She straightened, her throat tightening suddenly for those parents seventeen centuries ago. “One of your ancestors?”
“Well, probably not on Niccolò’s side. But on Laurianne’s, who knows?”
“Hey.” Such a strange, intense thought struck Layla that she had to reach out and grab Matt’s hand again. “He might be one of my ancestors.”
“Well, probably not him,” Matt admitted. “Since he died when he was eighteen, and the inscription doesn’t mention a wife and kids. But…yeah.” He reached out and took her other hand, too, holding her face to face with him, his eyes warm and his body so solid in front of her. “You have ancestors around here. We could probably track them down, the Dubois gravestones. Élise’s name must be on some of the plaques to World War II heroes. And on the lists of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’, if she died saving children. I think I remember now seeing her photo in the Musée de la Résistance.”
Layla stood very still, her hand over her lips, shaky suddenly with this sense of time. Of weight. As if she was part of this great sweep of existence that made her mortal and immortal both, as if she had existed before she ever played a note, and she would exist after those notes stopped.
Which was what her music did—made immortality out of her mortal human experience, turned it into something that would outlast her life. But…she’d always had to rely entirely on that music to anchor her into human history. She’d never been able to be a part of it just by being herself.
“And then, of course, you have the Rosiers and the Delatours.” Matt curled the tips of his fingers into hers for a gentle squeeze. “By adoption. So yeah…you have roots here.”
Her eyes stung a little. She bent her head.
Matt loosed her hand to reach into his pocket again.
She took a deep breath of that peace and time. “I’ll give it back. Your land. I don’t need it.”
Matt froze. “You…don’t?”
She shrugged, trying to do this lightly, so that he didn’t see how much it cost her to give it up to him. “It’s not important to me like it is to you.”
Matt rocked back a step, almost as if she’d hit him.
Was she saying something wrong? Maybe he just didn’t understand. “I can write my music anywhere. The land doesn’t matter.”
He took another step back. Why did he keep looking like that? She was doing the right thing, wasn’t she? Healing the hole in his heart, no matter what it cost her?
“It doesn’t really,” she repeated, insistently. “All of this”—her hand waved to encompass the church with its time, the views outside of the Côte and the valley, this whole world of his that was so beautiful—“is secondary.”
“It’s what?”
She shook her head, trying to get at what she meant. “None of that is the heart of things.”
“You don’t care about it?” His voice sounded so flat, so numb.
Her words were coming out all wrong. Maybe she should have written this in a song first. With rewrites. “Not as much as I care about—”
“You.” His accusation cut her off. “And your music. And your fans. And your touring, and whether people are clapping for you. Not as much as you care about that, right?”
What? She stared at him, as shocked and hurt as if he’d slapped her. Even though she hadn’t been going to say any of those things at all, temper touched her at his tone, and she argued against the wrong thing: “Well, that’s my career, Matt. It’s okay if I value my career, isn’t it? That clapping you’re so contemptuous of is how I know if I did a good job.”
“And that’s more important?” His hand had come free of his pocket, fisted tight around something. The other hand flexed and closed. “You’re just going to dump this? All of this? Like some toy you got tired of?”
“I don’t—” She scrubbed her hands across her face. How had this gone so wrong? Wasn’t he supposed to be overjoyed and relieved right now? Feel whole again? Trust her? Wasn’t he supposed to be showing her that even if she gave up her legal claim to part of his heart he would still keep her safe in it? “That’s not what I meant.”
“You weighed them up, and you figured it out, right? Between your music and this. What really mattered.”
“It’s not supposed to be an either/or choice,” she snapped, anger growing. This was the man who hadn’t even gotten properly mad at her for lying to him, and now, just when she was making herself the most vulnerable, he was acting like this? “And you shouldn’t make it one. If who I am and want to be really matters to you.”