“I know it sounds bizarre….” he finally began.
“No more bizarre than anything else that’s happened this weekend.”
He shrugged. “Don’t be so sure. I’m pretty sure I ended up on your beach because I tried to save your life.”
Gen was getting impatient. “We already established that point.”
But Rafe was already shaking his head. “Not now,” he disagreed. “Then.”
“Then.”
Another nod. “The year 2120. There’s another Genevieve….”
If Gen hadn’t been sitting, she would have had to. In fact, she thought of crumpling into a little pile on the floor. “My descendant?”
“Your great-great granddaughter.”
She’d thought she couldn’t be more surprised. More moved. She was wrong. Tears pushed up the back of her throat and stung her eyes. Her child’s child’s child’s child. Dear God, what a concept! To know before your thirtieth birthday that your name, your memories, would be carried on so far.
“And she’s... like me?”
Rafe’s smile this time was bittersweet. “I always thought she might have been. She has such talent, such passion.”
“But is she all right?” Gen demanded. “Did you save her?”
Rafe leaned forward, took Gen’s hand in his. “WillI save her, you mean. I tried my very best, but she was so despondent.”
Once again Gen was left behind. “Despondent? What are you talking about?”
Rafe took a careful breath. Had the courage to look Gen right in the eye, even though he must know she could see and understand every emotion in his expression. She did, and her heart stumbled with a terrible grief.
“Oh, no, Rafe. She didn’t.”
He held on even more tightly. Gen could barely feel his touch. She could only think of those other women, those faded, hopeful photographs her mother had locked away to keep her safe.
But Rafe wasn’t telling her about hope. “You see,’’ he said, “by the time I was born, your suicide has become something of a legend among the O’Shea women.”
“My suicide?” Gen demanded. “But I’d never—”
Rafe’s smile was gentle, sad. “They didn’t know that. None of them. You were found after the storm, fully clothed. Washed ashore. The journals were all out, the trunks gone through. Your mother had locked everything away to try and keep you from being obsessed by the legacy of the O’Shea women, but she found everything and reached the same conclusion as the coroner’s inquest. Suicide. It didn’t just renew the interest. Your daughter invested it with a kind of cult status. After your death, I’m afraid she never really recovered.”
Gen couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t imagine such a thing, such a terrible impact on her baby, and her baby’s children down to the fourth generation.
“But what about your... Gen?”
Rafe shrugged uncomfortably. “I was pulling a gun out of her hands,” he said simply, and held on tightly as Gen moaned with distress.
“Gen,” he insisted. “I don’t think you understand. You’ve changed all that.We’vechanged all that. We’ve stopped Michael and shorted out his plan to disappear. We’ve prevented you from dying, and stopped the O’Shea legend, just like your mother tried to do.”
“Annie...” Gen murmured, her eyes on the phone.
Rafe nodded. “You’ll have the chance now to teach her about the mistakes her ancestors made, and how you’d never make that same mistake again. And maybe she can teach her children and grandchildren, so they don’t go through it all.”
Gen couldn’t stop shaking her head. “To think that she would have ended up believing I’d deserted her, when I would have died trying to prevent her thinking that very same thing. It would have been a horrible mistake.”
“It was, Gen. And I think that that was why it was so important I come back. That I be here for you.”
“But there’s still something I don’t understand,” she insisted. “If this is all part of some cosmic karma kind of thing, where we keep being reincarnated so we can find each other, why didn’t I have a Rafe in my life? Wasn’t there every other time?”
