* * *
Sophie woke as if she’d fallen out of her nightmare with a jarring thump, her heart hammering and her cheeks wet with tears. She sat bolt upright as she tried to slow her breathing and reconnect with reality, and her first conscious reaction was one of despair. She hadn’t had one of these horrible, recurring dreams for years.
Was this punishment because she’d fallen asleep thinking about Luc? Were they going to start all over again and make her afraid to even try and go to sleep?
No…
This felt different. Already her racing heart was slowing and the dark images her mind had thrown into her sleep were fading fast.
She could feel a remnant of the sensation of arms around her body but these weren’t trying to trap and hurt her. They were offering comfort. They were more like what she’d fallen asleep thinking about.
Luc’s arms.
This was what was so different. This was why the painful echoes of loss and fear and loneliness were ebbing so fast.
Sophie found herself lying down again, still imagining being inside that circle of Luc’s arms, her head against his chest, feeling the beat of his heart beneath her cheek. She knew it would feel like the beat of her own heart. Her own life.
That was what made it feel like home.
And that made it the most important thread in that confusing knot of emotions to untangle and keep. She wanted to hold on to that tiny ball forever but she also wanted to show it to Luc.
She wanted to tell him that she understood. That she knew he would have had and maybe stilldidhave, his own version of her nightmares.
She wanted to tell him how sorry she was.
He had loved Tom as much as she had. As much as Hannah and the rest of his family had, even.
Yet they’d all blamed him for Tom’s death. The whole family had conveniently forgotten that it had been Luc who had quite possibly saved Tom’s life by stopping him going off the rails and ruining his life with drugs as a teenager. They’d acted as if it had been intentional and not simply a stupid accident. It had been a unanimous decision that Luc was not to be allowed to attend Tom’s funeral.
There was shame to be found in remembering that.
And, for the first time, Sophie realised how selfish she’d been. The Baxter family had protected her privacy in her initial shock and grief, but she’d been complicit in that blame game by letting them shield her. By trying to somehow carry the shared weight of the grief that was crushing herself and Hannah. By buying into the unspoken verdict that Luc deserved whatever pain he might be experiencing because this was, quite clearly,hisfault.
Had she allowed Luc to be blamed because it somehow absolved her of having to admit that she had betrayed Tom in a different way? By being about to marry a man she loved but wasn’tinlove with? She had been willing to accept a love she would never have been able to return equally and Tom had deserved so much more than that.
Luc knew that. He’d loved Tom.
But he’d also loved Sophie.
There were more threads in her own knot. The heat of the physical pull had by no means melted the filaments of guilt and shame and grief. There was the new realisation of what she’d been searching for all her life, too, and the empathy for Luc that she hadn’t allowed herself to feel before.
But… what was also there that was making her heart beat more quickly and her skin prickle in awareness?
Was it love? Theinlove kind of love?
Or was ithope…?
Did she want to unravel threads like that if they were part of the knot?
It would be safer not to.
And what about Luc’s knot?
He might have burned that ball of threads, along with everything else that he’d risen from to start his life like the mythical creature he’d named himself after. Maybe those feelings no longer existed anywhere other than in memories. Or nightmares?
With a sigh, Sophie pushed back the covers of her bed. She might as well get up and make herself a cup of tea. It was unlikely that she was going to go back to sleep anytime soon.
* * *
