Read Chapter 35: The Final Stitch

The grotto smelled of wet stone and night-blooming jasmine. Camille pressed her palm flat against the cool marble wall and felt it—not cold, exactly, but alive, humming like a plucked string. The third full moon hung directly overhead, silvering the opening of the cave.

Étienne stood beside her, one hand resting on the small of her back. The wound beneath his coat had healed enough to allow him to walk the long path from the palace, though his breathing still carried a rasp. She’d tried to argue. He’d silenced her with a look.

“You feel it too,” she said, not a question.

“I feel you trembling.” He stepped closer, and the warmth of his body cut through the night air. “Claire. Camille. Whichever name you carry when you walk through, I’ll know you.”

The needle felt impossibly light in her fingers. The locket, warm against her chest, seemed to pulse in rhythm with her heart. She had used the needle only once since the night she’d sewn the message into the smock, and the world had not torn apart. The stars still wheeled above Versailles. The sun still rose. But she knew, in the marrow of her bones, that every stitch had consequences.

“If I go,” she said slowly, “I go to a time where the Revolution has already happened. Where the blood has already been shed. I can’t prevent it the way I hoped—I can only build something better in its wake.”

Étienne searched her face. “And if you stay?”

“Then the thread I’ve already pulled begins to unravel in ways I can’t predict. The smock. The message. My own childhood.” She swallowed. “I may cease to exist in the shape that arrived here. Or worse—I may become someone I don’t recognize.”

He took her free hand and pressed it to his lips. “Then we build something better together. In any time. In any world.”

Camille turned to face the wall, where the light fractured into patterns that weren’t quite of this world. The outline of a doorway shimmered between the stones. It hadn’t been there moments ago.

The needle sang as she raised it. The silver wire, infinitesimal, glowed with a light that had nothing to do with the moon.

“I don’t know what will happen when I open it,” she admitted. “The portal may only take one. Or it may collapse. I have no manual for this.”

“You’re a designer,” Étienne said, a ghost of a smile crossing his lips. “You improvise beautifully.”

She laughed despite the weight in her chest. Then she pressed the needle to the seam in the stone and pulled.

Time folded. The air grew thick and sweet, like honey distilled from moonlight. The doorway widened—an arch of rippling silver, and through it, she caught glimpses she recognized: the Eiffel Tower a hundred years younger, then the glass roofs of the Louvre, then the neon pulse of a Paris she had walked only weeks—centuries—ago.

Home.

Her throat closed.

“I see it,” Étienne whispered. “I see your world.”

She heard the fear beneath his wonder. His boots were made for marble floors and muddy courtyards, not asphalt. His mind, sharp as any accountant’s, had no frame for airplanes or smartphones. He would be a man out of time exactly as she had been—only he would not wear a peasant’s skin. He would be himself, wholly, impossibly, in a world that would call him mad.

“You don’t have to come,” she said. “You can stay. Live your life. Marry someone who understands your century.”

“I’ve lived my life,” he said. “It began the moment you fell into my path. It ends the moment you leave it.”

He stepped forward.

The portal flickered—a warning, a question. Camille clutched the needle, and the thread she’d woven all these months—every stitch, every seam, every mended hem of her own broken story—pulled taut.

“If we do this,” she said, “we may never come back. The needle may close forever. Everything we know, gone.”

Étienne looked at the shimmering arch, then at her. His eyes were clear, fever long burned away. “In your time, am I dead?”

She hesitated. “You’re history. You were born years before I was.”

“Then I have already lived once,” he said simply. “I will do it again. With you.”

The portal brightened, as if it had been waiting for his answer. Camille felt the locket grow hot against her skin, and for a terrible moment she saw two futures branching—one where she stepped through alone and built a fashion empire that redefined Paris, one where she was forgotten, a footnote in Versailles’ diminishing accounts. And another still, hazy and gold-edged, where she and Étienne built something no single century could contain.

She chose the third.

She reached back and took his hand—not the wrist, not the sleeve. Skin to skin, palm against palm, the same way she’d held him when he fell beneath the chandelier. The same way she’d held him through the night that nearly took him.

“Together,” she said.

They stepped.

The world turned inside out. Camille felt the stitches of her own existence pull, stretch, snap, and reweave. The smell of jasmine vanished, replaced by diesel and coffee and rain on warm asphalt. The hum of the grotto faded into the distant drone of traffic.

Then silence.

She opened her eyes.

The light was artificial, fluorescent and cruel. She blinked against it, and shapes swam into focus: a mannequin draped in unfinished silk. A pin board covered in sketches. A sewing machine she had bought at a flea market, its pedal worn smooth. Her studio. Her life. Her time.

Her hand was still tangled with Étienne’s.

He was standing beside her, breathing hard, his eyes wide as he took in the room: the fabric stacks, the hanging garments, the laptop glowing on the desk. He reached out, slowly, and touched the screen. His fingers left no mark.

“This is your world,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

Camille opened her mouth to explain, to apologize for every shock he would face, to warn him about everything from the metro to the internet. But the locket had gone cold against her chest, and in her pocket, something heavy and familiar settled.

She pulled it out. A key. Warm as if it had been held by someone who loved her.

Étienne looked at it, then at her. He did not ask. He simply waited.

“Welcome to Paris,” she said, and began to laugh through her tears. “I’m going to have to teach you everything.”