Peace overtakes his embarrassment just thinking of the place. There’s a palpable presence there, one with whom he’s wrestled. And a physical peace he cannot explain. Bit by bit, it has managed to penetrate his soul. “Yes.” He smiles. “Yes, I suppose I have.”
Her smile is wide and gratified. “I asked Mother to leave it to you.”
“Anwen Dunn.”
“There’s something unexplainable about the peace one finds there. I wanted you to have that. Your life was never easy.”
His heart is pounding. “We’ve met before.”
Her face clouds, then clears. “You remember.”
A shrug. “Afraid not. Just assuming. Everything I know of you I learned in that notebook…or from the painting.” He rests one hand on the paper covering it. He does not mention how long he spent staring at her face. How much company the oil paint version of her provided. “Why did you stop writing in it? That memory book, I mean.”
“Well, I began it because I had this fear that everything would be lost again. That I’d strike my head and everything new would fall out.” She touched her plaited hair. “I meant to keep track of the new memories, but then…” She lays both palms flat on the bench.
“You recovered your old memories.”
She considers him. “What do you know of memory loss, young Will?”
Young Will.“Enough to envy it.”
Her eyebrows rise.
“You were damaged by the lack of memories. I was damaged by the opposite.” He accepts Persephone back as she clambers toward familiar arms. “You look…whole. Healed. Which is why I assumed you found them again.”
A quick smile. “Not exactly. I never got them all back. I did happen upon a few important ones, however. I was glad, yet they were…not what I’d expected.”
“Tell me,” he says, leaning forward.
That lost look returns to her face. “Regretful memories are a weight,” she says sadly. “Always bent on pulling us back to the bottom of the sea even after we’ve fought to reach the surface and be free of them.”
Chapter 36
Merryn, 1913
Memoriesareananchor,keeping us rooted to our little piece of the earth when all else changes around us. The busy street on which I lived in Gloucester is foreign to me, but it was home once—which means I should find something of my past in it.
When I reach the building, I close my eyes to verify the number against what I read on the paper, then glance back up. It’s a brownstone behind an iron gate on a busy thoroughfare with hardly anything to recommend it. After a childhood in Cornwall, how did I ever agree to make my homehere? AJ must have utterly charmed me.
He’s a brilliant liar.
I climb the steps, dodging a crack.
But I cannot fathom that jovial man hurting anyone.
Can both things be true?
The words of that grieving writer on the beach float back to me:Let memory shape who he is to you—the good memories. But I cannot imagine good memories occurring in a place like this with a man who had deceived me. Married me for my fortune—twice—and tried to do away with me. This isn’t even comparable to the grieving man’s marriage. There were some precious aspects to that one, surely. Sometruethings.
What do you do with a marriage that was wrong to begin with? One based on fabrications? What does the Almighty ask of people in that sort of situation?
I cannot know anything for certain with AJ. Yet now I must depend upon him to keep my promise to a small boy.
I push through the gate and climb to number eight, the flat that contained the whole of my life with AJ, and I knock. When it echoes into emptiness, muscle memory kicks in. I bend slowly, retrieve the key from a narrow crack in the wood frame, and fit it into the lock.
I cringe at the stale aroma of the hallway. I cannot imagine agreeing to live in this tiny, dark tenement in a noisy city with factories and trains belching steam, people yelling, and not an inch of beauty anywhere.
Yet…he charmed me into sleeping in a cave, swimming in icy water, and stowing away on a wagon. I went everywhere with AJ because AJ made the place what it was. He drew adventure and beauty and excitement out of everything simply by being there. That makes him a genius…or incredibly devious.
