“Gwendolyn?”
I nodded, even though it looked like he was lookingthroughme and notatme.
“Marry me?”
Every muscle in my body froze. Did I just hear him say what I think he said?
I tilted my head to look into his eyes, trying to feel what was going on in his head.
“I promised myself that if I somehow made it out of the ocean, I wasn’t wasting anymore time without you being my wife. My world. My goddess.”
“You remember me?” Dammit, now I was crying again.
“My mind may have had a temporary relapse, but my heart knew who it belonged to the whole time. It needed to remind my head, so we didn’t lose you again.”
There was no awkward silence now, and I had no issues lunging for his lips, connecting us at last.
“Be my wife, Gwendolyn. I’m not walking out of the room without you saying yes,” he murmured against my lips with a smile.
“Yes.”
We kissed and cried together before the rest of our family interrupted our reunion with congratulations on the engagement and celebrating Arthur’s second rebirth.
“What made you remember everything?” Lilith asked, and Arthur rested his head to the side of mine. We hadn’t stopped touching since his memories returned.
“She is the muse to my artist’s soul. When her lips touched me, my whole world exploded in color. Love brought me back.”
I couldn’t help but attack him with kisses after that statement. My world, my future husband.
Epilogue
Gwendolyn
Eight Years Later
“Woo hoo! Go Emily!” I screamed loudly as her name was called to walk across the stage.
The ten-year-old that first walked into my life, so unsure of herself, could not be seen in the now eighteen-year-old young woman walking to the dean of her high school to accept her diploma.
It wasn’t always easy. I barely survived her thirteen-year-old stage, but the demons who had inhabited her body vanished by age fifteen.
Her eyes scanned the crowd for us, and I gave her two thumbs-up, my smile stretching from ear to ear. Then I realized people were looking at me instead of her and I sat back down quickly. Arthur was there to grab my hand to calm me from getting too inside my head. As long as he was there with me, my senses wouldn’t take over.
“Emily!” The screaming four-year-old boy next to me, sitting on his daddy’s lap, waved his arms frantically to get her attention. I looked at Arthur and smiled; it made my heart melt every time I looked at my son in his arms.
Memories assaulted me, of our wedding shortly after Arthur was free from the hospital, to the moment Cora had checked my blood to see why I’d been so sick, which led me to find out we were pregnant, to holding that screaming baby in my arms and kissing his cotton-white downy hair.
Life had turned out okay after all.
I’d been so worried when Emily first showed up that I wouldn’t be able to handle being a family. But we made it work, and I couldn’t have done it without Arthur by my side.
After the graduation ceremony, Emily took pictures with her friends, and even stood next to her boyfriend in front of us, which was brave of them both.
Arthur may or may not have made a large wave crash into the kid when she first introduced him as her boyfriend at the beach on family day.
“Let’s go get something to eat. I’m starving. Should have stuck a granola bar in my bra,” Emily whined, grabbing hold of Wallace’s hand.
She took her role of aunt very seriously, even though he was more like a brother to her.
