouth and sat back. The old woman held the photograph with both hands and looked at it while she talked, never at Lucas. *** “Your father came here in the winter of that year. He was twenty-four. He worked as a junior accountant at a firm two streets from here, and he ate lunch alone every single day at the bench outside my window.” “That sounds like him,” Lucas said quietly. “For four months I watched him eat alone,” Madam Celine continued. “And then one day it rained, and he came inside to wait for it to stop, and he never really left again.” Lucas said nothing. “We were together for two years.” *** The clock in the corner kept ticking. “Did my mother know?” Madam Celine finally looked up. “Your mother did not exist yet, Mr. Whitlock. Not in his life.” “Oh.” “He met her four years after we ended.” Lucas felt something loosen in his chest, and immediately felt guilty for feeling it. *** “So why do you look guilty, madam?” The old woman put the photograph down on the counter. “Because the watch was mine first,” she said. *** Lucas stared at her. “Yours?” “It came into this shop in nineteen sixty-eight, inside a box of items from a house sale in the north.” “And you used it?” “For eleven months.” Madam Celine touched her own left leg, the one with the limp. “This is from there,” she said simply. “Not from here. A wall fell on me in a city that does not exist.” *** Lucas felt his skin go cold. “You finished it?” “No.” “Then how did you stop?” The old woman looked directly at him for a long moment. “I gave it to someone else,” she said. *** The shop became very quiet. “You gave it to my father.” “Yes.” “On purpose?” “Yes.” Lucas stood up. “Why?” “Because I was tired, Mr. Whitlock.” Her voice did not change at all. “Because I had not slept properly in eleven months. Because I was thirty-one years old and I looked fifty. And because he asked me what was wrong, and I did the easiest thing a frightened person can do.” She folded her hands. “I told him the truth, and I let him choose to take it.” *** Lucas walked two steps toward the door, then stopped and walked back. “And he chose to take it.” “He did.” “Knowing what it did to you.” “Knowing exactly what it did to me.” Lucas put both hands on the back of the chair. “Why would anybody do that?” Madam Celine's mouth trembled for the first time since he entered the shop. “You may say it is because he loved me,” she said. “That is what I told myself for twenty years.” “And now?” “Now I think he simply could not watch someone suffer in front of him and do nothing.” She looked away. “Which, if you want my honest opinion, is a far worse reason. Love ends. That never does.” *** Lucas thought about Dorsky bleeding on the ground. He thought about himself running out from behind the wooden post with both hands raised, even though nobody asked him to. He sat back down very slowly. “Madam Celine.” “Yes?” “Is it hereditary?” The old woman laughed — a short, broken sound. “The watch? No.” “Then what?” She looked at him with something like pity. “The habit, Mr. Whitlock.” *** Outside, the street lamps came on. “Then why do you feel guilty?” Lucas asked again. “He chose. You said it yourself.” Madam Celine picked up the photograph one more time. “Because I did not stop him,” she said. “And because... because I am a woman who seduced him first. I admit it that night, and I have never taken it back, not once in twenty-six years.” She put the photograph face down on the counter. “I made him love me, and then I handed him the thing that killed him. Both of those are true, and I have to carry both.” *** Lucas sat there for a long time. He wanted to be angry. He tried to be angry. But all he could think about was a twenty-four-year-old accountant eating lunch alone on a bench, and a thirty-one-year-old woman who had not slept in eleven months, and how neither of them had any idea what they were walking into. “Madam.” “Yes?” “Do you still have his letters?” The old woman went very still. “How do you know there are letters?” Lucas took the cheap notebook out of his bag and put it on the counter between them. “Because that is what people like us do,” he said. “We write things down so we don't forget who was real.”