The dark streets remained empty, our passage the only sound. I wished we were at home having music lessons, because playing in a group last night had given me ideas. And music was far less hurtful than thinking about the explosions, or our argument.
Cold swirled and made me shiver as we passed by a white shell, which had once been someone’s house. Now the occupant was gone, lost to Templedark. Someone had cleared away the debris from outbuildings. I wondered if there was anything left inside, or if the darksoul’s belongings would stay there until they rotted—a memory of someone loved and lost.
We kept walking. The silence and weight of history drowned me.
“What happened between you and Cris?” My words turned into mist, barely visible in the temple light.
“It’s nothing.” Roughness edged Sam’s voice.
I knew better than to push, but—“I don’t think it was nothing to him. I see the way you are together, and the way he looks at you.”
I didn’t think he was going to say anything at first, but then: “It was two lifetimes ago.” He had that somewhen-else tone again. Good memories or bad? Suddenly I wished I hadn’t asked. “Cris was working on the roses, and I was composing a nocturne about them, so I asked to stay with her a while and study how they grew, how she cared for them.”
Sam had lived in Purple Rose Cottage? With Cris? I tried to imagine I’d always felt his presence there, even before I became aware of music and what it meant to me. “What happened?”
“It was fine. I went between there and my cabin, learned more about roses than I thought possible, and after a while, we grew to appreciate each other’s company—more than I want to talk to you about.”
“More than I want to hear about, I’m sure.” I wanted to pretend he was really only eighteen and everything he was telling me had actually happened to someone else. I wanted to pretend he’d only ever loved me. “The song you composed—”
“Songs have words. You can’t use ‘song’ for everything.”
I smiled. “Your song ended up being a serenade? For Cris?”
He nodded, his movement barely discernible in the darkness. “We played it as a duet. I’d mostly forgotten about it.”
Would he forget about the waltz he’d written for me? Most nights, I fell asleep listening to it on my SED. It wasn’t as good as hearing Sam play it on the piano for the first time, but it always made me happy, made me remember the evening I’d discovered he wasn’t just Sam, he was Dossam, the musician.
Oblivious to the way my heart tied itself into knots, he continued. “After that, it was my fault. We wanted different things, we argued, and she told me not to come back to the cottage until I was less selfish. So I left. I could have stayed and tried to work things out, or find a compromise, but I didn’t. By the time I was reincarnated, I realized I regretted my decision.”
“What did you fight over?”
He glanced at me and shook his head. “I don’t—I don’t want to talk about that.”
It must have been huge. Dedication-of-souls huge? What else could drive them apart if they still looked at each other awkwardly, hopefully? I couldn’t forget my first morning in Sam’s house, when Stef had whispered, Don’t let him break your heart, sweetie. He never settles.
Now I knew part of that was because she loved him. Cris loved him. He hadn’t stayed with either of them.
And did I love him? The word still made me choke. Even more frightening was the sudden understanding that my feelings for him—whatever they were—might be bigger than his feelings for me. I didn’t want to end up like Stef and Cris, pining lifetimes later.
Cold sapped moisture from my skin. I licked my lips and ducked into my scarf. “So after a while,” I said, “you regretted the decision not to find a way to work it out?”
He nodded and guided me around a corner. Snow built up in yards and on trees, reflecting temple light enough to illuminate our path. “I’ve lived long enough to know there are things worth regretting, but there’s nothing you can do to change the past. And yet, sometimes it works out anyway, in ways you don’t expect.”
Did he mean me? I couldn’t bring myself to ask. The things I wanted to say and do but didn’t know how—they felt like a wall between us. “Do you still regret it? Whatever it was you couldn’t agree on?”
“I regret that I hurt her so badly. And that we didn’t speak for a hundred years because of it. By the time he presented the roses and no one thought they were blue—that was both of our last generations—I felt like saying anything would just make it worse for both of us.”
My face did something between a smile and a grimace. “I hate admitting when I’m wrong, too.”
Sam pulled out his SED. The glow shone on his frown, and the line between his eyes. After a moment’s hesitation, he tapped the screen a few times and pressed the device to his ear.