She found it where Michael had looked first. The wedding picture, old, faded, black-and-white, with the same smiles, the same joy and anticipation. And the answers Gen still didn’t understand.
On April 24, 1926, Genevieve O’Shea O’Carroll had married Edmund R. Burke. Her grandparents. Her own face looking back from yet another year.
Gen wondered how long she’d had him. How long her joy and contentment had lasted before being shattered on the stones of loss.
She wondered, even knowing what these women had come to lose when their husbands died in their arms, how they could have left behind their children.
Maybe that was why their memories had been so embedded in this old house that they had seeped into Gen’s life. Maybe it wasn’t their loss she’d been meant to experience, but their failing. She did understand, finally, why her mother had locked this all away where she wouldn’t have to face it. Where she could protect her own daughter and granddaughter from it.
Why, maybe she’d never completely destroyed it.
“It still doesn’t make sense,” she said out loud, looking down on this woman she finally knew.
Gen hadn’t realized how quiet Rafe was until he answered. “What doesn’t?”
And she turned to see him in the candlelight, ephemeral and faint, as if painted in faded watercolors. Unreal, unwhole, like a memory that had been worn away by too much retelling. It frightened her. He frightened her, because just the sense that he wasn’t real enough to last into the sunlight terrified her.
“If you’re this man—” she lifted the picture “—these men, why weren’t you here for me? Why isn’t Annie your daughter? Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to play out?”
But she was looking for answers from a dream, and he didn’t have them.
Gen began to shake as she wrapped Rafe’s shoulder in the kitchen. Around her the wind moaned and sighed. The rain and surf sang the same song. Trees clattered and shutters rattled with the probing fingers of the storm. Gen figured that the sun was probably up somewhere out there above the clouds. Beyond her island, the world went on.
But here she struggled as mightily as the storm to hold on to her reality.
It was beginning to sink in. All of it, from the first chords of that terrible nightmare to the terrible mystery of her devotion to a man she couldn’t have rationally known, yet had made love to as if she’d known him forever—to the shattering discovery that her husband, whom she’d only just buried, had come back from the dead to betray her. He hadn’t just deserted her—whether by accident or intent—callously disregarding her very real fears. He had coldly and deliberately taken advantage of her. He had calmly made his plans knowing full well what it would do not only to his wife, but also to his daughter.
Gen’s hold on reality had been shaky enough before. She was really afraid that it had been dealt a fatal blow.
She thought of what she’d been through in the past two days. She thought of what she suspected, what she knew, what she’d been told and given and robbed of. And even with the warm, vibrant touch of Rafe’s skin beneath her fingers, she wondered whether he was real. Whether any of this was real, or whether she was simply living out some terrifying dream that would leave her spent and silent when she woke.
If she ever did wake.
She didn’t even notice Rafe’s surprised reaction when she walked away.
“Gen?”
His voice brought tears to her eyes as she paced to the shuttered front windows. Couldn’t he be real? Couldn’t she know what those women had known? Couldn’t, once in her life, she be given a gift that wasn’t taken back? She heard him follow her and fought the twin demons of delight and despair.
She turned on him, her voice accusing. “Who are you?” she demanded, hand to chest, eyes wide, heart battering her ribs. She was shaking and pale, trying so very hard to put into words the impact of what she’d been through. Trying to sort out what couldn’t be sorted out. “Why are you here?”
Rafe stood still, never once taking his eyes off her. “To love you.”
But Gen shook her head. “That’s what Michael told me. Over and over again. Why should I believe you?”
“Because you know me.”
“I thought I knew him. I thought I knew myself, but I didn’t realize that I’d been carrying these memories in me all these years. I didn’t know I could love a man the way—” She stopped, her hand at her mouth, as if she could hold in the truth. As if it would make a difference.
Rafe stepped carefully toward her, and Gen fought the urge to run. He was so sweetly familiar to her, when he shouldn’t have been—his hair, his eyes, that sly dimple in his left cheek when he smiled. The pride he took in his land and his work.
She knew she couldn’t be remembering any of this, feeling any of it. And yet she was. So strongly that she thought she would burst with it. And yet, before she’d come to this house, she had known none of it. She’d lived her life in comfortable anonymity, never once expecting to be consumed by a passion of any kind. Never suspecting her own capacity for life.
She had grown, loved, married and given birth, not for a moment believing that life could be more than it was.
She’d been wrong. She’d never believed in a timeless passion, and yet that same passion was what had awakened her night after night. A depth of love and understanding and communion that a woman should never be cursed with, because after holding Rafe in her arms, Gen knew that there would be no one else who could fit there again.
And it was that devotion, that singular delight simply in the sight of him, that made her question it. Question her own sanity for feeling it.
