Page 157

The letter rested in my hands long after I had finished.

My body shook—not gently, not the polite trembling of contained grief, but the deep, wrenching shudders of something breaking open. His words had undone me. Every careful wall I had built since waking in this century, every measured breath, every moment of holding myself together—gone.

For loving you was worth the breaking.

I read the line again. And again. Until the words blurred and I had to close my eyes just to breathe.

He had written that. He had lived the rest of his years without me and still believed that loving me was worth every moment of loss. Not despite the pain. Because of it.

The sob that rose from my chest was not quiet. It tore through me—raw and animal and ancient. I bent forward, folding around the letter as though I could pull him through time by sheer will, and I wept the way I had not allowed myself to weep since I arrived.

I wept for the mornings I would never have with him. For the arguments we would never finish. For the way he used to say my name—Lily—like it was the only word that mattered.

I wept for the children we would never raise and the quiet evenings we would never share and the slow greying of his hair that I would never see except in photographs.

I wept because he had watched me burn and made the hardest choice of his life, and I had not been able to tell him it was the right one.

The bond in my chest ached—but not with absence.

It pulsed, warm, steady, present.

I pressed my hand to my sternum, gasping, because I had expected silence. I had expected the hollow echo of a connection stretched too thin across time. But this was not hollow. This was not thin.

It was him.

Not his voice. Not his thoughts. But the essential truth of him—the part that had tangled with my soul so completely that death itself could not sever it. The bond did not care that he had been gone for decades. It did not care that his body had long since returned to the earth. It only knew that he was mine and I was his, and that some things do not end simply because they change form.

He was my heartbeat now. Not a memory. Not a ghost. Something deeper. Something woven into the fabric of who I was.

Even if the very heavens fall, I shall find you again in every lifetime.

He had promised. And the bond—the impossible, unbreakable bond—was his way of keeping it.

I don't know how long I sat there, bent over his letter, letting the grief move through me. Long enough that the light changed. Long enough that my tears dried and fell and dried again. Long enough that my mother knocked softly on the door and asked if I was alright, and I managed to say yes without my voice breaking.

When the storm finally quieted, I was not empty.

Scoured. Clean. As if breaking had been the only way through.

The photograph lay beside me on the bed. I picked it up again, even though I knew it would hurt.

He was older than I had ever allowed myself to imagine. Lines marked the corners of his eyes—laugh lines, I realized. Not pain. Laughter. His shoulders had broadened, thickened with years of living. His hair had gone silver at the temples, and there was a steadiness in his posture that spoke of a man at peace with himself.

There was no shadow in his gaze. No vacancy. No hollow where the weapon used to live.

He had not withered without me. He had endured.

And somehow, impossibly, that broke me all over again.

Because it meant he had woken each day in a world where I no longer existed and still chose to rise. He had walked through streets we once walked together, knowing I would not turn the corner. He had raised Marigold, attended her wedding, held her children, and done all of it carrying the weight of a love he could never speak aloud.

He had loved me in absence—and had not allowed that love to curdle into ruin the way his mother's loss had done his father's.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered. For leaving. For surviving. For asking him to choose my life over his heart.

But the bond pulsed warm in response, and I understood—with sudden, devastating clarity—that he would not want my apology. He had made his choice with open eyes. He had written that letter not to make me grieve, but to make me live.

I pressed the page to my chest and breathed.