Until athudsounds behind me, and anoofthat sounds terribly like AJ. He groans. “Whose rotten idea was this, anyway?”
“No one forcedyouto jump.” I’ve landed on my hand, and two of my fingers throb. I twist the new wedding band off, hanging it off the tip of my smallest finger and rubbing the swollen one.
A hiss of grass and AJ is sitting up, looking down at me in the scant moonlight. “Do you honestly think I’d leave you, Merryn?”
Me, or my inheritance?That must be why he married me.
I examine the new rip in my linen shirtwaist in the cover of darkness. Rotten brooch. Rotten pride. Had I handed it over to AJ in the tearoom, it would be in his pocket now. I turn away from him. He’s insufferable when he’s right.
I hold the gold band up to the moonlight to see what is sharp and jagged inside. It’s plain and thin, with no gem marring its shape. But…words. An inscription. I strain to see the message AJ inscribed to me.
We rise, and a flash of moonlight pierces the dark. For a brief second, I see a name.
Tamsin, my beloved.
I curl my fingers around the ring. “Who is Tamsin?”
He pauses. “My mother.”
“Oh.” The ground feels solid beneath my feet for a moment. I stare up into AJ’s face in the darkness. In my unsettled heart, the picture becomes clear. It isn’t peace I’m searching for around every corner, for what I want most isn’t merely a cessation of chaos—butlove.I wish to have love cradling me through the storms, catching me when I fall. Holding me up toward the sunlight. I wish for someone to care whether or not I’m in an asylum and to doggedly pursue me if I’m lost.
I finger the solidness of this ring that ties me to him, to something of his history. “You truly mean to keep me, don’t you?”
He blinks down at me as if I’ve lost my mind, then glances about. “Look.” He points past the gently sloping hill and there beyond the rise is a slate roof and a simple stone steeple, haloed in light. “A church.”
“Sanctuary.” I’m weary and sore now. Pliable. He tucks my hand in his arm and escorts me down the grassy hillside, through the rough-hewn double doors that are, mercifully, unbolted. In most parts of rural England, churches are a known place of refuge, which we sorely need.
We step into a sacred space—something holy that should not be tarnished with anger. It’s a humble chapel, but it houses a magnificence, somewhere in the mix of a holy silence, the rugged stone walls, and the moon’s glow through arched stained-glass windows. I close my eyes, slipping his mother’s ring back on my finger as a song tumbles from somewhere deep.
O gladsome Light, O grace
Of God the Father’s face,
The eternal splendour wearing,
The Son of God, the Saviour!
Tallow candles burn in each window, making it a small lighthouse to beckon visitors. I turn to AJ, who is bathed in red and yellow light, his face glowing with concern. Forme.
“You seem better now,” he says, brushing a hand down my cheek, sweeping away loose hair. And I know he does not mean physically, because I look considerably worse than I did before the jump. His fingers find my spine, causing it to jolt at the touch, then relax. “Your back. It’s not stiff anymore.”
I’m not skilled at hiding my emotions. He sensed my turmoil in the cart and tried to fix it, in his very AJ way. Laughter, always his medicine, bursting the bubble of my tension. “I’m not ready to jest about…about—”
“The place which shall not be named.” A quick smile on his well-defined lips. “Very well, no more talk of it.”
My muscles loosen under his touch and I move closer instinctively, my hands on his chest. I’m fully aware of the fact that we’re legally married, and that we have every right to belong to one another. And that I have asked him to abandon everything while making him believe he is, at best, a convenient adhesive securing all my broken pieces together.
But the image of that other man haunts the fringes of my mind.
Which marriage would be valid? The first or the second?
Well, the first one.
And the second one would cease to exist, as if it had never been. Sometimes it seems inevitable that my new self will be absorbed into the past one, the only valid version of me.
I can offer AJ nothing. Not if I love him.
No…there is one thing. “When we met that first day,” I say, laying my cheek against his chest. “I didn’t drop the book.”
