Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Lennon
The ceiling is back.
I wake up on the floor of Seraphine’s living room with the taste of cold air still in my mouth and a crying sound somewhere above me.
The incense is out. What’s left is only a burned-down stick, and the record has stopped. The morning is coming in gray and ordinary through the curtains.
I lift my hand in front of my face out of pure habit.
Five normal fingers.
Awake.
The crying comes again.
I turn my head toward it and find Mabel kneeling by the couch, and on the couch is Seraphine, lying on her back with her silver hair spread out, her hands folded over her chest, and every crystal she owns laid out along her body in lines and clusters, the way Jasper does it, except Jasper isn’t here.
Her eyes are closed.
She isn’t going to wake up again.
I know it before I know how I know it.
Around her throat, on the chain that was around mine when I went under, is the moonstone.
My hand goes to my chest. It’s bare, the chain gone.
The warmth that has been sitting against my breastbone for weeks, the little weight I’d stopped noticing because it had become part of me, gone, lying now against the still throat of a woman who isn’t here anymore.
“Oh, no.” I get up, and even if my legs barely work yet, I cross to her. “What happened? How did… shit. What happened?”
Mabel doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she reaches into the pocket of her cardigan and pulls out a tarot card, holding it out without looking at me.
“She told me to give you this. She said, “When it’s done, give it to the girl.” ”
I take it from her.
The Lovers.
I turn it over to find a note written in a looping, shaky hand.
Love him the way he deserves.
I read it twice, but the text doesn’t shift.
Awake.
I turn to look at the still-sleeping Nevan on the floor.
She wants me to love her son the way he deserves.
And I think about her in the garden with her basket on her hip, tapping this exact stone against my chest.
“Sometimes we have to sacrifice ourselves for the people we love.”
I thought she meant me. I thought she was warning me about what I’d have to do.
“She sacrificed herself,” I whisper when I turn toward Mabel again. “She… that was her. In there. At the end. She’s the one who…”
Mabel makes a sound that’s half a sob and half something sharper, almost a laugh. “That,” she says, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Was not a sacrifice, even if she’d probably want it to look as if it was.”
I stare at her.
“She got exactly what she wanted, who she wanted. She’s been wanting it for decades.
” Mabel looks at her oldest friend lying on the couch, while her chin trembles slightly.
“Saving your friend was a happy accident… a side effect. Don’t you dare put a halo on that woman’s head.
I love her, but she doesn’t deserve it.”
“What?”
Behind me, the others are surfacing.
Paul first, sitting up fast, his dark eyes going straight to me, checking in, so I give him a small smile.
Then Ridge wakes up with a sharp inhale and immediately finds my face.
Nevan sits up slowly, blinking, his gaze landing on the couch, on his mother, and the crystals.
He rises, then helps Ridge into his chair as if it’s nothing, before they all come to me.
They cross the room and crowd in close around where I’m standing with the card in my hand.
“What’s going on?” Nevan asks, his eyes flicking from Mabel to Seraphine.
“She’s a selfish thing, isn’t she? Even now, she leaves it to me to explain herself.”
Mabel sighs, and Nevan frowns at her. “Mabel, what are you…”
“A long time ago,” she starts. “Seraphine fell in love with a man in her dreams.”
No, it can’t be.
Can it?
“She used to tell me about him. This beautiful man, in this beautiful place… she called it elsewhere, where the two of them could be together and stay together, and nothing could touch them but the fact that she had to wake up every day. She said it was more real than anything out here. More real than me.” Mabel’s mouth twists. “More real than her boys.”
Ouch.
I turn to look, but Nevan doesn’t move, so I reach over and find his hand.
It’s freezing. That’s how I notice I’m cold too.
The window behind Seraphine is cracked open, enough for a thin draft to slip through, lifting the ends of her silver hair off her shoulders and setting them drifting like she’s underwater.
“She couldn’t go to him, though. Couldn’t stay there, couldn’t cross over, because every time she tried, something pulled her back.
” Mabel looks at Nevan, and her face breaks open with a tenderness so old it hurts to look at.
“You. She couldn’t let go of you, even for him.
She came back every single time, and she hated it.
She came back anyway, because you were her tether. ”
“Then why,” Nevan asks, and the hurt in his voice almost takes my knees out. “Why didn’t she untether from me? Why didn’t she let go and stay with him?”
“Even a bad mother can love her child,” Paul murmurs.
A shuddering breath comes out of Nevan, and I squeeze his hand tighter.
“Apparently, the man in her dreams didn’t like that at all. Didn’t like that your mother chose you over elsewhere with him.”
Is that the reason Lucien tortured him in his sleep for years?
Because he was jealous that his mother chose him?
Nevan’s face does something I will see for the rest of my life. “He tortured me,” he says slowly. “Because my mom loved me.”
Is that why he made him promise to stay away from her? Because he thought if Nevan let go of her, she’d have nothing holding her back? That she would finally come to him, then?
God, Lucien, you are pathetic.
“Because she wouldn’t stop loving you,” I agree, handing him the tarot card. “Either of you.”
It takes him a moment to read what’s written on it, but then he makes a sound, and I pull him into my side.
“Wait.” Ridge’s voice is still rough from sleep. “But Seraphine was stuck in Jasper’s dreams. If she wanted to be with This Man so badly, how’d she end up trapped in her kid’s subconscious instead?”
Mabel nods like she’s been waiting for the question. “Because she promised him.”
“Nobody is ever going to promise anything to anyone again under my roof,” Paul mutters, and if Nevan weren’t still shaking against my side, I would have laughed at that.
“When she finally made her choice, the last clear choice she ever made, she chose the boys. She told the love of her life she wasn’t going to stay with him.
And he didn’t take it well.” Mabel’s jaw works.
“She told me he asked her to promise that if she wouldn’t be with him, then she’d go somewhere he could never find her, never reach her, never see her again, so he wouldn’t have to keep hurting, looking at a door she’d never walk through again. ”
Yeah, that sounds like Lucien.
“And she promised him that?” Ridge asks.
Mabel nods. “But somehow, that promise put her exactly where she asked to be. Somewhere he could never find her, because he didn’t know of Jasper.
His subconscious was the safest, most hidden place she had left.
Where her boy needed her, and where the man who loved her would never, ever think to look. ”
Shit.
Holy-fucking-shit.
“That’s why she needed all the promises gone.
” Paul looks at me. “Not just Tessa’s or Nevan’s.
Hers. The promise she made him was holding her inside Jasper’s dreamscape, and as long as it held, she could never reach elsewhere.
The only way to free her was for Lucien to release every promise he’d ever taken, including the one that locked her away from him in the first place. ”
“Seraphine, you little minx,” Ridge says slowly, and there’s something like awe in it. “Telling us about your plan to break Tessa free through Jasper. And not one of us clocked that the whole point was getting you free.”
“It was both,” Mabel disagrees. “Helping your friend out was real. She just had her own door to walk through while she did it.”
I think about the dark. The door opening a second time after Nevan got thrown out, the figure stepping through that I thought was him coming back.
Freed at last, walking into the place that had been hers from the start.
“He recognized her. Even with the wrong face on. He looked at her and knew exactly who she was.” I turn to Ridge. “So did you.”
“I saw her in Jasper’s dream before.” He shrugs. “I just knew.”
“A soul recognizes a soul it knows from dreams elsewhere,” Mabel explains.
“Wait.” I turn toward her again. “So he would have always known that it was me and not Tessa? He would have known each of us?”
She nods, and now I have to hold myself back from strangling the sleeping woman in front of me.
“What was even the point of this?” If I hadn’t promised Nevan I’d stay with him, I would have been the one never to open my eyes again.
Was it to buy her time?
To make Lucien feel like he already won, because we were being stupid about it?
Okay, Seraphine, I hate you a little.
“I think the point was to give him a reason to release the promises, and make sure nobody would try to stop her,” Mabel murmurs, stroking a strand of hair off Seraphine’s temple, but her eyes flick to Nevan, who is pale around the nose and eyes.
He looks like he’s coming to terms with the fact that his mother isn’t coming back.
She picked the life she wanted to live.
“Damn, Seraphine,” Ridge says quietly, looking at the still figure on the couch. “I did not give you enough credit.”
I look at the moonstone on her throat again. I started to think of it as mine, but it never was. It was only ever on loan from a woman who needed it back to make the crossing she’d been dreaming of her whole sick, lonely, loving life.
I’m going to miss it like a limb.
Mabel follows my eyes to the stone, and she sighs.
“Sera and I were friends for sixty years,” she muses.
“I knew all of it. I watched her fall into this hole inch by inch and couldn’t pull her out.
” Her eyes find Nevan’s. “When the sickness started, and she started forgetting and slipping, I took the crystal off her and hid it in Jasper’s collection, because I thought without it, without her anchor, maybe she couldn’t go so deep.
Maybe she’d come back to us. Maybe I could give those boys their mother back.
” She presses her hand to her mouth. “But she was already gone by then. The sickness had her. I didn’t save anyone.
I took her favorite thing away in her last clear years for nothing. ”
“Not for nothing,” I say, because I can’t not. “It came to me to help Tessa and give Seraphine what she wanted in the end. So it did exactly what she wanted. It took the long way around.”
“Still, I’m so sorry I couldn’t give you your mother back, Nevan.”
Nevan reaches out to put a hand on Mabel’s arm. “I never had her in the first place, but I had you.”
“And we have you now,” Paul tells him.
Nevan doesn’t answer. He nods once, but a small smile tugs at his lips, making my heart feel a little lighter.
Morning light spills across the floorboards, touching Seraphine’s still hands, the moonstone at her throat, the scattered crystals around her like tiny fallen stars.
There is nothing left to fight.
My phone rings with that obnoxious ringtone Jasper gave me.
It’s loud in the quiet room, and I almost don’t answer it.
I almost let it go, because how could anything else happen today?
How is there room for one more thing? However, the screen reads Derek, and with a jolt, I remember what actually just happened.
My heart is in my throat before my thumb even moves.
“Derek! Shit, Derek, how is she? Did she wake up? Is she…”
There’s a fumbling sound, then a few slow breaths, and then a voice I haven’t heard in twelve years.
Not in waking life.
Not with my actual ears.
A voice I have only heard inside dreams, and it’s so rough, cracked, and small from twelve years of silence that it barely makes it down the line at all.
But it’s hers.
“Lenny.”
“Tessa.” I’m already moving toward the door.
“Come to me.”