My name sounded rougher on his tongue than usual. Worried.
Father William gestured helplessly toward the manuscript. “The book is doing something infernal again.”
“I can see that.”
The psalter pulsed brighter.
Choose once and for all. Now.
The pull strengthened suddenly, violently. Boston crashed over me in fragments, the vision filling the chapel. From a great distance, I heard Father William praying and Geoffrey swearing. They too could see my time.
My apartment. The smell of coffee, old books, and heat from the radiator in winter. Darcy yelling at reality itself if I somehow reappeared after vanishing for months.
Electric lights. Central heating. Endless hot water. Plane and cars. Phones. My friends. Tylenol. How I missed modern medicine.
And layered over those memories came newer ones now. Castle walls at sunset. Geoffrey’s mouth against mine. His hand at my waist pulling me closer with unbearable gentleness despite the strength in him. The rough scrape of his jaw against my skin. Dark hair falling loose across his forehead in the wind while helooked at me like strategy itself had finally abandoned him, like I was the most important thing in all the world.
For one terrifying moment I understood how easy it would be to surrender. To let the manuscript carry me home where life was safer, more certain. My hand trembled slightly at my side.
Fear crossed Geoffrey’s face. Not fear for himself. But the fear of losing me. And suddenly I understood this was the final choice. Not the proposal or the kiss.
The psalter glowed brighter still, flooding gold across the chapel walls.
The path is open. You have done what was required. Choose now.
I looked at Geoffrey standing motionless near the doorway, every line of his body rigid. A man prepared for battle. Prepared for loss. Prepared, if necessary, to let me go because he loved me enough not to chain me to his world.
That realization shattered something quietly inside me. Because Geoffrey had never asked me to stay. Not once.
He had offered me trust. Patience. Care. A place beside him if I wanted it. But never obligation. And somehow that made the choice easier instead of harder.
The psalter had brought me here because history needed more than treaties and wars and kings. It needed this. A man who had forgotten how to hope. A woman who had spent her entire life safely studying life from a distance instead of living it.
Thread by thread. Choice by choice. Until neither of us remembered how life looked before the other existed inside it. The gold light surged around me one final time. And I stepped backward.
Steady. Certain.
“I choose Geoffrey,” I said clearly.
The words echoed softly through the chapel as the vision of Boston vanished.
Emotion flashed across Geoffrey’s face so quickly it almost hurt to witness.
“I choose this life.”
The psalter blazed brilliantly gold. Then the light collapsed inward. The glow vanished beneath the vellum pages completely. Silence rushed into the chapel all at once. Heavy. Sacred. Final. The manuscript lay still on the lectern. Ordinary again.
Father William moved to stand in front of it. He stared at it cautiously. Then poked the page once with two fingers like a man verifying a snake was actually dead.
Nothing happened.
“I believe,” he said slowly, “that it is finished.”
My throat tightened unexpectedly.
Finished.
The path is closed.
