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“Well, yes and no, Ambri. There’s no need to torment yourself with horrible memories just to prove some point.” He reached across the table and took my hand. “But if it’s important to you, then yes, of course we should go.”
Lord have mercy, this man.
Cole’s consideration and protectiveness of me was a constant. Unwavering. He deserved every happiness. No doubts or fears or uncertainty. Not ever.
“Did Cas say what’s at Hever?” he asked.
“No. He said we must see it for ourselves. Tomorrow, I think. He sounded rather urgent.” I stood up. “But I must go.”
Cole frowned. “You just got here.”
“Yes, but I realize I have an errand to run.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“Not one more minute.”
I threw my uneaten lunch back in the bag, then leaned over the table and kissed Cole. A quick kiss on the mouth and then another, a longer one, while I held his face.
“I love you.”
He smiled. “I love you too.”
But now there was uncertainty in his eyes. Not that Cole didn’t trust me—his concern was of the same tenor as that which plagued me at times. That things were too good, that we were too happy. Surely something must be waiting around the corner to muck it all up.
I walked away, across the school’s green grass.
“I’ll die first,” I muttered. “Again.”
The following afternoon, Saturday, we took the Southern train to Hever Castle and Gardens. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and we followed a line of tourists into my former abode. As we approached the entrance, Cole slipped his hand in mine.
Crossing the threshold was like stepping back in time, but instead of the dark and drafty castle I’d known, there was electric lighting in the rooms, polished wood walls and floors, and elegant furniture. A tour guide informed a group of listeners that William Astor was responsible for the restoration of Hever in the twentieth century. He took it back to the Tudor era to invoke something of what the castle was in Anne Boleyn’s time. She was the main attraction, of course, but I found I had none of the old jealousy of having been forgotten by time.
“How are you doing?” Cole asked, checking in as we passed through the lushly furnished Drawing Room. “If it’s too hard, we can go.”
“It’s somehow both more and less modern than when I lived in it,” I said. “It’s a strange feeling to see that your home has become a museum. Though it wasn’t actually my home for very long, and it never felt much like one anyway.”
We made our way to the Long Gallery that was lined with paintings—most of them Tudor-era. But at the end was a section of previous owners.
Cole’s hand in mine tightened as we came to my family’s portraits, and then he gasped and fell back a step. “Holy shit…”
My father’s portrait hung beside my mother’s, then my older sister, Jane’s…and then there was me.
Cole’s portrait of me, done over those precious months we were together before the tour and the demons that pried us apart, hung with the rest. I was un-erased after all.
I looked to the placard below it.
Ambrosius Edward Meade-Finch, 1762–1786
“Artist unknown,”Cole said with a chuckle. “They got that right at least. But I don’t understand it. The canvas, the paint…none of it was contemporaneous.” His gaze darted to me. “Oh, baby, are you okay?”
Tears blurred my vision. “I thought I’d never see it again. I thought your work…it was lost in the fire.” I smiled. “One last gift from our guardian angel.”
“Come on,” Cole said, after a moment. “Let’s get some air.”
I nodded vaguely and we went out to the courtyard. We sat on a concrete bench in front of an elaborate fountain.
“You did that,” I told Cole. “You gave my life back to me. Both of them. The first one, all those years ago, and now this one.”
