The Keeper of Happy Endings(122)

FORTY-SEVEN


SOLINE

31 October 1985—Boston

We wake together with the sun streaming in. Anson smiles sheepishly as our eyes meet, and for a moment it’s as if no time has passed. We’re the same people who met in a busy corridor of the American Hospital, a handsome hero and a frightened volunteer. But we’re not those people. Time has left its scars on us both and made us into different people. People who will have to work hard to discover one another again. But we’ve decided to try.

There are gaps to fill, empty years and hollowed-out dreams, and we have begun to fill them. I have told him about the Roussels and our strange vocation, and he has told me about the faces that still haunt his dreams and sometimes jolt him awake in the night—ghosts from his time in Moosburg. There is more to tell, of course, for both of us. We have each collected our share of shadows over the years, but there have been bright places, too, and eventually we will get to it all.

We lie amid the tangle of sheets, flushed and awkward, tripping over our tongues as we endeavor to navigate this new reality. It’s been a long time since either of us has awakened to a lover’s touch. The sharing of a bed and our bodies, and of all that comes after, is unfamiliar ground.

Now and then, one of us will go quiet and simply stare at the other, or venture some small touch, reassurance that all of this is real, and I suddenly realize that this is how it would have been—should have been—after that first night all those years ago. We would have risen with the sun, young lovers with a newfound wonder for the world and each other. We were cheated of that morning, but we have been given a do-over, as Rory calls it, a chance to do it differently, to do it better.

We get up finally, and I make coffee while Anson uses the phone in my study to make a few calls. Later, I take him to Bisous Sucrés for croissants, and we walk the few blocks to the Common. The trees are nearly bare, the ground littered with papery leaves, and there’s a bite to the morning air. We stroll around Frog Pond and eventually find a bench in the sun. We’ve been talking nonstop, filling in the blanks left by forty years apart, but suddenly there’s a lull in the conversation. I watch as a child of two or three toddles after a pair of ducks, her mother close behind.

“I love it here,” I say with a sigh. “It reminds me of Paris, when we used to sneak away to the park for lunch. I used to come here every Sunday with my coffee and my croissant. Because it reminded me of us. That’s why I wanted to come today. To show you.”

“I’ve been here before,” he says, his tone suddenly somber.

“To the Common?” It never occurred to me that his business might have brought him to Boston, though I suppose it should have. “When?”

His eyes cloud, and he looks away. “Sometimes,” he says heavily, “when I was home and missing you so much I was afraid I might drink, I’d get in the car and come here instead, walking for hours, thinking maybe I’d catch a glimpse of you.”

The confession stuns me. “Did you?”

“No.”

“And if you had?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I’d like to think we would have ended up on this bench, that somehow we were always going to end up here, but I don’t know, and it scares me a little to think about it.”

I weave my fingers through his, holding his gaze. “Rory asked me once if I believed that certain things were meant to happen. I wasn’t sure then, but I am now. Somehow, against all odds, we’ve found each other again, with the help of a granddaughter neither of us knew existed. I can’t explain it. I only know that we are here on this bench. The rest of it doesn’t matter.”

He answers me with a kiss, and I feel like a teenager again, with flushed cheeks and a belly full of butterfly wings.

He’s grinning one of his boyish American grins when we finally pull apart. “I must remember to thank our granddaughter,” he says huskily. The grin slips then, and he checks his watch. Suddenly he looks very somber. “Speaking of Rory, I never told you why I turned up at the gallery the other night. I came to see Rory, but then . . . there you were.” He pauses to touch my cheek, but his face has gone serious. “At the risk of ruining the moment, I need to get back to my hotel. I’m expecting a call, and then I’m going to have to talk to Rory. In person.”





FORTY-EIGHT


RORY

Rory sat down at her desk with a fresh mug of coffee and opened her planner. With the opening in her rearview mirror, she’d finally been able to settle into the day-to-day activities of running the gallery. Business was slow and would be for a while, but she planned to use the time to expand her stable of artists and get a jump on plans for several spring events she wanted to hold. And she could do with a little downtime after the excitement of the last few days.

She had just scribbled a reminder to buy thank-you notes when she heard the soft peal of the entry chime. She grabbed a sip of coffee before heading down. No need to pounce. Give them time to get inside, look around. But when she reached the landing, instead of customers, she found Soline—and Anson.

Her initial reaction was panic, but the longer she looked at them, the more she realized everything was fine. Quite fine, in fact. Anson had a hand at the small of Soline’s back, as if it belonged there, while Soline looked up at him with soft, wide eyes. Is she blushing?