Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Would the two of you like to be alone?” Lady Honora asked from behind where Rose and Christopher stood.
“If you don’t mind,” Christopher said without turning around.
“I’ll just be outside if you need me…” Lady Honora was quick to hurry from the room, leaving Rose and Christopher alone.
They had been holding hands when they walked inside, but Rose gently released Christopher’s hand and took a step back so that he could be alone. He did not notice, too swept up in the moment, too fixated on what he was seeing and what it meant to him.
Finally, he is starting to accept who he is. Better yet, he is starting to realize that he should not be ashamed of where he came from, because that’s what has made him the man he is today.
As to who that man was? He was a man whom Rose was well and truly in love with. Not the same person she had married. Not the same person she had learned to live with. But a transformed version of that, one who was real, and honest, and loved her with all his heart.
“I can’t believe she kept it like this,” Christopher said, almost to himself as he continued to gaze over the room. “All this time…”
“You did not know?” Rose asked.
Christopher shook his head. “I did not think to ask. No doubt, too, my father warned her not to tell me. Likely, he would have asked that she have it destroyed.”
“He was only trying to protect you,” Rose said.
“I know it,” Christopher sighed. “And I do not blame him. I just wish…” She was standing behind him, to his right, and she saw the smile spread over his lips. “I just wish he had been alive to see me now. To understand that what he did was not the curse he seemed to think, but a blessing.”
“I am sure he knows.”
“Maybe,” he said. “It still would have been nice. Nicer still if she had been alive for long enough for him to accept what he had done, even given a chance to do as I know he would have wanted.”
“And what’s that?”
Christopher turned to look at Rose, and she was not surprised to see tears in his eyes. “To have lived with the woman he loved. To have not given a damn what people said. My father and mother were happy, I know they were… but I guess he could have been happier.”
Rose smiled and walked to Christopher, where she took his hand once more. “I suppose that just means you’re going to have to be happy for him.”
“It looks like it.”
“Better late than never, too, I can’t help but think.”
Christopher laughed, something he had been doing a lot more lately. And then he turned back to look further over the room, and Rose could see the smile reflected in his eyes, just as she could feel how happy he was for this small moment in time.
I couldn’t be happier for him, too. Even though he has changed much this past week, even though he is finally starting to heal, this right here is exactly what he needed. Proof not just of where he came from, but who he truly is. The man whom I love, as he loves me.
The room that they were in had once belonged to Christopher’s mother.
Once Christopher told Rose the truth, and once she accepted this truth, they decided to visit his aunt to tell her that Christopher was sick and tired of running from his past. He would no longer hide who he was, and he would certainly not pretend to be somebody other than who he was.
His aunt had been thrilled by the admission, at which point she revealed that for all these years, she had kept Christopher’s mother’s room as it had been.
“It felt wrong to destroy it,” she explained as she led them to the room. “Your father wanted me to, of course, but I suspected that was a request brought about by pain, rather than a need to hide what he had done.”
“Did he ever find out?” Christopher asked.
“Just before he died, I showed him,” she said with a gentle smile. “And I knew then that I had made the right decision. As I am sure that you will be.”
It was a simple room, with just a single bed, a wardrobe, and a writing desk. Far more than most maids were afforded, but Christopher’s mother was more than most maids.
And while just seeing the room that his mother had once called her own might not have brought about a visceral reaction, it was what had been kept in the room that had tears streaming down Christopher’s face.
“I don’t remember this…” He walked across the room to where a large family portrait was hanging on the back wall. It was identical to the one that Honora had shown them both weeks earlier, only in this portrait, it was Christopher’s mother who stood over his shoulder.
“I doubt it is real,” Rose said. “Likely, it is a replica based on the other one.”
He nodded. “That makes sense.”
“But that your father sought to have it made…” She took his hand again, and together they looked upon the family that Christopher had never known. “He really did love her.”
Rose had thought that there was something wrong with the other portrait when she had first seen it.
She hadn’t been able to pinpoint what exactly it was, assuming it was the simple matter of Christopher’s mother not looking like her son.
Now, to see this other version, she knew immediately what the problem was.
In her mind, this was the real portrait.
This was the real family. She could literally see the love blooming between the three of them.
She could see how similar Christopher looked to both his father and his mother.
She could see the happiness that poured from them, and she wondered what life might have been like had their love been allowed out into the world.
“What else is there…” Rose asked as she looked around the room.
They found other items from Christopher’s childhood, things that he could not remember having made.
Drawings that he had done as a child. Articles of clothing that he had once worn.
There were also drawings of Christopher, ones that his mother must have held onto when she could not see him, and he even found a diary that he refused to read from.
“That is between her and my father,” he said once he glanced at the first page. “I think it is better to imagine how they were… if that makes sense?”
“It makes perfect sense.”
They were holding hands in the middle of the room, looking into one another’s eyes, basking in the midday sun that bathed the room in golden light. And as they did, Rose could see something in her husband’s eyes… a question that he could not quite bring himself to ask.
“Say it,” she said.
“What?” he balked.
She rolled her eyes. “No more lies, remember? Say it.”
He breathed out, and she could feel him relax. “You are free to say no to this…”
“I know I am.”
“And I do not want you to think that I am pressuring you.”
“You never could.”
“Being here, seeing this room…” He squeezed her hands further and smiled at her.
“I know when we married, I said that I did not want children. Or rather, that you were not expected to carry any. But this marriage, Rose, it is not as it once was, and I am not who I was once, for that matter. And now I can’t help but wonder…
” He exhaled and looked around the room.
She laughed. “Still, you cannot say it.”
“Have a child with me,” he said. “I want to start a family, Rose. I want… I want what my father never had. As I said, you do not have to agree, you are welcome to think about it, but it is something that –”
“Yes,” Rose said without hesitation.
He blinked. “Did you just say…”
“I said yes.”
Rose had not given any thought to children, but the moment that Christopher said the words, she knew they were the right ones. All her life, she had acted as a mother to her younger sister, and she had believed truly that this alone was enough to satisfy any motherly urges that she might have.
Now, she knew better.
Having a child wasn’t just about being a mother.
Rather, it was about having a family and raising that family with the person you loved.
She loved Christopher more than she thought possible, and just the thought of having a child with him, of seeing that child grow before their eyes… it made her want to cry.
Which she started to do.
“What’s wrong?” Christopher asked when he saw the tears. “Rose…” He reached forward to wipe the tears away.
She snatched the hand. “Nothing is wrong. In fact, as I can see it, everything is right.”
‘Right’ didn’t come nearly close enough to describing how Rose felt. But for now, she figured it would do.
Rose had never wanted to marry. And when she had, she hated the man to whom she was married. But that wasn’t so strange, seeing as the man she now loved was not the man she had all but blackmailed into marrying her.
The man she loved was kind. He was warm. He was honest. The man she loved was real in all the ways that mattered, and as she looked into his eyes, as she felt that love shine from him, she could not wait to see the man he grew into… or rather, see him become more of the man she knew him to be.
Rose was happy, and that was what mattered. And after all they had been through, all they had fought for, she didn’t worry too much about the future and what might come. Why would she? The hard part was now over, and the easy part was just beginning.