Page 113 of Where the Snakes Sleep

He is right often enough that I have learned to distrust my own indignation whenever it stands opposite his certainty.

That sentence.

God.

I knew that feeling before I knew Alberte.

Paul could turn anything around if I gave him enough time. By the end of an argument I’d be apologizing for reacting to whatever he’d done in the first place. I read Alberte doing the same thing and wanted to reach backward through twenty-seven years and shake him, which is probably hypocritical.

Maybe if somebody read my life laid out as diary entries, they’d ask why the fuck I stayed too.

Why didn’t you leave after the first time he grabbed you?

Why did you keep planning a wedding with someone who hated every change that made you happier?

Why did you let him fuck you even when you supposedly didn’t want to?

Because love makes you stupid.

No. That’s too simple.

Love makes you hopeful, and hope makes you stupid.

You keep waiting for the person you remember to come back, even when they’re standing right in front of you, proving that version of them either disappeared or maybe never existed in the first place.

By the end, Alberte knew exactly who Henri was, and still loved him.

That terrifies me.

Because the final entry doesn’t say I used to love a murderer.

It says I love a man who killed four people.

Present tense.

I understand that too, a lot more than I want to. I hated Paul when I left. I was terrified of him, and I knew what he’d done to me was unforgivable, and yet there were still nights in that motel when I wanted to call him because something funny happened and, for six years, he was the person I told funny things to.

The body does not care about moral clarity.

It misses routine, and familiar hands.

It misses the version of safety that existed before safety became dangerous.

So yes, I understand Alberte, but I am also so fucking angry at him that I could scream; both can exist.

I wipe my cheeks. They are wet again, and my nose is running. I sniff miserably and stare down at Nadia’s name.

Then Camille’s.

That boy becomes the man who keeps sixteen snakes in a private laboratory and knows more about venom than any sane person should.

His mother researched compounds at Le Mas.

His mother disappeared inside a scandal built around venom research.

And Camille became a venomologist.

My heart cracks a little more.