I found his studio three days with the help of Thomas.

  The landlord—a stout woman with kind eyes and flour on her apron—let me in without question. She'd seen my face in his sketches, pinned to every wall like an obsession. "You were his angel," she said in rough French, crossing herself. "He called for you at the end. 'Jeanne,' he would say. 'Jeanne, je te vois.' He saw you everywhere."

  The studio smelled of turpentine and death—that sweet, cloying undertone of illness that no amount of open windows could purge. His easel stood by the window, a half-finished canvas catching the grey Paris light. Another woman's face. My face. Emerging from shadow like a memory struggling to be born.

  I couldn't breathe.

  The bed was still unmade, the sheets tangled from his final fever. A cup of cold tea sat on the nightstand beside a small leather journal. I know shouldn't have opened it but I opened it anyway.

  After reading, I closed the journal. I pressed it to my chest, to the hollow space where my heart should have been, and I wept. Not the graceful tears of a grieving lover. Ugly, heaving sobs that I muffled with my fist because I was afraid—afraid that if I let the sound out, it would never stop.

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  He had died searching for me. He had died KNOWING, in some deep, fractured way, that I was real, that I was out there, that we belonged to each other across the impossible gulfs of time.

  And I had been blocks away. Trapped by quarantine. Unable to reach him. Unable to hold his hand, to kiss his forehead, to whisper in his ear: I'm here. I've always been here. I will always find YOU.

  I stayed until dawn. Before I left, I took one sketch—the smallest one, tucked behind his mirror as if he couldn't bear to see it every day but couldn't bear to hide it completely.

  A woman's face, my face, emerging from shadow. On the back, in his cramped hand: "If I find her in this life, I will never let her go."

  I woke with tears on my face and his name on my lips—not his modern name, but the one I had whispered against his skin in a different century, in a different life.

  The name hung in the darkness of my bedroom, a ghost from a past so distant it felt like a dream within a dream.

  I lay still for a long moment, letting the grief of the memories wash over me and then recede. It always receded, eventually. It had to. If it didn't, I would have drowned in it centuries ago.

  But tonight, the grief felt different. Sharper. More present.

  Because he was here. In this city. In this century. Alive and breathing and walking through parks at night, staring at water as if searching for something he couldn't name.

  And I had run from him.

  Again.