Read Chapter 29: The Choice of a Lifetime

The masked man’s smile was a crescent of polished ivory, and his eyes held the glint of a man who enjoyed his own secrets a little too much. He wore a velvet domino of deep burgundy, the kind that cost more than Camille’s peasant family had earned in a year. He gestured to the alcove, away from the shimmering press of the court.

“A fellow traveler,” he repeated, his voice a low, confiding murmur. “You speak of the future as if it’s a dress you can simply unstitch and re-hem. I, too, have seen the shape of things to come.”

Camille’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the silk of her borrowed gown. Every instinct screamed at her to listen, to believe. He knew. He had to know. But she forced her face into a mask of polite bewilderment, a skill she’d honed in the cutting rooms of Paris.

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, monsieur,” she said, letting her voice tremble with a hint of provincial confusion. “I am merely a seamstress, grateful for the Queen’s patronage. I know nothing of travel, save for the journeys I take in my own imagination.”

The man laughed, a sound like dry leaves skittering on stone. “Charming. The act is flawless. But I know what you are, Camille Dubois. Or should I say, Claire Martin? The needle you carry—it is not a tool of this time. And the locket… ah, the locket is the key.”

His eyes dropped to her bodice, where she had, with Étienne’s help, concealed the precious, recovered artifacts. A cold dread slithered down her spine. He knew about the needle. He knew about the locket.

“The portal you seek,” he continued, leaning closer, his cologne a cloying wave of musk and amber, “is not a doorway to a new life. It is a razor’s edge. To use it is to cut the very fabric of this world, to unravel everything that is and ever will be. You will not just be leaving, Claire. You will be destroying. A fire in a silk warehouse—that is chaos. This would be an inferno that consumes the past, the present, and every future that could have been.”

He let the words hang in the air, heavy and suffocating. “This timeline, with its king and its queen, its desperate peasants and its glittering court—it will cease to exist. And everyone you have touched, everyone you have grown to care for, will be unmade. Erased. As if they had never been.”

Camille felt the blood drain from her face. The image of Marguerite’s hopeful smile, the Queen’s vulnerable trust in her artistry, Étienne’s steady gaze—all of it washed away in a tide of nothingness. The warning echoed the baronne’s cryptic words with a terrifying clarity.

“Who are you?” she breathed, her pretense of foolishness gone.

“A friend,” he said, his smile widening. “One who wishes to spare you a terrible mistake. And one who could help you find a way home, a safer way, perhaps. For a price, of course.”

*A price.* The words snapped Camille back to reality. Her designer’s eye, trained to spot a counterfeit stitch, a fake label, a poor-quality fabric, finally took in the full measure of the man. The velvet of his domino was fine, but the gold thread at his cuffs was slightly tarnished. His smile was practiced, but his eyes didn’t smile with it—they were flat, calculating, like a merchant assessing a bolt of cloth. He wasn’t a traveler. He was a predator, feeding on secrets.

She took a half-step back, her mind racing. A swindler. It was a favorite trick of the court—claiming secret knowledge to gain influence or coin. This man was likely after her newfound favor with the Queen, not her reality.

“You speak of destruction and safety with the same oily ease,” she said, her voice steadying. “It is a talent. But I have heard that the Comte de Vaudreuil has been entertaining the court with tales of a man who claims to have seen the ghost of Voltaire and who sold him a tonic for immortality. A tonic that turned out to be watered-down wine.”

The man’s smile faltered, a crack in his porcelain veneer.

“And I have heard,” Camille pressed on, her confidence growing, “that another gentleman, the Marquis de X, paid a small fortune for a ‘prophetic’ map of the New World that was drawn with a modern hand. A detail, I’m told, that included a city called Washington that does not yet exist.”

The masked man’s eyes narrowed. He was not the only one who collected secrets; he had simply been foolish enough to peddle his in circles that overlapped with hers.

“You are not a traveler from the future, monsieur,” she said, her voice now clear and cutting. “You are a common charlatan, and your whispers are as empty as your purse. The only thing you will ‘unmake’ is your own reputation if you repeat such fanciful nonsense to anyone else. The Queen may find my stitching a novelty, but I doubt she would find your lies about me and about the fate of her kingdom amusing. Not after the fire.”

The man’s face hardened. He gave her a curt, mocking bow. “I see the seamstress is also skilled in the art of embroidery. Enjoy your time here, Mademoiselle Dubois. You have far more to fear from the truth than from a swindler’s tales.”

He melted back into the crowd, a ghost in burgundy silk. But his words, despite her successful rebuttal, did not dissolve with him. They burrowed into her mind, tiny, poisonous splinters of doubt. *To use it is to destroy this world. Everyone you care for will be unmade.*

Later, she found Étienne in the quieter corridor leading away from the grand salon, waiting for her as he always did. The golden light of the chandeliers softened the worry in his eyes. She told him everything, the charlatan’s claims spilling out in a hushed torrent.

He listened, his face unreadable, until she was finished. The silence stretched, filled only by the distant strains of a minuet.

“Well?” she demanded, her voice tight. “Tell me he was lying. Tell me he was just a fool trying to frighten me.”

Étienne took her hands in his. His grip was warm, solid, real. “What I am about to say may not be what you wish to hear, but it is what I believe,” he began, his gaze unwavering. “I have failed you in so many things, Camille. I failed to protect you from Drouet. And I have prayed that you would find your way home, a path I cannot follow. I have told myself it is because I want your freedom, your happiness.”

He paused, pressing her fingers to his lips. “But I have been selfish in my guilt. If your heart truly lies in the future you were torn from, then I must let you go. I want you to have the life you deserve, even if it is one without me. My time with you, stolen from the hours of this strange and dangerous world, has been the only thing that has made it feel like my own.”

His voice dropped to a whisper. “But if you were to ask me to choose, to save this world or to save one life—I would not have to think. I would save you, Camille. And I would accept the consequences. I do not care if I am unmade, as long as you are not unhappy in the making of it.”

Camille stared at him. The swindler’s threats, the baronne’s warnings, the terrifying scope of the choice before her—all of it faded into the background. Here was a man offering her an unconditional freedom, not because he didn’t care, but because he cared so deeply he was willing to be erased for her.

She looked at his face, so earnest and honest in a world built on lies and pretense. The needle and the locket, instruments of her escape, hung heavy against her heart. But a new weight had settled there too, one that felt less like an anchor and more like a foundation.

Her perfect skinny jeans, her brilliant career, her sleek Parisian apartment—they were images in a showroom window, beautiful but untouchable. This, this moment, with a man who saw her and accepted her, was real. It was a thread she had sewn herself, stitch by stitch, into a fabric that felt more like home than anything she’d ever known.

“You are a fool, Étienne,” she said, her voice catching.

“A devoted one,” he agreed.

She closed the distance between them, resting her forehead against his. “Then I suppose you are my kind of fool. Because I have been searching for my freedom, for a way back to a life. But I think, perhaps, I have been looking for a life I left behind, and missing the one I have been building here. With you.”

She pulled back, a new resolve hardening her features, the designer replacing the displaced woman. “We’re not leaving through the door. We’re going to burn the bridge. We’re going to find the needle and the locket, not to open the portal, but to destroy it. We need to make sure no one else can ever use it.”

Étienne’s eyes widened, a slow dawn of understanding breaking across his face. “You mean…?”

“I mean I am staying,” Camille said, the words feeling like a swatch of fine silk, smooth and right. “But I will not leave our enemies a weapon to hold over us or a door for them to walk through. Drouet has them, and he has a buyer in Vienna. We cannot let them fall into the wrong hands. Not for my safety, and not for the safety of this world.”

The plan was a sobering one, a commitment to a permanent present. But as she looked at Étienne, at the fierce hope in his eyes, Camille knew she had made the right choice. She was no longer a traveler lost in time. She was a woman who had found where she belonged, and she would fight to protect it.