“For once,” I whisper, sinking onto the edge of the bed, my hand finding the dark, downy crown of my daughter’s head, “I didn’t take a soul.”
Elara’s hand covers mine. “No.”
“I helped create one.” The words come out fractured, each one carrying more weight than the last, and I have to press my lips together to keep the rest of them from flooding out in a mess of incoherent awe. “I made…this.”
“We made this,” Elara corrects softly.
“Yes.” I lower my head against her sweaty temple, leaving a kiss there before I whisper, “We should make more.”
She chuckles. “Never again.”
I look at my daughter. At the scrunched nose and the angry brow and the tiny fist still clutching at nothing, demanding the world pay attention. At the blazing, impossible, finite aura that will one day dim and fade and go out.
And instead of grief, instead of the cold, preemptive mourning I braced myself for in graveyards and arguments and the long, dark hours before I chose this path, I feel something else entirely.
Gratitude.
Thankfulness for this single, unrepeatable, devastatingly brief moment. For the small weight of a life I helped make, resting against the chest of a woman I love, in a room filled with morning light and the distant sound of a realm that is learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to live again.
Now is all we’re ever given.
I press my lips to my daughter’s forehead. A kiss so soft it wouldn’t disturb a petal.
Yes, I understand it now.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Elara
Vale is staring at me again.
I can feel it the way you feel the sun on the side of your face: warm, persistent, entirely too focused for a man who should be watching his eldest daughter walk down the aisle. But no. He’s gazing at the side of my head with the rapt attention of someone who’s just discovered something extraordinary.
“What?” I whisper, keeping my eyes on the chapel doors where Maren is about to appear.
His fingers find the strand before I can stop him. He lifts it from behind my ear and holds it in the faint chapel light with the reverence of a man examining a relic.
“Another one,” he murmurs, his mouth curving. “White like the bark of a birch.”
“Put it back.”
“I am not done admiring it.”
“You’re being strange.”
“I’m being mesmerized.” He tucks the strand back into place, his fingertips lingering at my temple, tracing the fine lines that fan out from the corner of my eye. “Do you know what these are?”
“Wrinkles, Vale. They’rewrinkles.”
“Evidence,” he corrects softly, his thumb following a crease that deepens when I squint. “That you laughed too hard at supper last week. That you frown in your sleep.” His touch drifts to the corner of my mouth, where the skin creases more than it once did. “That you’ve spent twenty years smiling at me when I don’t deserve it.”
Something warm and familiar turns over in my chest. He does this often, mapping the changes in my face with a tenderness that should feel humbling and instead feels like worship. Every new line, every shift in the landscape of my body, he discovers and registers as though it’s a gift being unwrapped slowly over decades.
The elongated, pale lines on my hips from three pregnancies? He traces them in bed like roads on a map, asking which child left which one. The silver in my hair? He finds each new strand with the delight of a boy finding coins in a fountain. The softness that settled around my waist after our youngest? He wraps hisarms around it every night as though it’s the only shape he ever wanted to hold.
My husband looks at me as though I’m the most exquisite thing he’s ever seen. “Extraordinary.”
