5

                                    

                                          
• • • ♡ • • •
                          
Francine,
                          
   I thought you were dead. 
                          
• • •
                          
I came back as soon as I could, and there was nothing. 
                          
The moment the war ended - the moment I had the chance - I came back to France. I came back to find you. I knew that there would be some evidence, somewhere.
                          
But the evidence I saw made my heart sink. Your entire city had been bombed to ash. There were occasional leftover steel beams, brick walls, and even the odd scorched tree trunk that jutted into the sky. The rest had collapsed into piles of burnt rubble. 
                          
Of course people had begun to rebuild. There were clusters of the town that had remarkably survived and were already becoming new strongholds of post-war hope. 
                          
I remembered where your house had been, on the side of the main road. I passed by its place in the ashy landscape and choked. The man driving the car, the man I'd met during the war and clung to since, spared a brief glance at me. His sweet eyes were full of concern.
                          
"I thought - I don't know. I was foolish to think there might be something left."
                          
The man, my dearest Al, sighed. The breath was more to himself than anyone, and pulled over. "Go look. See if there's anything left."
                          
Please understand, dear Francine, I married him to stay safe. As the war raged, he began targeting people like us, and like him. He watched a German soldier drag his lover away to a gas chamber, a young man named Armand. What Al did to be spared from the same fate was something he never discussed and I never asked him.
                          
He changed his name and we married to defer suspicion, and because no one else would bring us such intimate companionship through loneliness. He took many other lovers while we were married, because he knew Armand was gone. I knew he could only quench his loss by pretending to have found him again in other men.
                          
I never took anyone else. I believed that you might have survived. 
                          
When he pulled over I stepped out of the car with shaky legs. I almost collapsed in the ash of the piano. A few half-melted keys remained.
                          
I was breathing hard and fast but it wasn't enough to fill my lungs. Al just stood quietly by the car, letting me feel what I needed to.
                          
My hands were shaking so hard I could barely move my fingers, but I clenched my fists on the gold necklace chain you'd given me as I broke into sobs. I hadn't taken it off since we parted.
                          
I wandered through the ash, making circle after circle. I dug through it with my bare hands, covering my dress and my skin in the soot of our past together.
                          
I found pieces - bones. I couldn't tell whose they were. Of course I couldn't. I clutched one and cried harder than I ever had before.
                          
They'd burned you, my sweet Francine, to the ground.
                          
Yours,
Margot
                          
• • • ♡ • • •