Every day for the first month, I hoped. More than that really, I expected Adwen to come for me. I expected him to apologize and say that grief had made him say things he didn’t mean.
I didn’t believe he sent me away because I couldn’t have his children. He sent me away for exactly the same reason that Orick said drove so many of Adwen’s actions—fear. He’d lost Orick, and he couldn’t stand the thought of losing someone else. He thought it easier to push me away.
The day we left, I allowed his words to hurt me even though they didn’t ring true. I was too grief-stricken, guilty, and tired to fight. I regretted not staying, not shaking him until he saw sense, not splashing him with cold water to wake him up. I overreacted when I should have done as Orick suggested and lost my patience with him—forced him to see his own strength.
Instead, I left. By doing so, I let down all three of us—Adwen, myself, and Orick’s memory.
Isobel tried more than once to get me to go back but, no matter how much I regretted leaving, that was one thing I had made very clear to him that day. If he pushed me away, I wasn’t coming back. I would not go back on my word.
When Isobel finally realized that I meant that, she hung onto her own hope that Adwen would come for me. She hung onto it still. I allowed that hope to die.
It is a funny thing to kill a dream—to make the conscious decision to stop wanting, to stop hoping, to stop wishing for something you once thought you couldn’t live without. It’s like choosing to remove a part of yourself you know you will never get back.
It took time for life to return to some sort of normal rhythm for us all. If not for Cooper, if I hadn’t had the opportunity to watch him move through his own heartbreak and grief with such innocent grace, I might have allowed the loss of everything to turn me into someone I really didn’t want to be.
Instead, I was simply a little less dreamful, a little less na?ve, and a lot stronger than I was before. I now understood what Orick meant about strength. Tragedy had a way of building you into a truer form of yourself after it tears you down to nothing. It was painful, and I still wished every day none of it had happened, but it had and I wouldn’t stop living my life because of it. I would be fine. My life would go on without Adwen or Orick.
“How was the ride this morning, Coop? How are your sisters?”
Cooper smiled as he rode into the stables, climbing off the small horse with ease. “It was good. They’re both good.” He moved in to hug me. “I’m happy to see you, Aunt Jane.”
I ruffled his hair and kissed the top of his head while I laughed. “I’m happy to see you too, but I just saw you last night.”
“Well, I know that, but I’m always happy to see you. Hey, can I show you something?”
“Of course.”
He took my hand as I answered him, dragging me through the other side of the stables to sit on the small step at the back of the inn. He pulled out a small, smooth, wooden circle and handed it over to me.
“What is it?”
“Turn it over.”
I did as he said and swallowed as I looked down at the image carved in the wood. The picture was small and intricate, but it was undeniably the likeness of Orick. “Oh, Coop. Who made this?”
“Dad got the wood ready. He cut it and smoothed it out and everything. And then Bebop drew him as I described him. Then when the drawing was right, he carved it into the wood.”
“It’s beautiful, Cooper. You did an excellent job of telling Bebop about him.”
“Well, Bebop actually met him once, that night he and Adwen came to the castle to eat, and he’s pretty good at remembering faces, but I told him as much as I could. This one is for you to keep. I had him make five.”
“Five?” I ran my thumb over the image, the picture of Orick bringing tears to my eyes. I missed him every day.
“One for me, one for you, one for Isobel, one for Gregor, and one for…” he hesitated and I knew the name he meant to say next.
“It’s okay, Coop.”
“And one for Adwen, if I ever get to see him again.” A tear formed at the corner of Cooper’s eye, and I pulled him into a hug so he wouldn’t see that his crying had me about to well over completely.
“This is very thoughtful of you, Coop.”
He shrugged inside my arms but didn’t try to wiggle free as I held him. “It’s hard in this time, you know? There aren’t any pictures or anything to remember him by. I didn’t…” He drew in a shaky breath and broke down into tears, tearing away any strength I had to keep my own tears from flowing. We sobbed together as he spoke. “I didn’t want to forget him.”
“Oh, you won’t, Coop. But this is really great. I’ll carry it with me always.”
I held him as we cried together, only looking up when I saw a man approaching us from the side. I looked up to see Clyde Allaway, a traveling fisherman who often stopped in the village in hopes of selling dried herring or other catches to locals. Isobel despised him and refused to purchase anything from him, but it never stopped him from trying.