Chapter Twenty-Five
She haunts him. She has for centuries, but now it feels different. Her memory is less of a nudge and more like the frigid hands of a wraith gripping his heart. So cold, it pierces.
CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
Anna waits.
She fills her days, her weeks, her months, with little chores she makes for herself.
The cottage is brimming with food, the closets full of clothes that fit as if they were made for her.
There’s a greenhouse in the back that’s stocked with terracotta pots and enough hand tools to last a century.
In the cellar she finds jars upon jars of seeds, lined and labeled, beside the potato stores.
There’s even a sewing machine in the spare bedroom, complete with a closet full of fabric and thread in every color, and a box of yarn and knitting needles under the bed.
If she needs a pattern, she’s certain she’ll find a book of them hiding in plain sight in the extensive bookcase surrounding the living room fireplace.
Even if she doesn’t, there’s enough money hiding in the sock drawer that she could buy what she wants a thousand times over.
Khiran has supplied her with everything she could need, everything she could want. Everything except for what she wants most. Everything except for him.
So she spends her days starting seeds and prepping garden beds, exploring the surrounding forest and meadows, the beaches and the cliffs.
She goes farther and farther each time, mapping out the landscape with both bitterness and awe.
An hour in one direction and she’s surrounded by towering redwoods and a mossy forest floor.
In another, she’s surrounded by wildflowers and open skies.
Another, and her feet are buried in soft sand with the cold ocean tide touching her toes.
There’s even a town a few hours walk down the main road, brimming with shops of nearly every kind.
Anna could leave, take the money and go anywhere.
She doesn’t.
Because between her exploring and planting, reading and knitting, the sense of waiting—of expectation—never leaves her.
She finds herself searching for him between the trees, expects him to be sitting there in the armchair every time she opens the door.
Sometimes, when she wakes up from dreaming about him, she finds her hand reaching out to the empty side of the bed searching blindly for his warmth.
In eight centuries, he was the only constant.
Even when his visits were years apart, she was never left without the expectation of seeing him again.
Looking at the amount of resources he left her—measuring the amount of planning that went into it—feels like a bad omen.
She’s certain he had hopes that she would give up on him, that she would live her life in comfort here until she was ready to move elsewhere.
He underestimates her stubbornness.
She makes a habit of tugging at her ring.
It never slips past her knuckle, but the small act of defiance soothes the bitter edge of anger. She hopes he can feel it. Hopes with every tug, he feels the pull on his heart. He never does show, but Anna decides to embrace the habit, anyway.
She likes the idea of him being forced to remember her existence.
Likes to imagine that every tug on her finger is a tug on his heart.
She hopes it hurts as much as his abandonment does.
Hopes the ache of it fills his days and haunts his nights.
Mostly, she just hopes she’s not the only one suffering.
On the anniversary of his leaving, she brings a bottle of brandy to the same field they landed in. She lays in the grass, the flowers tangling in her hair and the clouds overhead turning shades of pink and orange in the evening light.
The brandy burns. By the time it grows dark, the jug feels suspiciously light and her vision swims. It doesn’t stop her from screaming up at every constellation that bears one of his many names.
She picks up painting.
It’s not something she’s ever really tried.
Her hands aren’t skilled in making beauty after lifetimes of labor, but her garden is thriving and she’s already caught and cured enough salmon from the river to last her months.
Even if it wasn’t, she still has more food stored away than she knows what to do with.
It feels like a good time to try something new.
Particularly since she found a collection of paints, small canvases, and a folding easel tucked away under some spare blankets in the wooden chest at the foot of her bed.
She takes it into the garden, tries to capture the way the light plays off the greenery, the depth of the reds in the strawberries.
The result is abysmal, a vague impersonation of the real thing, but there’s a beauty in the process.
A serenity in searching out and finding the tiny details that make a scene beautiful.
Her hands commit to doing a little artwork every week; sometimes simple sketches with charcoal, sometimes watercolor or oils.
By the end of the summer, she’s drastically improved.
Though, the end results are still far from what she considers good.
She continues the ritual anyway, finding peace in it.
In the spring, she convinces one of the local beekeepers to sell her a hive.
She carries the humming box eight miles; feels the energy and life thrumming through the wood.
She’s not sure how a mild curiosity and a stray book about beekeeping and pollination led to her committing to building a bee box and purchasing a small colony, but here she is.
She finds them fascinating.
The way each individual works for the good of the colony—the way the entire hive will revolt if the queen fails to help them thrive.
She reads that a sick bee will go out into the world and die alone instead of risking the health of their hive.
When it comes time to harvest, she watches the golden honey drizzle into her jars and thinks of all the effort nature has put in to it.
She finds far more enjoyment out of it than she anticipated, and over the years the colonies split and grow and one hive becomes two, then five, then ten. Soon she’s producing far more than she can eat—both in honey and in the garden.
So she buys a donkey and a cart, starts loading it up every few weeks, and brings it to the communities that need it. The donkey, to her dismay, is as stubborn as he is clever. It takes her three tries to fashion a latching system for the garden gate before he stops breaking in.
She names him Loki.
Partly because of the trouble he likes to cause, but mostly because she finds a great amount of amusement in imagining Khiran’s face when he discovers one of his many names has been bestowed, by her, to an ass.
Seven years on her own, with no Khiran in sight, and she looks around the cottage grounds and realizes it’s the first place she’s made for herself that feels rooted.
Sometime when she wasn’t looking, she stopped carefully planning for when she’d need to pick up her life and move, and started building a home.
Sitting on the front step, her hand wrapped around the white-painted spindles of the railing, she wonders how it happened.
Why it happened. She’s never grown so attached to a place, never nurtured a garden with plans that outlive a few seasons, never let herself paint pictures to hang in the greenhouse.
For the first time, she feels like she’s living for herself. Only for herself.
Her purpose is in the budding greens in the soil, the buzzing of the hives she’s helped grow. It’s in the books she reads in the firelight, the poetry she recites under her breath and feels in her soul. It’s in every stitch of the blanket she knit to curl up with when the mornings chill.
She’s close enough to society to visit, but far enough that she won’t be forced to leave.
Far enough from pain and suffering, that she doesn’t feel compelled to sacrifice her own happiness to fix it.
It’s both a freeing and guilty realization.
The next time she sees him, her hands are covered in dirt.
It’s been thirteen years. Her garden and her hives have expanded.
She’s taken to drawing murals on the empty cottage walls—delicately painted bees flit down the hallways and gather in the doorways, vined flowers creep over the windowsills.
Recently, she’s taken to embroidering similar little joys into the hems of her dresses and collars of her shirt.
It’s entirely out of fashion with what’s being displayed in the town windows, but it brings her joy regardless.
There’s magic in those few hours before the sunset—when the sun dips low and the world turns golden. When the tiny specks of dust become glitter and the leaves shimmer in the breeze. It’s a fitting time for him to choose to walk into her life.
She’s digging out potatoes, her nails black with soil, when she feels him. His gaze is a familiar weight, his magic a soft scent on the breeze. Her hands still, a smiled breath, and she continues plucking plump tubers from the earth.
Her anger, her hurt at his abandonment, has healed into resignation. She’ll never believe he was right to leave her, but she understands why he did. The haunting pain in his eyes, the sorrow, when he said goodbye haunts her often enough to see the love behind it. To see the sacrifice.
Anna doesn’t turn around. She lets him find his courage privately; lets his words be the first spoken since he was the first to leave.
“You stayed.”
She smiles, pulling two more potatoes before leaning back on her heels.
Her garden is still in full bloom, the warmth of the July sun fueling bursts of color throughout.
“I did. I’ve seen a good bit of the world.
Someday, I’ll see more. But, for now, this is as good a place as any.
” She pushes her hair away from her face, admiring her work.
“Besides, it’s rather beautiful here, and the weather’s mild. ”