Chapter Forty-Nine
Tyler smiled softly at her, and it was the most soothing feeling she’d ever felt in her entire life. He was a beautiful apparition,
yet somehow still whole, exactly as he’d looked the last night she’d seen him, but there was no blood or injuries anywhere
on him. His presence touched every part of her body, her heart, her mind, her soul. She could feel his goodness moving through
her and all around her. It was the first time she’d felt safe since he’d died.
Helen set the gun in the dirt next to her and released a long-held breath. Two years of waiting were finally over. “Tyler,
I’ve been trying to talk to you for so long.”
When he spoke, his words were made of love. “I hear you.”
She wiped at her wet cheeks and felt the longing in her chest swell. “But you never answer.”
“I answer you, but not with words.”
As Helen stared into Tyler’s eyes, the present fell away.
She was truly herself again. Gone was the woman who had married a man she barely knew and maybe didn’t even like all that much.
Gone was the woman who had slept with an entirely different man just to fill the emptiness.
Gone were the rage and the regrets. Helen wasn’t perfect.
She’d never been perfect. But she’d once been a good woman with a good man who’d stood behind her and believed in her.
She’d been happy most of the time, and she’d been willing to fight the good fights and willing to try when the chips were down.
For a moment, she was that woman again.
“Tyler,” she said, “that night, there was something you wanted to tell me. What was it?”
He smiled softly again. “You already know, Helen.”
She nodded slowly. Believing there’d been a lost message from him was just one of the many ways she’d beaten herself up over
the last two years.
“I love you,” Helen said, realizing she’d always had the answer.
Tyler nodded. Indeed, those were the words. It was that simple. All he’d wanted to say to her that night was the exact thing
she already knew, the same sentiment she’d heard a million times.
“I love you,” he said.
His words reached the darkest corners of her heart and filled them up with light again. Here she was, finally, sitting across
from the man who had loved the pilgrim soul in her, and the relief was all-encompassing. And then an even more magical thing
happened: Tyler began to tell Helen things without even saying the words aloud. As she absorbed it all, the tears trickled
down her cheeks. He told her that throughout her lifetime, so many others could and would love the pilgrim soul in her. All
endings were also beginnings, and she would reinvent herself as many times as she wanted. Old versions of herself would rest
in peace.
Why did it have to happen though? Helen’s soul, not her lips, asked the question, and as his eyes melted into hers, she understood then that it wasn’t that simple.
Tyler’s life had been full of so many beautiful moments, so many of them with her, and that night had been one bad moment.
That was all. Everyone’s life was made up of good and bad moments.
His just happened to end on one particularly terrible one, but that didn’t make it more important than everything that came before it.
She was spending too much time reliving the wrong moment. There were better things to remember.
Tyler finally spoke aloud again. “You can let go at any time.”
His body began to flicker, fading in and out of this world and the next.
“But I need you here,” she said.
He smiled, this time sadly. That wasn’t how it worked.
“But you could come see me,” Helen pressed. “Visit me. Like this.”
He looked at her with such tenderness and affection. “I shouldn’t even be here now, darling. You aren’t meant to be staring
out windows or standing on riverbanks, waiting like this. We don’t haunt the ones we love.”
“We need to be together,” Helen said. But even as she said the words, even as they came out like a plea, she understood something
on a deeper level. Somehow there were things Tyler was still communicating to her that he wasn’t able to say with words. Because
all of a sudden, she understood that all those times she’d wondered if she was hearing him in the whispers on the wind and
feeling him in the leaves on the breeze, he truly had been there. He was inside her and all around her, and her connection
to him would continue to evolve throughout her lifetime.
“We’ll be together someday. But not today,” Tyler said. “It’s time for you to be brave.”
She nodded, because she now also understood that someday she would reconnect with him in some other time and in some other
space that was too extraordinary for her to comprehend while she was with the living.
As that knowledge flowed into her, it filled her with peace she didn’t know was possible.
In the next moment, Tyler was gone.