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“Wait. Are you saying he beat you?” Dylan reared back. “He hit—”
“Never. Not once.” My eyes narrowed. “Not even a little. Circumstances beat both of us. Life made us suffer such terrible things. If you knew...” Pressure built behind my eyes; I swallowed hard. “If you knew what he did, what he overcame—all in the name of love—well, I doubt this interview would appeal to the science world but would be eaten up by romance readers.”
Margot looked at Dylan before she caught my gaze. “Why do I get the feeling this love story isn’t as Disney as we believed?”
“Because it’s not.” I shrugged. “We’ve endured things I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. But those circumstances didn’t make us who we are. We became who we are despite them. We found each other in spite of them. We loved one another, all while despair did its best to break us apart.”
Tiffany, my wonderful housekeeper who kept this on-shore property functioning and kept us alive while we dwelled in it, appeared with a tray of freshly squeezed lemonade.
Giving me a quick smile, her kind eyes wrinkling with age, she passed me a sweating glass before nodding at Margot and Dylan to take theirs.
We all sipped.
I mouthed a thank you to Tiffany and then returned willingly to the past.
“The night my darling father tried to give me firm boundaries for the first time in my short life, I went to sleep concocting dastardly plans. How I knew Aslan was going to feature so heavily in my life, I still can’t say. Just like I could never explain how I always seemed to find the creature I was looking for in the ocean. It’s a gift I’ve never questioned, and one that has steered me well, so...naturally, I trusted that little nudge deep within my belly that said he was the one.
“I woke the next morning with steadfast belief that Aslan had been sent to me for a reason. I fizzed with excitement as the poor shipwrecked boy joined us on The Fluke for another day of research. He survived that day. And the next. He begrudgingly learned to live in a world that he’d been so eager to leave.”
“Why do I get the feeling he was there for longer than a week?” Dylan grinned, scribbling notes.
“Because he was.” I welcomed the haze of memories again. “Every night for that first week, I buried my face into my pillow and thanked the stars that’d guided me to him. The more I was around him, the more I gravitated toward him as if he was the planet on which all those stars shone. But he was also the blackhole that threatened to swallow those stars if I dared get too near.
“After the conversation on the boat, where he’d confessed he wasn’t sure he wanted to live, Aslan kept his distance from me and did exactly what my father told him. He threw himself into working, as if staying busy could stop his grief from finding him. He’d occasionally look over at me but would glance away if I tried to catch his attention. There were no more tense moments. No more secret stares. He shut me out—obeying my father’s strict rules to avoid me...even if that meant avoiding my friendship too.
“Whatever fear Aslan had of the open water was soon replaced with an almost aggressive desire to master it. He didn’t let his fractured ankle or wrist slow him down. He didn’t look for handouts or free passes. He made sure to battle his demons, all while being an asset to the ones who’d found him, but he couldn’t quite hide his flinch whenever my mother would pass out homemade sandwiches on the boat or Dad would have me run in to pay for dinner on the way home. I knew he felt like a burden. I knew he hated that he couldn’t pay his way. He didn’t see his work as payment. He didn’t truly know what his help meant to my parents.
“But I did.
“My parents had finally found the worker they’d needed ever since their small company had gotten notoriety and attracted long-term research projects. It didn’t matter that he worked harder than all of us and offered no complaints. He streamlined the computer data storage in the second afternoon. He reorganised my father’s folders on the third. And by the end of the first week, it felt like Aslan had lived with us all along.”
My eyes glazed as I relived everything my young, impressionable heart had felt back then. How my twelve-year-old obsession slowly morphed into something with substance.
“Aslan had only promised us one week, and we’d made no offer for more. My tender heart skipped with worry at dinner on that final night, knowing Aslan was supposed to stay and be mine, but not so sure my parents would agree. I came up with a crazy plan of sneaking him out of the house while they slept and sailing him to Low Isles. I’d hide him there, and we could live happily ever after on an island.”
