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She caressed it—a yellow halo surrounding a crescent moon, drowned in blue streaks of dark blue sky. A single element from Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
“I wanted to get a sunflower, but …” he trailed off, and she heard the grin in his voice. Her eyes were stuck on that ink.
“You know the crescent is facing the wrong side,” she said, her mind trying to grasp everything.
“I know. I didn’t want a waning moon. I needed hope. Look closer.”
She shifted her body against his. “Um, what am I looking at? I see there’s a line above the moon that shouldn’t be there.”
“You’re the art expert. You immediately noticed the differences. Try looking at it again.”
Something in his voice made Anne look at his face instead of the tattoo. She then shifted to look at it again, gripping his muscular bicep and twisting it a bit so she could get a good look.
An elevator dropped in her stomach. “J. It’s a J,” she whispered. The extra line in the tattoo made the crescent look like the letter J. She shifted her gaze to his face.
Finn wore a soft smile. “It’s a J. It was my way of wearing my heart on my sleeve.”
A heart full to the brim can hurt as much as an empty one.
Her heart throbbed in her throat. If it had been hard for her, it had been harder on him. Tears pricked the back of her eyes.
“In plain sight,” she mumbled. The tears welled up in her eyes, and she breathed deeply in to keep them back.
“Hey, hey,” Finn said, pushing himself up, causing her to rise, too. They sat up, and he wrapped his arms around her, holding her face in his palms and swiping his thumbs under her eyes. “Loving you kept me going. It kept the pieces of my heart together. Some days … some days I could feel you, you know? It was like … like the blood that flowed between the … shards—that was you. You kept it together.”
Her own broken heart overflowed now, and the tears that she had held back spilled out and streamed over Finn’s thumbs, down his hands, and along his wrists.
“No, no, it wasn’t supposed to make you cry,” he said, crushing her to him as if he was trying to stop the tears with the force of his body.
She burrowed further into him and let it all out against his chest, her hand pressing against it, as if she were trying to put his heart back together from the outside.
“Jane, look at me,” he said. “Anne.”
He never called her Anne when they were alone. That made her push herself back and look at him.
He smirked. “Now I know how to make you stop crying.”
She smiled through the tears.
“I’ll say it once and for all—everything that happened was my fault, so you shouldn’t be shedding a single tear over me, okay? All this time, it was you who I … I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you—all of it—the fact that you had to be there and witness it all, the fact that you left, that you stayed away from your family, the years you thought of me as married. I was, but there are roommates with better and closer relationships. I stayed for Max, and I left for Max. And I ask you to forgive me.”
“I already have. I never blamed you. I did, for five minutes, but I know it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was a trainwreck of coincidences and circumstances. You did the right thing, Finn. We did. I played a part in that decision, too. Whatever it did to us, even in hindsight, I can’t see how you could have done any different. I’m crying not just for you, but for me, too. All this love … I could have used it.”
“You had it all along.”
“I know. But it was out of reach.”
“It’s not anymore, if you let it. If you let me.”
There was a knock on the front door. They both froze.
The knock repeated.
“Trick or treat,” they heard a chorus of several squeaky voices from outside.
Anne exhaled in relief. “Every year, I bring things from the bakery. I did this time, too, but they’ll have to excuse me.” She cast her eyes over hers and Finn’s naked bodies. Yeah, she wasn’t going anywhere.
When the voices disappeared, Finn wiped her eyes with his hands, then lay back with her in his arms. She was so tired all of a sudden, as if she had just laid down the burden of years. The steady rhythm of Finn’s heartbeats pacified her.
