Page 59 of A Ghost of a Chance

She gave him a dazzling smile filled with unbridled joy. That moment as she floated in the light, a halo surrounded her body and she looked more solid than ever. Her hair took on a glorious golden sheen, and her skin glowed. Even her eyes became brighter, more vivid. She moved higher into the light.

Osanne disappeared.

The archway remained. Rafe held his breath. Would she return? Could she? The chance was small. Everyone had told him so.

He clung to hope that fate would bring her back to him. They would have a real life together. Have children. Grow old. It would happen. He must have faith. Faith that had given him the courage to summon the Angel of Death. Faith to perform the ceremony. Faith to let her go.

As if someone had closed a door, the arch, the light vanished.

Rafe stood in the darkness. The candles had extinguished. No moon. No stars. No Osanne.

Darkness.

She wasn’t coming back.

He was alone.

Rafe fell on his face and sobbed great wrenching wails that shook his body and drained his life. Finally exhausted, he lay on the cold ground. Cold, silent tears slid out of his eyes. The wind knifed through his coat and chilled him all the way to his soul.

Dawn lightened the dark sky to gray but all the world lay in drab, lifeless silence. Without the strength or will to move, Rafe remained on the dead hillside, surrounded by the henge that had held hope, but now only mocked his foolishness.

How could fate have brought them together only to tear them apart?

Footsteps crunched dead leaves, coming closer. Rafe lay unmoving. He had let her go. Now, she was gone. He had lost the great love of his life.

“Rafe?” Peter’s voice broke the stillness. “You’ve been here all night, haven’t you?”

Rafe opened his eyes. Carrying a blanket over his arm, Peter steadily approached. The bright red blanket reminded him of blood against the barren landscape.

“I suspected as much.” Peter unfolded the blanket and laid it over Rafe. He sat next to Rafe. “She’s gone, then?”

Dully, Rafe said, “I really believed she would come back. I thought I was being so brave to take this risk, but really, I believed it would work out the way I wanted. I was naïve.”

“You were not naïve. You had faith. But sometimes even the greatest faith of the holiest of men cannot change the will of God. We must trust Him and His purpose.”

Rafe pushed himself up to a seated position, wrapping the welcoming warmth of the blanket more tightly about him.

Peter hugged his knees. “I’d like you to consider something. This may be difficult to hear.”

Flatly, Rafe said, “You still think I was living under some grand delusion.”

“It’s a possibility, but that’s not what I was going to say. Perhaps you were not meant to be with Osanne.”

Rafe squeezed his eyes closed.

“Perhaps you merely needed to meet her. She is the reason you came to our village, the reason you returned to your ‘true self,’ I believe you called it, the reason you have let go of misplaced guilt over the fates of your friends and your men. You needed her in order to heal, to become whole, to find peace.”

A breeze picked up and carried the smells of dying woods combined with smoke from morning fires.

Everything would continue.

Could he?

Peter’s hushed voice added, “Now you need to let her go to make room in your heart for another.”

Rafe gave a sharp, sour laugh as Peter spoke the very thoughts that had taunted him earlier. “Another.”

Peter lifted a shoulder. “Now that you are not so wrapped up in your grief and misplaced guilt, you can, in time, love another.”