Read Chapter 15: A Ghost's Kiss

The tunnel air hit her first—cold, mineral, tasting of iron dust. Camille pressed her palm flat against the carriage window and watched the black rush by. The watch on her wrist ticked. One minute. Then another. Each second louder than the last, filling the empty first-class compartment like a heartbeat.

She had stopped checking the time. The watch was no longer telling her anything she wanted to know.

"Camille."

The voice came from behind her, close enough that she felt the warmth of it on the back of her neck. She turned.

Julian stood in the aisle, more solid than he had been in weeks. His coat was dark and neat, his collar starched white, his hair combed back from a face that had once been handsome enough to stop conversations. He looked the way he must have looked in 1955, on the night he boarded the train to Nice. Before the derailment. Before the fire. Before seventy years of being torn apart and stitched back together by memory.

"You're warm," she said, because she could feel it radiating off him from three feet away.

He took a step closer. "I know."

"Julian, you're—"

"Solid. Yes." He looked down at his own hands, turning them over. "I don't know how long it will last. The tunnel, maybe. Perhaps longer." He raised his eyes to hers, and the look in them made her chest tighten. "So I need to say this quickly."

Camille stepped toward him without deciding to. Her hand reached out before her mind could stop it. His sleeve was wool beneath her fingers—coarse, real, impossibly present. He lifted his hand and covered hers.

"Marie-Claire is alive," he said.

The words didn't land at first. She knew the name—had spent the last three days tracing it through municipal records, through the Société's old ledgers, through the passenger manifest of the night train on that cold March evening. Marie-Claire Durand. Age twenty-three. Listed as deceased in the derailment records. Buried, supposedly, in a common grave at the Nice cemetery with the other unclaimed dead.

"Alive," Camille repeated. "The manifest says—"

"The manifest lies." Julian's grip tightened on her hand. His fingers were warm, no longer the chill of a ghost pressed against glass. "There was a body. They identified it as hers. Her family was paid to accept that identification. But it was not her."

"How do you know?"

He looked away, toward the window, towards the black nothing beyond. "Because I saw her. After the crash."

Something in Camille's chest cracked open. "After—Julian, you died in the crash."

"I should have." His voice was quiet. "The train derailed. The cars were torn apart. The fire came fast." He swallowed, and she saw the ghost inside the solid shell—the flicker of something less than human around his edges. "I was thrown clear. I crawled back to the wreckage looking for her. I found her bleeding by the side of the track, her leg crushed, her face—" He stopped.

"Julian." Camille's voice was barely a breath. "How long did you survive?"

He looked at her, and the warmth in his eyes was unbearable. "Three days."

The carriage swayed. Camille steadied herself against the seat. "Three days. But the records say you died on the train. Your body was identified—"

"I was never identified." A ghost of a smile crossed his face. "You think the Laurents wanted that mess? A dead war hero with his name in every paper, and a survivor who could talk about what he'd seen?" He shook his head. "The doctor who treated me was paid. My death was recorded two hours after the crash, before I had even died. I was buried in the hills above Nice under a false name, and Marie-Claire was taken away by her family before I could find her."

The train was slowing. Camille felt it, a slight drag beneath her feet.

"Her family," she said. "They took her?"

"They told her I had died on the train. The same lie they told everyone." Julian's jaw tightened. "I sent letters. When I could barely hold a pen, I wrote her letters, giving them to a nurse who—" He stopped. The edges of his form flickered, the warmth fading from his fingers. "She never received them. I know that now. I thought she knew I had survived, that she simply didn't want me. I died believing she had chosen to leave me behind."

"Julian." Camille's voice broke. "That wasn't true."

"I know." He reached into his coat. She hadn't noticed the gesture until his hand emerged, closed into a fist. "I know now. And I need you to do something I have been waiting seventy years to do."

He opened his hand.

A ring lay in his palm—a slim gold band with a small sapphire, worn smooth at the edges, the metal slightly bent as if it had been crushed and straightened again. Camille felt her breath stop.

"That belonged to her," he said. "Your great-grandmother. Odile's mother. She gave it to me the night we were supposed to run away together." He looked at the ring, and the pain on his face was human, raw, devastating. "She was ready to trade her name, her family, everything. I tried to give it back to her at the station, but she wouldn't take it. She said she would meet me at the end of the line."

Camille's hand trembled as she reached for it. The metal was warm from his touch.

"I held onto it through the crash," he said. "Through three days of fever and pain and a nurse who kept telling me to let go. I held it because I believed—" He stopped. Swallowed. "Because I believed she would need proof that I had not given up on her."

"Julian." Camille closed her hand around the ring. "What do you want me to do with this?"

"Find her." His voice was urgent now, the solidity of his form beginning to fray at the edges. "She's alive. She's old, but she's alive, and she has carried a lie her whole life. She thinks I died hating her. She thinks I died never knowing she loved me."

"Where do I find her?"

"The name she took—" He flickered, his face losing focus for a moment before snapping back into sharpness. "She changed it. I don't know to what. But she is in Nice. She never left. She told me once she would never leave the sea."

"Nice," Camille repeated. "That's it? That's all you have?"

"It's enough." He reached out and touched her cheek, and the warmth of his palm against her face was so present, so overwhelmingly alive, that tears rose unbidden to her eyes. "You have his eyes," he said softly. "Henri. Your great-grandfather. He was not the man you think he was."

The train began picking up speed again. The black of the tunnel walls was giving way to the faint gray of open air, moonlight spilling across the carriage floor in pale slats.

"Julian," Camille said, "I have to ask you. The watch. It started again. Why now?"

He looked down at the watch on her wrist, and a strange expression crossed his face—part wonder, part sorrow. "Because I found you," he said. "Because for the first time in seventy years, I have a reason to anchor myself to this world that isn't a ghost."

"Marie-Claire," Camille whispered.

"No." His thumb traced her cheekbone, and she felt the heat of him like a brand. "You."

The train burst out of the tunnel. The light was harsh, cold, impossibly white—moonlight reflecting off the sea in the distance. And Julian was gone.

Camille stood alone in the empty carriage, his voice already fading from her ears, the warmth of his touch dissolving from her skin. She opened her hand.

The ring sat in her palm. Real. Solid. Warm.

She closed her fingers around it.

"Nice," she said to herself. The words felt like a promise.

The watch on her wrist ticked twice. Then fell silent. When she looked down, the second hand had stilled at 2:23.

But this time, she knew, it was not broken. It was waiting for her to move.