Chapter 18 #2
Geoffrey de Warenne survived in historical records.
I knew that already. But surviving was not the same thing as living.
Before me, he had been becoming harder year by year.
More isolated and strategic. A man who trusted numbers more easily than people because numbers hurt less when they failed.
And somehow, the psalter had reached across eight centuries and dropped a historian directly into his path.
Not to alter England. To alter him. Gold light moved beneath the vellum pages like living fire.
Come back or stay. The choice is yours.
My pulse staggered painfully as energy thrummed through me.
Footsteps sounded outside the chapel. Familiar. Measured. Heavy with unconscious authority. A second later Geoffrey appeared in the doorway.
He stopped immediately. The gold light reflected across his face and dark wool surcoat, catching in the loose strands of dark hair that had escaped whatever inadequate attempt someone had made to civilize it that morning. He looked tired, sharp-eyed, devastatingly handsome.
And the moment his eyes found me, everything else disappeared.
“Harper.”
My name sounded rougher on his tongue than usual. Worried.
Father William gestured helplessly toward the manuscript. “The book is doing something infernal again.”
“I can see that.”
The psalter pulsed brighter.
Choose once and for all. Now.
The pull strengthened suddenly, violently. Boston crashed over me in fragments, the vision filling the chapel. From a great distance, I heard Father William praying and Geoffrey swearing. They too could see my time.
My apartment. The smell of coffee, old books, and heat from the radiator in winter. Darcy yelling at reality itself if I somehow reappeared after vanishing for months.
Electric lights. Central heating. Endless hot water. Plane and cars. Phones. My friends. Tylenol. How I missed modern medicine.
And layered over those memories came newer ones now.
Castle walls at sunset. Geoffrey’s mouth against mine.
His hand at my waist pulling me closer with unbearable gentleness despite the strength in him.
The rough scrape of his jaw against my skin.
Dark hair falling loose across his forehead in the wind while he looked at me like strategy itself had finally abandoned him, like I was the most important thing in all the world.
For one terrifying moment I understood how easy it would be to surrender. To let the manuscript carry me home where life was safer, more certain. My hand trembled slightly at my side.
Fear crossed Geoffrey’s face. Not fear for himself. But the fear of losing me. And suddenly I understood this was the final choice. Not the proposal or the kiss.
The psalter glowed brighter still, flooding gold across the chapel walls.
The path is open. You have done what was required. Choose now.
I looked at Geoffrey standing motionless near the doorway, every line of his body rigid. A man prepared for battle. Prepared for loss. Prepared, if necessary, to let me go because he loved me enough not to chain me to his world.
That realization shattered something quietly inside me. Because Geoffrey had never asked me to stay. Not once.
He had offered me trust. Patience. Care. A place beside him if I wanted it. But never obligation. And somehow that made the choice easier instead of harder.
The psalter had brought me here because history needed more than treaties and wars and kings. It needed this. A man who had forgotten how to hope. A woman who had spent her entire life safely studying life from a distance instead of living it.
Thread by thread. Choice by choice. Until neither of us remembered how life looked before the other existed inside it. The gold light surged around me one final time. And I stepped backward.
Steady. Certain.
“I choose Geoffrey,” I said clearly.
The words echoed softly through the chapel as the vision of Boston vanished.
Emotion flashed across Geoffrey’s face so quickly it almost hurt to witness.
“I choose this life.”
The psalter blazed brilliantly gold. Then the light collapsed inward. The glow vanished beneath the vellum pages completely. Silence rushed into the chapel all at once. Heavy. Sacred. Final. The manuscript lay still on the lectern. Ordinary again.
Father William moved to stand in front of it. He stared at it cautiously. Then poked the page once with two fingers like a man verifying a snake was actually dead.
Nothing happened.
“I believe,” he said slowly, “that it is finished.”
My throat tightened unexpectedly.
Finished.
The path is closed.
No more waiting for another glow or wondering whether I would leave or be sent back.
No more pretending this life was temporary.
I had chosen. Geoffrey crossed the chapel toward me then.
Not quickly but with quiet certainty. He stopped directly in front of me close enough that I could feel warmth radiating from him in the cold chapel air.
“You stayed,” he said softly.
Wonder filled the words as relief moved briefly across his face so raw it nearly undid me.
My eyes burned unexpectedly.
“Yes.”
Geoffrey looked at me for a long moment as though he still couldn’t entirely believe I remained standing before him.
“Marry me properly,” he said quietly. “Before God and every saint in England. Not because fate carried you here. Because you chose me.”
My throat tightened painfully.
“Yes,” I whispered again.
His hand lifted slowly, carefully, like he still couldn’t entirely believe he was permitted to touch me. His fingers brushed against mine. The smallest contact imaginable. It felt enormous.
And somewhere beneath the fear and uncertainty and impossible complexity of loving someone eight centuries outside my own lifetime, I recognized something simple and startling.
I had chosen Geoffrey long before this moment. Not in the proposal or the kiss. Earlier than that. In trust and daily conversation. In the thousand tiny moments that had quietly become attachment while neither of us was paying attention.
Love, apparently, was less lightning strike and more medieval tapestry restoration. Slow. Intentional. Held together thread by thread until one day you looked up and realized the thing had become invaluable.
Father William crossed himself firmly toward the now-silent manuscript.
“I dislike that object immensely,” he informed the chapel.
“Reasonable position,” I said faintly.
Father William looked between the two of us with the exhausted resignation of a man realizing divine mysteries had become personally inconvenient. He sighed heavily toward the ceiling.
“I preferred matters when I believed she was merely peculiar.”
Despite everything, laughter escaped me then. Breathless and shaky and real.
Geoffrey’s mouth curved slightly at the sound as he drew me against him then, there in the quiet chapel while candlelight flickered across ancient stone and the psalter rested dark at last upon the altar.
Outside, Thames Castle carried on around us. Fires burned in the kitchens. Snow gathered softly along the battlements. Somewhere below, servants laughed over Christmastide wine.
Life continuing, thread by thread, choice by choice. And for the first time since falling through time, I was no longer standing between two worlds.
I was finally home.