25. Chapter Twenty-Five #2
There’s a kitchen with copper pots hanging from the ceiling and a long table scarred from use.
A room filled with random instruments, including an organ.
I smile when we enter a room that’s filled with blankets and pillows, and has a window seat piled with them already folded on it, and when I ask what it’s for, he says I really enjoyed a similar room in a place called Bruges for many years once.
He wanted me to have a place of ultimate comfort and escape.
My throat clears at the admission.
And I keep waiting for the but. The part where the ceiling comes crashing down on me, or I wake up in an actual facility where the voice in the back of my skull leans in to remind me I don’t deserve any of it.
None of that happens.
There’s just quiet. Actual quiet. My head isn’t swirling with bad ideas and thoughts. My body isn’t singing from pain or anxiety. My bones aren’t aching with the thought of living one more day in a world I hate.
“Two more,” he says when we’ve circled back to a corridor near the top of the stairs. He’s practically vibrating. It’s the strangest thing to watch a man like him get excited. “I saved these two for last.”
He opens a door to a room with a long table, and on it, books.
Dozens of them. Some bound in cracked leather, some in cloth, some so worn the spines have softened and furred. Most are stacked while a few lie splayed open. A ribbon marks a page in the biggest one, and the air in here smells like old parchment and flowers.
“What are they?” I ask.
“Look.”
So I do.
I open the nearest one, and the page crackles, and there—pressed flat against yellowed paper, held under a strip of waxed tissue—is a flower. A beautiful pale-blue. Beneath it, in ink that’s faded to brown, handwriting that speaks of elegance.
My flower,
You turned seventy-one years old today, and you sat in the sun with your hands in your lap while you told the girl beside you that you had lived a good life but that something had always been missing from it, and you could not name it.
I wanted to tell you, but you were not receptive to me years ago.
Instead, I stood at your shoulder for many hours, and I refrained from speaking to you because you were smiling, and I could never take that from you.
You love the cornflowers in this life. You put them in your hair when you were young. They were perfect on you.
I will see you again soon.
The page flips. Another flower. Another letter.
My flower,
You said no to me on the bridge tonight. You said it kindly, which was worse because I know you do not mean to hurt me. You said, “I don’t think I’m made for anywhere but here,” and then asked if I would still come see you. I said yes before you even finished the question, of course.
You have many years left in this life, and I will spend each one at your side. Perhaps you will change your mind one day.
You’ve loved the white lilac ever since you first saw them behind your father’s cabin.
My hands shake so badly I have to set the book down.
“They’re all—” My voice cracks in half. “Ash. Every life? There’s a letter for every one?”
He’s standing very still by the door, brows creased together. “Every one. One thousand three of them. The flower in each is the one you loved best that life. You changed your mind constantly, and in some you favored more than one.”
I open another at random to a rusty marigold; the letter underneath is four lines long, and one of them says ‘you were happy today, and I will keep it for both of us.’ I drop to the floor as my legs give out. Ash lowers himself next to me a moment later.
“I gave them to you,” he says. “Each morning. I thought they would bring you some joy, and since I wasn’t able to give you my voice or the truth, I gave you the only thing I could leave behind.”
“I shoved them all in a jar.”
“You kept them.” He breathes, like it’s the greatest thing anyone’s ever done. “You had every reason to throw them out, and I wouldn’t have blamed you. Yet you kept them, and I have never—” He stops. Breathes. “You have no idea what that did to me.”
We stare at each other before I throw my arms around his neck, my face into his shoulder, and he wraps an arm around my back as I cry into a god’s shirt surrounded by a thousand years of him refusing to give up on me.
“You may read them for the next millennium if you wish,” he mutters into my hair some indeterminate amount of time later.
“I will bring you tea and read them aloud if it pleases you. I will build you a better table as well. But there is one more thing, and I am dying, flower, I have waited so long to show you—”
I cough a wet sort of chuckle into his shoulder. “Ugh, shut up, I’m all snotty and gross.”
“Get up.”
He drags me up by both hands and hauls me through the palace at a pace that has me stumbling, and I’m laughing—actually laughing—as he glances back at me with his face wide open and his eyes bright.
He shoves large doors open, only to pause when I inhale the velvety air. It’s cool and comforting, almost like it has its own relaxation properties.
And then I see it—the garden he’s told me so much about.
It’s nothing like I imagined, but so him. Different colors rise into the sky, a couple dozen feet tall at least, arches formed where the tops intertwined. Paths split in every direction like a maze, and I have a feeling he built this for the pure joy of getting lost in it.
Roses as big as my head. Lilacs heavy enough that their stems bow. Blue and white and orange and pink are everywhere.
And there, at the mouth of the nearest path, planted where I can’t possibly miss them, dahlias. Deep black petals with the tips gone a dusty rose.
My hand claps over my mouth. “They’re mine,” I whisper. “They’re all mine.”
He doesn’t say anything, content to watch my face the way he always has.
“Every life.” I descent the patio steps until the ground under my bare feet is cool and damp. “Every single one, you grew it. And you—Ash, some of these were a hundred years ago—”
“They have never once stopped blooming. I would not let them.”
I whirl to face him. He’s on the bottom step with his hands at his sides while his throat works, and he is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in either world.
“I didn’t know it was possible to feel like this,” I say—to him or myself, it no longer matters. “I want you to understand that I’ve spent twenty-seven years with a hole in me, and I thought I was born wrong, but it turns out I was just…I don’t know the word for it.”
“Homesick.” He’s exactly right.
“Yeah.” The heel of my hand against my left eye. “Homesick. For a home I’d never been to or knew existed.”
He crosses the last step and takes my face in both hands, and for once there’s no fabric or hesitation—just him.
His eyes search mine before he speaks. “You are home. Say it back to me.”
“I’m home.”
His eyes close, and he almost looks pained. “Again.”
“I’m home.” My fingers curl into his shirt. “I’m home, I’m home, I’m—thank you. For not giving up and for always coming back even when I kept saying no. Thank you.”
“Flower.” His mouth brushes mine, barely. “There was never any version of this where I did not come back to you.”
Behind him, the whole ridiculous garden waits there in the endless dusk, and every flower in it is one I picked out for myself in a life I haven’t remembered, kept alive by a man who did.
There’s no uncertainty within me as I kiss him properly, and for the first time ever, I don’t want to be anywhere else.