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There were moments when Christine realized that her life was changing forever. Those moments seemed to be coming ever quicker these days: her choice beneath the opera house, her return to marry Erik on his deathbed, and now, boarding the train to the north of Sweden with Raoul, life blooming in her belly. A life Raoul already knew wasn’t his.
Raoul covered her hand with his. “It’s better this way.”
Christine nodded. She knew he was right; the gendermarie still believed he had murdered Philippe, and no doubt they would think her a madwoman if she were to tell her story. Still, she mourned that she would never sing “The Jewel Song” for an audience again. That she would spend the rest of her life on the same farms her father had fought so hard to escape so many years ago.
The train accelerated. No turning back now.
Charles de Chagny was born on a bitter winter night in a cabin in north Uppsala. Christine squeezed her eyes shut as he was born, preparing for the screams of the midwife confirming that he had inherited his father’s face. When she heard no such thing, she opened her eyes.
Charles’s face was thinner than what she imagined most babies had, yes. His fingers were already long. But he was full of life and rosy cheeks and blond tufts of hair and a button nose. So this was the life Erik had made with his last breaths. She had been so certain that a child born of so much death would bear the same curse as his father.
Maybe God did show such mercy at times.
The older Charles grew, the more distant Raoul grew. Christine knew it would happen eventually. No matter how rosy-cheeked Charles was, he was still a living, breathing reminder of the man who had nearly took Raoul’s life. The man who had nearly taken so many lives that night.
Christine wished that Raoul wouldn’t think of that. She wished that Raoul were able to see the boy as his own, especially after the midwife had told them that she would not have more children.
Little Charles tried so hard to get Raoul’s attention. He would walk up to Raoul in the daytime and whisper what she assumed were childish secrets into his ear. Raoul would only respond by staring into space.
At nights, she held her husband to her breast as he thrashed in his sleep. His dreams were filled with endless deserts and drowning and the Angel of Death. In the daytime, though, sometimes she caught him talking to himself.
“He is a demon, Christine! Why won’t you believe me?”
Christine clung to the table, biting back tears. Who was the man she married? She no longer recognized Raoul. The sweet boy who had rescued her mother’s red scarf from the ocean. The man who had held her in his arms and comforted her during those long-ago days in the opera. “Raoul, you’re not yourself.”
“Please, you’ve got to believe me.”
“Charles is a child!”
Raoul blinked for a few minutes. “I think—I think I need to lie down.”
Christine nodded. “You need to get better. I miss you.”
Absentmindedly, he kissed her temple before retreating to their bedroom. Christine looked around to see Charles staring at them from the corner of the room, his golden eyes glimmering in understanding beyond his years.
Christine woke up to the crashing of glass, the smell of alcohol, and a terrible heat. She bolted out of bed…Raoul was missing.
Hardly thinking, she opened the door into the main room, and a terrible wave of dry heat hit her face. The main room was ablaze. Her heart pounded in her chest. Instinctively, she ran to Charles’s room and picked him up out of the bed. He had still been asleep.
She burst out of the burning house and set Charles down in the snow. Then, she went back into the house. “Raoul! Raoul, where are you?”
Then, she saw him, sitting in a chair, in the midst of the blaze. A broken lantern lay two feet from him. “Raoul, come with me! We need to get out, now!”
Raoul looked at her, but made no move to leave. Above her, the roof creaked. Christine knew she had to get out now, before the house collapsed. She bit back a sob. “Please. Not like this.”
A support beam in the back broke and fell to the ground. Christine ran out the door, sweat and tears streaming down her face. She plugged her ears against the roar of the fire and the screams. She sobbed for her dead husband—her dead husbands.
There were moments when Christine realized that her life was changing forever. As she walked down the road out of town, the very same road she had followed her father down so many years, she knew it was happening again.
Exhaustion seeped into her bones, but she dared not stop, not now. She clung to Charles’s hand. There was nowhere left for them to go, but she would figure out something. She was nothing if not a survivor.
Charles looked up at her. “Mama, is it just the two of us now?”
Christine nodded.
A chill went down her back at his response. “Good.” Then, he ran in front of her a little ways down the road.