Chapter 14 #4
She got up and took a walk in the garden, thinking about Thor.
He wasn’t Bert. He was himself and he had his own special gifts to give her, and she had been too afraid to take them and love him in return.
She knew why he had come back to the mill, and she had pretended not to know why, and pretended to be his friend when she loved him too.
She had been a coward, while everyone thought she was so brave.
But Thor knew the truth. She wasn’t brave at all.
She was afraid to love him, or any man since Bert.
* * *
Victoria didn’t know where Thor had gone or where to find him.
She called the rooming house and they said he had checked out that morning when he left for work.
She didn’t think he would stay in Manchester without her.
It would be too hard, and everyone knew him now at the other mills.
She knew he would go to London. She didn’t know where he’d go after that.
But there was only one way out of Manchester.
He drove a company car and he didn’t have one of his own.
He couldn’t afford one yet. He’d only been back from the war for six months.
She drove to the train station, and Thor wasn’t there.
But there wasn’t a train leaving for London for another three hours.
It was the only thing she could do now. She had no idea where he’d go.
Maybe Yorkshire, but he’d have to take a train there too.
All she could do was wait and see if he showed up.
If Thor was her destiny, he would, and if he wasn’t, he would slip away.
She should have stopped him before he left her office, but she had been too paralyzed to move or even speak after what he said.
He had said everything she felt for him and never had the courage to reach out and grab with both hands.
And he had finally said it all. She couldn’t hide from it anymore and she didn’t want to lose him, and she had.
Victoria sat on a bench in the train station, watching for him. She was there all day, and he didn’t come. She had lost him.
She hoped he’d find a woman who had the courage to love him. He wasn’t hard to love. He had done everything he could for her.
He hadn’t come for the five o’clock train, and she was about to leave the station, but then she sat down again.
The last train to London was at eight o’clock.
It was her last chance to find him if it wasn’t too late.
She sat there hoping he’d turn up and she’d get another chance.
She probably didn’t deserve it, she thought, but she wanted it desperately.
Everything he had said to her had been right, except the parts about him not being good enough for her because of who he was.
He was more than good enough, and braver than she was to speak up and reach out to her.
Victoria didn’t see Thor board the last train to London, but as it slid out of the station and she got up from the bench she’d sat on all day, she saw him looking at her from far down the platform with his suitcase in his hand, wearing his good suit.
She was right. He’d been going to London, but he hadn’t gotten on the train when he saw her on the bench.
She walked toward him, and he met her halfway with his suitcase.
“You made me miss my train,” he said, smiling down at her.
“My place is with you,” she said simply, “and I don’t care about your being a foreman or a coal miner’s son, or whatever you come from.
It doesn’t matter to me. I belong with you.
I was just too scared to see it and admit it.
All I wanted was for you to come home from the war alive.
I was so afraid you would die while you were there and I’d never see you again.
” Thor looked down at Victoria and kissed her, as he had wanted to for years.
“The countess and the foreman, it’s a hell of a story,” he said. But as they walked out of the station together, she knew it was the right one and the way it was meant to end, with them together. “Let’s go home,” he said quietly, and put an arm around her shoulders as they walked to the exit.
“I was terrified I’d miss you at the station.
I’ve been sitting here all day,” she said, looking at him.
“I fell in love with you that night too, when you bandaged my arm.” He put his suitcase down then, took her in his arms, and kissed her again.
And then he drove her home to Wilmslow, and their life began as it had been meant to all along.
They had almost missed their chance until Thor was brave enough to speak the truth and she was brave enough to hear it.
It had taken them seven years to get there, but it was well worth the wait, and by the time they got together from opposite ends of the world, they were equals in all the ways that mattered to both of them.
It was a fair exchange and a match made of their respective talents.
It took a long time to find each other, but everything about it was right, and they both knew it.
It was a perfect match. And her place was with him.
They had come from their separate worlds to find each other and create a world of their own.
Two brave, strong people who loved each other in a place of their own.