He sighed and rubbed his eyes.
Snatching up his hat and coat, he made his way down to the excavation site, Chris nowhere to be seen.
A worker beckoned him forward eagerly, handing him a lantern.
Lamp in hand, Alistair crouched along the tunnel, emerging into the cairn proper. A second lantern flickered on a pole, adding illumination to the space.
The central chamber appeared untouched. But Chris had been hard at work excavating the side niches. One, in particular, had been scraped down to the same level as the main chamber.
Lifting his lamp to examine it more closely, he froze, breath catching in his ribcage.
Chris’s unexpected find lay on the floor before him.
Shaking his head in wonder, he bent forward, eyes drinking in the story before him.
Two skeletons lay side by side, knees bent, hands mingled together, heads turned to face one another. Their foreheads had likely touched when first placed into the earth.
A romantic embrace.
As sure a depiction of love as any poem ever written or vows declared.
Alistair stared at the entwined skeletons for far too long, pondering how they had come to be here together. Had they both died at the same time, the loss of one causing the other to falter? Or had one been unwilling to be parted even by death itself, and so had willingly joined their lover in the afterlife?
He would likely never know.
But standing there, his lamp casting long shadows on the surrounding stones, he knew one thing clearly:
Whoever they had been—husband and wife, illicit lovers—and whenever and however they had lived and died . . .
They had loved.
It was writ, despite time and decay, in their very bones. Stated as clearly as an epitaph. Or as an immortal poem. Two lines from Shakespeare’s sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” drifted through his mind. Would-be suitors often recited the first line or two, but neglected the final couplet:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
And like Shakespeare in that sonnet, the skeletons before Alistair loudly declared their love. So that he, thousands of years onward, knew and understood what had passed between them.
It stole his breath and caused his own bones to tremble.
Because . . .
If he let Chris go, if he were content to watch her walk away, no one would ever know. There would be no trace of their love. No remnant. It would dissolve like sea foam, melting into the sands of Time and utterly forgotten.
And that . . .
That would be simply unbearable.
That she would be so forgotten.
Thattheythemselves—Chris and Alis—would be forgotten.
How odd.
That the largest decisions were, in many ways, the simplest.
He loved Chris.
