Epilogue
LUCY
The view from this cliff has barely changed in all these years.
Obviously a certain amount of cliff erosion is to be expected, and the wind attacks us from three directions now that the church is little more than ruins, but it doesn’t change the comfort of the place one bit.
It feels so good to be home.
We’ve been away for a while. It was twenty-two years this time, holed up in a little farming village in the Highlands.
Elias was right, it turned out. Now and again, to evade suspicion, we’ve had to move away, change the way we look, sometimes even change our names.
It hasn’t been too much trouble, though, after the first time.
In fact, we’ve become quite the masters of reinvention.
But now we’re back in Whitby, my happy place, and my home for a good portion of the last three and a half centuries.
I moved here a couple of months after the weekend I met Bram, into his little cottage on the other side of the bay.
We married two years later, and two years after that – on our anniversary, actually – I finally convinced a very reluctant Bram to turn me.
It wasn’t a decision I took lightly, but I know in my heart that it was the right one for us. I also know, in my heart, that I will love this man for eternity.
It hasn’t always been easy, of course, but as I’ve learned from the hundreds, perhaps thousands of friends we’ve made and lost over the years, nothing worth having ever is.
Alongside them it feels as if we have lived a hundred lives, but there has been one constant through it all.
The marriage vows take on a slightly different meaning when you eliminate the till death do us part bit and the in sickness and in health bit, but the essence of it is the same.
In the end, it has all come down to this: we have loved each other.
We have loved each other through days, through years, through centuries.
Through soaring highs and crashing lows.
We have loved each other through each new name, each new home, each new adventure.
We have loved each other in grief and in hope, in success and in failure, in our best moments and in our worst.
Through all of it, always, we have loved each other.
It has been as difficult and as simple as that.
Our time together has been vast, but every time we come back to this bench in this graveyard in this town, it feels like it’s been no time at all – like we are still those versions of ourselves who collided in the annexe of Harker Cottage on that dark October night.
This is the seventeenth incarnation of Heartbreak Bench since the original, and I think that this one might be my favourite yet – all engineered wood made to mirror the shape of the cliffs around us.
It makes me feel happy the moment I sit down, especially when my husband sits down next to me and draws me into his side.
I catch Bram’s eye as he reaches for my hand, and though he doesn’t say a word, I hear all the things he’s telling me. All the things he always tells me, every day.
I love you.
I’m so glad I met you.
I would die for you.
I try my hardest to silently say them back, and when I see the faint curve of his smile, I know that he hears me. After three centuries, I know him like the back of my hand. And I know that I was right, all those years ago.
This is the kind of love that lasts a lifetime.
And far, far beyond.