23. Chapter Twenty-Three
“Were you married?” I asked, touching the little pictures in those adorable frames. The kind that had the words “love”, “family”, or “prayer” engraved on them. I had seen them before, but only in the movies. There was nothing so sentimental in Alastair’s house. While there were photos of Yuliya and Jericho with their mother, and many of them after he adopted Rose, there was none of that hallmark feel to them. Like the families you might see on TV with the cluttered, cozy houses.
Our home was cozy, sure. But in a grand way, with my dark green house and the ancient furniture and the castle-like feel. It was so different from the little room I found myself in now.
“Aye, I’m married,” Ryan said, combing his hand through the hair that grayed at the temple. “I have two kids. They’re at school now. My wife is… she’s a teacher.”
I smiled, wondering if he had the kind of wife who liked books, the way he did. Did she wear a knit sweater, and walk around in plaid, woolen skirts to and from school? Did she have one of those messenger bags made of leather that clanged on her hip as she walked?
There was a picture in my mind of how Ryan ended up, in his large sweaters, and tweed jackets.
“I bet you read aloud to them when they were kids,” I smiled, still touching the frame of what must have been him, his wife and his children. They were teenagers, maybe? I wasn’t great at judging ages, but they were far from children, but far from grown. “Did you?”
“Aye, I did,” he said with a shy grin. “I did the voices and everything, like what we talked about back when…”
His voice trailed off.
Back before I disappeared. That’s what he meant.
Back when we used to walk these streets as children, holding hands and making grand vows that we would never have been able to keep. Oh, sweet Ryan.
“I looked for you, you know.” His brow knitted as he frowned. “For a year, I looked. I asked everyone, and no one knew where you were. Then, my mate came home from America. They said they saw you in New York.”
“Oh?” I said, tilting my head. “What was his name?”
“Blaine Flanagan,” he blurted and I recoiled from the name. Maybe he noticed, because he quickly amended, “Well, actually it was his daughter, Sinead. Blaine, you see, knew my Da. The girl, Sinead, was in here looking at books with her little sister. Siobhan, I think. Do you know them?”
I let out a fast laugh.
“Aye, I know Sinead.” I wouldn’t admit to knowing Blaine Flanagan. Not after the wrongs he had committed against my person. “Sinead is a friend. One of the few I ever had. She did me a great favor once.”
I thought back to the girl, Kira. To how I had given up my life for hers, in a way, pushing her and her baby towards Sinead, who was my savior.
“She once took in a friend of mine.” I almost laughed, trying to be cryptic, the way Jericho could be. “Helped her escape the life I was cursed with.”
I looked up from the numerous photos, having drunk my fill of that happy life. The kind, sweet, normalcy of it would have filled me with envy, once upon a time. But not now. Not when my own exciting man was waiting outside for me.
My sweet Jericho. The simple thought of him, and how he gifted me such closure, made me smile.
I turned to Ryan, and noted the roundness in his belly, and the softness of his physique. Not like my man, who was made of granite and steel.
“What happened to you, Aoibheann?” His face was so distraught, I almost felt bad for him. But I didn’t, because he had had a good life without me. He was happy here. Maybe I would have been happy here, had life been different. But I couldn’t be now. This life was closed, and a distant wish. A wish I was glad I was not granted.
“A lot of things,” I said, with a small sigh. “A lot of terrible things. But…”
I stepped up to him, taking his hand in mine, inspecting his palms.
“I’ve reached my happy end, I think,” I inspected his palm to the love lines. Two kids. One wife. He was living his fate. “And you have had yours.”
I flipped his hand over and looked at the back of them. I saw his long, elegant fingers. The fingers of a man who worked with the delicate tools of books. Not like my husband who worked with the tools of death. How different they were, and how different I had become…
“Thank you for the tea,” I said, letting his hands go. “I’m happy to see you so… ideally placed.”
He sadly chuckled. “I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”
“For?”
“I don’t know,” he said looking around at his modest cottage home. “I thought that I should have found you, and picked up a gun, or sword, and been your champion and brought you home… but I…”
“That’s not you,” I said for him. “And you would have just been killed.” He looked chastised, so I quickly added, “It doesn’t make you less of a man. If you knew what I knew, you’d understand that.”
I looked around at the house again. The simple wooden furniture was chipped. There were marks at the door, measuring the height of children as they grew, and the ages of the children at each height. I touched the markings for just a moment, feeling an ache in my heart for the thistles that had prevented me from having little ones. I didn’t know if I could have any now, at my age. But I realized that I would very much like them, with Jericho.
“You’re a father, and a good one from what I can see and feel.” I looked at the windows, to the backyard where a small playground of plastic was set up, along with an old, neglected pink play house. Probably forgotten by a girl that was too old to play with dolls now. “You are a good husband.”
I looked back at him, and I felt the sweetness radiating from him. In this house, a man and wife were happy. Children were growing strong.
“That makes you a good man.” I felt a hot tear start to form on my eye, and I blinked it away. “That is the truest mark of a knight.”
He looked embarrassed by my compliment.
“May I look around the bookshop one last time, before I leave?” I asked him, touching the sleeve of his Aran sweater, just for a chance to touch the rough fabric.
“Of course, Aoibheann,” he said with a disbelieving, gentle, huff. “You can take whatever you want. Call it a gift for all the years I failed to find you.”
I touched his cheek, and he smiled. The smooth skin of the boy I knew had been replaced with the wind-worn, salt-dried ragged skin of an adult man. A handsome man.
“Thank you for showing me what I could have had, if things had been different.” I leaned up to place a kiss on his cheek, and he let me. “I’m overjoyed to see you so well.”
I stepped away from him, and walked out the door that separated his family’s living quarters from the bookstore. I walked to the corner, where I knew there’d be a row of books on spirituality, and religion. Mystical things. That was what had drawn me to this bookstore in the first place, nearly two decades ago now.
I touched my fingers along the spine, reading the many titles, and smiling to myself as I recognized many of them. There were new things too, about the Norse Gods, and other Pagans. There were many on the eastern religions as well, which I found fascinating. But there was something drawing my hand further down the stacks until I felt a book tug at me, like we were opposite magnets, attracted to each other, and only settling when my palm snapped to the spine.
I pulled it out, and read the cover.
The Ancient Knowledge of Motherhood: From Conception to Birth.
There was no author. None on the cover at least. Of course there was an author. I wasn’t naive enough to think that this book was created from thin air. But it added to the mystery. And I found that I no longer turned to magic in order to have control over a fate that had never been mine. I was happy with the unknown.
I knew that it could not harm me, because of the King who stood beside me through it all.
I smiled, ready to walk out the old familiar store, a place that had been my happy past, and into the happy future with the man too good for me to have even imagined him in my dreams.
I pushed through the glass door, and heard the bell overhead, feeling like I had wings on my feet.
“Jericho?” I called out into the empty street. I looked one way, then the other. No one was there. “Jericho?”
I ran, my boots clacking to the end of the street to see if he was around the corner. But there was no one there but an old man going for a stroll. I turned around, running to the next corner, and looked down the side street. Again, he wasn’t there. There were only strangers walking up and down, going about their lives, as my heart fluttered in my chest.
“Jericho?” I said, louder now, hoping he would hear me. “Jericho?”
But there was no answer. My hands trembled. I felt like I was drowning. Like I was lost at sea. Where was my compass? Where was he?
He said he would be here when I came out. Where had he gone?
“Jericho?”