Epilogue #2
His fingers closed around mine, warm and steady and alive.
“Come walk with me,” he said.
I glanced toward Agnes. “Will you permit it, or must I finish the entire tray first?”
Agnes narrowed her eyes with theatrical severity, then waved us away. “Go on, then, but slowly. Your wounds are still healing, remember.”
“Yes, mother,” Nicholas said.
Agnes shot us both a look.
I smiled. “We will not go too far.”
“Hopeless,” she muttered, though affection warmed the word.
Nicholas helped me to my feet, his thumb brushing once over my knuckles before he tucked my hand into the crook of his arm, and the simple contact sent a gentle warmth through my chest. It was astonishing, really, that after all we had survived, after all the blood and horror and revelation, his touch still undid me so easily.
We had taken only a few steps down the path when Hawthorne appeared from between the rose bushes.
The strange stiffness had not left him entirely, and perhaps it never would.
His limbs still carried that eerie, gentle grace, as though each motion required consultation with some internal system neither human nor plant.
Yet there was awareness in him now, steadier than before.
His dark eyes no longer slid past the world.
They held to it. They chose what to see.
In his long hands, he carried a rose—a single bloom, deep red and freshly cut, its stem stripped carefully of thorns.
He stopped before me and held it out.
Roses, I now remembered, had always been my favorite.
I looked from the flower to Hawthorne, and something tender and painful unfurled inside me.
“Thank you,” I whispered, my vision blurring with tears I refused to acknowledge.
Hawthorne blinked once, slow and solemn.
I took the rose from him, careful not to crush the petals.
They were velvet-soft, layered tightly around a dark center, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I did not imagine how they would rot.
I did not picture the edges blackening, the stem softening, the earth reclaiming them with indifferent hunger.
I thought of the brass rose-handle on our bedchamber door, and how Nicholas had shaped metal into a flower that would never wilt for our first anniversary.
I thought of every life this house had tried to preserve, every beautiful thing love had ruined and remade.
Hawthorne lowered himself onto the grass near Agnes’s bench with the grave satisfaction of a creature who had completed some important duty. Agnes immediately reached down to smooth one hand over his hair, pretending not to cry.
Nicholas watched them for a moment, his expression quietly undone.
“He forgives you,” he said softly.
I looked at the rose. “I know.”
His eyes met mine. The grief I had once watched there returned, but for a different reason now.
“It was not your fault.”
“I know,” I said again, though the words caught in my throat this time.
Nicholas and I had never really discussed everything that had happened to me after I lost my memory—those crucial moments between waking in our greenhouse with his lips on mine and waking in the hospital were the only memories I had lost for good.
He had offered more than once, but I had not been ready to hear the truth.
But now I was.
“Will you tell me?”
He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded. “If that is what you want.”
“I think I need to know.”
His jaw tightened, shame coloring his voice.
“After I kissed you, you became confused and frightened, so I sedated you. I could not bear to see you looking at me with such fear or watch you panic when I tried to explain who you were and what you had done. So I used the compound I had developed for Hawthorne and put you to sleep. I tied the ribbon around your throat, then I took you to the hospital.”
He glanced away, staring into the painful memories.
“Mr. Finch helped establish the story of your collapse and mysterious illness. I paid the physicians to go along with it and made certain you had everything you needed while I watched from a distance. But I never gave up hope. I began researching memory loss, hoping to create a compound that would bring you back to me.”
He paused, taking a deep breath and running his fingers through his hair. “Then he told me your condition was deteriorating and you were becoming desperate for answers, so we arranged for you to see my advertisement. I thought that I could fix it.”
I studied him, this man who had loved me absolutely, who had saved me and been forced to carry the weight of losing me anyway—and my heart broke all over again.
I stopped, turning and taking his hands in mine, his features blurring with the unshed tears clinging stubbornly to my lashes.
“I am so sorry, Nicholas. I am—“ my voice cracked, and I threw myself into his arms, hugging him so tightly that his heart beat against mine through the layers of clothing. He squeezed me just as hard, burying his face into my neck.
“Don’t be,” he breathed. “I would suffer it a thousand times to have you here with me.”
I pulled back, reaching up to adjust his ascot where the knot had shifted slightly to one side.
His breath caught.
“Does it still hurt?” I asked.
“Only when you fuss with it.”
I smiled and his finger brushed a single tear from my cheek. “Forgive yourself, Mellie. Everything that happened led us here.”
He spread his arms, gesturing around us. “If you were going to be immortal, my love, I was going to follow you anyway.”
He closed the space between us, tilting my chin up to meet his searching gaze. He bent, his lips barely brushing mine. “I cannot live without you and I certainly will not die without you either.”
His mouth came down on mine, the heat spreading through my entire body, pooling low.
Nicholas lifted his hand to my face and I leaned into his palm, savoring the touch, tasting sweetness and salt from my own tears, on his tongue.
His thumb brushed my cheek with devastating tenderness. “Are you happy?” he asked, pulling away just enough to whisper the words against my lips.
The question was so simple that I almost laughed. Happy was too small a word for what I was. Happiness belonged to ordinary marriages, to women who did not carry a garden beneath their skin. What I felt was stranger than happiness—wilder and less innocent, perhaps.
I looked past him to Agnes on the bench, still pretending not to weep while Hawthorne sat at her feet with his face turned toward the sun.
I looked at the roses, and the garden full of beautifully hungry plants.
I looked at Nicholas, alive because Agnes had saved him, alive because love in this house had never known when to stop reaching into the grave.
“Yes,” I said at last. “I think I am.”
His expression broke, just slightly.
I rose onto my toes and kissed him again.
His mouth was warm against mine, soft as petals at first, then edged with something rougher, something thorned and wanting. The pulse beneath his ascot answered the one beneath my ribbon, two impossible rhythms keeping time beneath velvet.
Behind us, Agnes made a scandalized sound, but was smiling despite herself.
Hawthorne tilted his head, observant as ever.
I smiled against Nicholas’s mouth before drawing back.
“I think I will be very sad to lose Agnes one day,” I said, his gaze following mine across the garden. “Do you think she would let us put the vine in her?”
Nicholas laughed, the sound deep and rich. “I doubt Agnes will let us come anywhere near her with a vine.”
The humor softened between us, and with it came the old ache. What happened would never be gone entirely, only changed by the shape of what had grown around it.
I slid my hand from his chest to his throat, feeling the faint life of the graft beneath green velvet. “I love you, Nicholas.”
His eyes searched mine, and whatever he found there made his face soften into something very close to peace.
“Never more than I love you,” he said.
The words settled around us like a vow.
The garden breathed.
Roses stirred in the summer breeze. Wisteria trembled, scattering fragrance into the warm air, and somewhere beneath the soil, roots twined blindly through darkness, touching, feeding, holding fast.
I looked once more at the rose Hawthorne had given me, its petals open against my palm, its color dark as living blood. It would wilt eventually. All flowers did. All beautiful things surrendered something to time.
But some things, if tended carefully, did not end when they were cut.
Some things rooted again.
Nicholas’s hand found mine, and I held tight.
We were not innocent. We were not the people we had been before death opened us and love reached inside.
We were something stranger now. Something grafted from grief and devotion, stitched together by hands that trembled but would never let go. We were thorn and bloom, wound and stem, hunger and tenderness growing from the same determined root.
Monstrous, perhaps.
But monstrous together.
And if forever waited for us, green and patient beneath the earth, then we would meet it as we had met everything else—hand in hand, scar to scar, blooming defiantly in the dark.