Page 160 of Where the Snakes Sleep

“It was clear he loved you more than anything,” I add quietly.

Henri smiles before flicking a gloating smirk down at Camille. When he looks back at me, he says, “I am glad that came through his words. I only wish he had loved me enough to stay.”

“I don’t know,” I say after a moment, letting my gaze drop as though I’m weighing whether to tell him something difficult. “Maybe that was the problem.”

Henri’s smile fades by degrees. “What do you mean?”

I drag one thumb slowly across my palm, buying myself a second. Across the room, Camille has gone very still, and I can feel his attention on me even without looking.

“Maybe he loved you too much.”

Henri doesn’t speak.

That lands exactly where I hoped it would.

I glance up, keeping my expression subdued. “That’s how it read to me, anyway. Like he spent years trying to convince himself that if he just loved you hard enough, forgave enough, stayed long enough, eventually everything would go back to the way he remembered it.”

Something shifts in Henri’s face—not anger, but memory.

“He wrote about missing you even while he was afraid of you. About wanting the man he met when he was young, like that version of you was still in there somewhere and he just had to wait long enough for him to come back.”

Henri’s throat works; he looks less like a man enjoying himself and more like someone hearing a voice through a wall.

“He always was sentimental,” he says quietly.

“Yeah.” I let the word sit. Then add, “So sentimental that it followed him all the way to America.”

Henri asks, “What do you mean?”

“Do you know why he picked Virginia?”

Henri studies me. “No.”

I lean forward, lowering my voice as though I’m sharing something private. “He wrote that Americans say Virginia is for lovers.”

Henri freezes. The change is tiny, but I see it. His fingers tighten around the cane.

“He chose it because of that,” I say. “Virginia is for lovers. He thought it was meaningful, I guess. Or reassuring. Maybe both.”

Henri stares at me. “It was in the journal?”

I nod. “He wrote it down when he was planning to leave France.”

Henri’s expression becomes unreadable.

I think of Alberte’s handwriting. The way the entries changed over time, from hope to excuses to horror, and how even at the end there were still sentences that made me want to shake him because he could name every awful thing Henri had done and still write about loving him.

“It was kind of tragic,” I say quietly.

Henri’s eyes lift to mine. “What was?”

“All of it?” I shrug faintly. “He left you. He knew he had to. He knew staying would eventually destroy whatever was left of him, and he still couldn’t stop wishing things had been different.”

Henri says nothing, so I keep going.

“He kept remembering the good parts. The dinners, the flowers, dancing with you in the kitchen. He wrote about choosing each other again like that was still possible. Like maybe there was some version of your life together he could somehow get back to if you both just tried hard enough.”

My chest genuinely aches saying it.