Everything changed when I left the fortress. From Paris, I took charge of my situation. I solidified my legal position and got a handle on my finances. I saw a doctor, learned that I was anemic, and began taking iron tablets. I rented a small apartment in Aigues Vives, a village ten minutes from Aubais, where I would live until Nikolai left France. I took the first steps toward a new life.
After he was gone, I went back to the fortress. Nico and Alex were with me then, but soon Nico would leave for Bulgaria and Alex and Fly would go to the States. I planned to sell La Commanderie and needed to clean things up.
The day he’d moved out, Nikolai had collected cinders from the fireplace and spread them over the floors, dumped ash in the piano and on the windowsills.
It was a mess. The day he’d moved out of the fortress, Nikolai collected cinders from the fireplace and spread them over the floors, dumped ash in the piano and on the windowsills. I later learned that this was a kind of departure ritual, a magic rite, although I never understood its purpose, other than making a mess. I could hardly face the house after all that had happened there. Thankfully, my mom flew to France to assist with the cleanup. With her help I felt better equipped for the job. We swept up the ashes and vacuumed the piano keys and sanded down the mantra carved in the door. We cleaned out the empty wine bottles from the courtyard and the trash from Nikolai’s office. And when it was done, the house was ready for the next owners, the ones who would inherit La Commanderie’s treasures and ghosts after our departure.
As I was packing my closet, I pulled down a box of photos. I’d been throwing pictures into this box for years without organizing them, telling myself that someday I would put them into an album. As I sorted through the box, I saw hundreds of the moments my family had lived together. I saw Alex after his stitches from running into a pole; I saw newborn Nico at Maichin Dom; I saw the four of us at my parents’ house in Wisconsin, standing before drifts of snow. There was our last Christmas in Aubais, the gifts and the food and the enormous tree, and the kids walking together on the beach at La Grande-Mott, Fly at Alex’s heels. There was a picture taken in the courtyard of the fortress, the four of us together, surrounded by the protective wall, the one that had not, in the end, been strong enough to keep us together.
As I was packing up these photos, I found a letter in a sealed envelope. It was dated May 2010, but there it was at the back of the closet in 2012, waiting like a time capsule for me to open. It was a final love letter, one filled with all the talk of destiny and magic that had marked our relationship from the beginning. Our love, Nikolai wrote, had been like a journey, an escape into a dark forest, a place in which we hid from the ghosts of our past. He’d cast a spell on me the day we met, he wrote, but that spell had grown weaker as time passed. Magic wears off ghosts find other people to haunt, and past lives die. He hoped that we would find our way back to each other, but his magic had turned dark. Love, like miracles, could live on nothing but purity.
I folded the letter and put it into the box of photos. I wanted to keep it, just as I wanted to keep the pictures. They were a testament, a record of the life I’d lived and left behind, and I didn’t want to forget them. I felt a rush of tenderness for the young woman I had once been, the woman willing to ride off into a dark forest with a sorcerer, the one who needed to believe in fairy tales. I had chased a big, beautiful dream, and while that dream had failed, I’d gained something precious in the effort.
I closed the box and packed it away, knowing that someday I would want to open it again. Someday I would read his letter and see my family photos and remember the woman I used to be, once upon a time, the woman who lived in a fortress.