“Ginny...” He paused. “You may hate me for saying this...”
Oh, God. She looked up at him warily.
“. . . but it was always too much for you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Raising your siblings, managing the house, all on your own. What happened to you, what your mother asked of you. It was too much for you. It could have flattened anyone. But you...” He trailed off.
The way he’d said “you” was so richly complicated, so savored, it sent a rush of delicious sensation down her arms.
He gave a soft laugh. “Hereyouare. Still standing.”
She took this in, and waited for defensiveness to rear, for temper to flame. But it was gone. All of it. She recognized truth when she heard it. It was a relief to accept it. It had been too much for her.
“It’s too much for any of us, really,” he added. “Life is. Including me. Somehow, we get on with things.”
The wind sighed through the long grass at the edges of the cemetery.
“I don’t hate you.”
She nearly whispered it.
And a thousand unspoken things thrummed in those four words.
“I know,” he finally said very gently. Like a wizard apologizing for the spell he’d cast upon her.
She reached into her reticule and retrieved the little red-and-white-striped heart-shaped stone she’d found by the bench in the park and held it up. “Do you mind if I leave this for Michael?”
He glanced at it, then back at her.
“But that’s your best one.” He said this with only a little irony.
She knelt and propped the heart-shaped stone snug against the headstone, right beneath the “B” in “beloved.”
They both stood back and gazed down at it.
“I suppose the best thing about stony hearts is that they’re indestructible,” she said. “They never stop loving.”
He turned his head swiftly toward her.
She’d at last become strong enough to hold his gaze.
She thought, in fact, she’d be willing to hold it for eternity, as long as he looked at her the way he was looking at her now, and the moment was long but not long enough, somehow.
“The night sky without stars,” he said finally. As though he’d long been working out a conundrum in his head, and this was his best theory.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your face without freckles,” he explained.
Her breath snagged.
His expression was intent and somber. The rhythm of the wind through the trees sounded like breathing to her.
A fear that was very like elation, or an elation that was very like fear, filled her chest with an odd radiance and stole her breath.
Finally, he tipped his head in a “let’s go” gesture.
