“Things from her time as a spirit?”
He nodded slowly.
“But those were her memories,” Mairead said quietly, “not her man’s. If you rescue me, you’ll loseyourmemories of me.”
“I wrote most everything I could remember down,” he reminded her. “And I’m going to trust that I’ll remember the rest on my own.”
“But what will become of you in your youth?” She paused. “I know you survived it without me the first time and I’m not the reason you’re a good man—”
“You put beauty where there had been none,” he said seriously. “And for that I’m grateful.” He smiled. “Perhaps you’ll need to pickmea few flowers in the future to make up for it.”
She couldn’t make light of it. “Oliver…”
“I know what it will mean.” He paused and his expression was so serious that it almost brought tears to her eyes. “I’ll trade that willingly for a future with you.”
She reached out to put her hand on his arm, then stopped when she realized it was pointless. She clasped her hands together instead. “But after your aunt passes, you will be alone.”
“It will make having you in my arms again that much sweeter.”
She pursed her lips. “You haven’t yet had me in your arms.”
“That’s absolutely not true, but it is something I would like to remedy as quickly as possible.”
She smiled uneasily. “Is that so?”
“Are you blushing?”
Her smile faded. “Oliver, I am not—”
His phone rang suddenly. She would have been startled, but she was too old for that sort of thing and it wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. He smiled.
“Excuse me a moment. I’m sure it’s just the lads telling me where to go find more pages to add to the book of horrors you’re helping me finish.”
She watched him walk over to Moraig’s tiny kitchen and wondered if it might be possible to fix into her soul somehow the memory of things that had been, over the past four centuries, lovely and good. Conversations with others who had taken their turn in her clan, standing on the periphery of happenings of historical significance, watching the seasons continue to turn and marveling at the beauty that was her homeland. She had particularly lovely memories of Moraig and her connection to that procession of the world’s turnings.
Perhaps there was some possibility that, as Ambrose said, when she walked the same paths again, the echoes of her memories from each day of those same years in her past would be there waiting for her.
“Let me text you,” Oliver said, putting his phone down in the kitchen.
She watched him as he walked over to her, that braw, determined man who had paid such a price in self-discipline to become so fully what he’d become. He knelt down in front of her and looked at her.
“The lads are waiting for us at Cameron Hall.”
She attempted a smile. “More pages for your book?”
He shook his head slowly. “Strategy session.”
She took a deep breath—well, she went through the motions of the same in hopes that it would calm what should have been her racing heart.
“I don’t want to lose my memories,” she admitted.
“I know.”
“But we might make new ones.”
“On every blessed day of all the days that lie before us,” he agreed. “And I will remember at least this conversation for the both of us. We can work on the rest as the days go on.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “I wish you could hold me.”
