“I’m sorry.”
“Your sorrow doesn’t fix anything.”
But he said it without cruelty. Just tiredness.
“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t.”
I looked at the psalter again. I thought I’d understood the mystery. Not the mechanism, not the rules, but at least the presence of them. The psalter responded to care. To attention. To me. Except now it hadn’t. And that changed everything.
“I can’t promise the psalter would take you there,” I said. “I can’t promise it would work at all in that direction. And I need you to hear me when I tell you that even if you went back,even if you told your father which alliance to choose, you can’t know that would save her. History shifts. Other things change. You might save her from one danger and put her in the path of another.”
“I know that,” Aldwin said. “I’ve thought about it constantly since the moment you arrived.”
“And?”
“And I don’t care,” he said simply. “I’d take the chance. I’d rather know I tried than spend the rest of my life knowing I had a door and didn’t walk through it.”
I thought about that for a long time, thought about Boston, about my apartment with its uneven floors and overstuffed bookshelves. About coffee shops, my work, electric lights, hot showers, familiar streets. About the life I had assumed was waiting somewhere on the other side of this mistake.
A door.
I had been thinking of the psalter that way too, whether I admitted it or not. A door left half-open. Now I wasn’t sure there was a door at all.
“I understand that,” I said finally.
Aldwin looked at me with something like surprise.
“I thought you’d argue.”
“I’m not arguing. I’m telling you it can’t be forced.” I looked at the psalter. “And I’m telling you I may have been wrong about why it worked. Maybe it wasn’t care or openness. Maybe it wasn’t me at all.”
Father William shifted near the doorway.
“Harper,” he said quietly.
I ignored him because if I looked at anyone and saw sympathy on their face, I might unravel.
Aldwin studied me more closely now. “You thought it would answer you.”
“I thought it might.”
“But it didn’t.”
“No.”
The chapel seemed colder than it had a moment ago.
Aldwin’s gaze moved to the manuscript. “Then perhaps it was made to only open once.”
The words landed with brutal simplicity.
Only once.
I hated him a little for saying it aloud. Mostly because I had already thought it.
“Perhaps,” I said.
He absorbed that silently for a moment.
