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He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Okay? Is that an, ‘Okay, I’m about two seconds away from finding a window to throw myself through, but I’m not gonna tell you because you’ll stop me,’ or is it an, ‘Okay, I’m pretty fucking peachy, Carmine, so stop questioning me’?”
She laughed. “I’m just . . . okay. Especially now that you’re here.”
He kissed her before the two of them headed upstairs. Settling into the chairs in the library, Carmine grabbed his guitar as Haven gazed at the cover of the journal.
“You still reading The Secret Garden?” he asked.
“No, I finished that book months ago.”
“Really? What happened in it?”
He didn’t truly sound interested, his gaze on his fingers as he strummed the guitar, but she smiled at the fact that he would ask. “The girl comes to the conclusion that the mean man she lives with isn’t as bad as she assumed. He’s just grieving because he lost his wife. She makes friends with the son, who the father can’t face for a long time, because he reminds him of his wife.”
Carmine’s fingers stilled, the music abruptly stopping as he looked at Haven. “No shit?”
She shook her head. “Nope.”
“Fate,” he said, his eyes drifting from her to the book on her lap. “My mom’s journal.”
“Uh, yeah. Your father gave it to me.”
He turned back to his guitar and started strumming again, music filling the room as sunshine streamed in on them from the window. She watched him in silence, her chest swelling with love as her favorite passage from The Secret Garden sprang to mind.
One of the strangest things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever . . . sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone’s eyes.
Haven felt it then, sitting in the library with the scarred boy who had stolen her heart, his deep green eyes twinkling as the beautiful notes poured from his fingertips.
Sempre. No matter what happened next, or what went on tomorrow, nothing would ever take that away. Their love existed, despite everything else, and it was that love that would go on forever. The moment was etched in time, transcending the constraints put on them by life.
For even after they were gone, when life continued on, a part of them would always exist in everything—and everyone—they ever touched.
She turned back to the journal and opened it. Taking a deep breath, she read the first line:
Today is my first day as a free woman.
