And to tell her.
“I don’t know how it happened and when, but it happened. I tried to repress what I felt and told her that I wasn’t right for her, tried to push her away from me.”
“But Ciara wouldn’t let you,” he concludes with a smile. “She’s hard-headed and doesn’t give up.”
“And I let myself by taken in. I simply got lost in her, in her eyes and in her light, her heart… and now I don’t want to go back. I don’t have any intention, therefore, if you’re here to tell me that I have to renounce her, to stay away from her… Know that you’re only wasting your time and that you won’t convince me even with your threats.”
Patrick nods and stamps on his cigarette butt. “You know that she’s been in love with you forever?”
I look at him, frowning.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that, I notice everything. If I made you make that stupid promise, it was so that none of you tried it on with any of my sisters. I didn’t mean that you couldn’tfall in lovewith one of them. And after what you did tonight, I don’t think she could be in better hands.”
“I’m in trouble, Patrick.”
“And I’ll do whatever it takes to get you out of it,” he says, staring at me. “And now go to her. She was worried about you.”
We walk through the door and Rain is around my neck a second later.
“I’m fine, Rain,” I tell her.
She hugs me tightly.
“I’m sorry for the trouble I caused,” I go on. “I beg you to forgive me.”
“Don’t talk that way! Ciara needed you.”
“Aaron?” Patrick’s mother comes to me as Rain steps aside to make way for her.
She embraces me. “I will never be able to thank you enough for what you did tonight. You saved my daughter.”
“Sarah, please, don’t—”
“Now go to her, she needs you.”
I nod and with a heart that is in the third stage of fibrillation, I climb the stairs leading to the attic. I open the door and am able to make out her figure on the bed.
I approach in silence, for I don’t want to scare her. I sit in the armchair next to her and take this moment to observe her sleeping in this bed in our house. I see her sigh in her sleep and my heart reacts, reminding me of its presence, and the fact that it’s still beating.
Beating only for her.
And I think that her being here sleeping will repay me for every wrong I have been dealt, every wrong move, every punishment and all of the pain. It pays for all of it. Because the love I feel for this woman is unbreakable and nothing can end it.
I am back: to love, to hope, to life.
To dream.
She is my dream and no one will take that away from me.
