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I shrugged with faint surprise. “You know...I never thought of that. But I suppose there could be rumours that we’re up to something nefarious. After all, we all share the same morals of hard work and stay mostly quiet about our successes with reversing certain medical conditions.”
“Wait, what? You haven’t mentioned that before—”
I held up my hand. “A story for another time, I’m afraid. This interview is already long enough to create a book. Two books. A trilogy even. If you’d like to know more about our advances in healthcare and what methodology we employ, you’d be best to speak to our head physician, Ayla.”
“Wait...” Margot’s eyebrows shot into her hair. “Your daughter is the head doctor?”
I smiled with pride. “She is.”
“Wow.” Dylan shook his head with awe. “You’re nothing if not a woman full of surprises. And a lineage of intelligent progressives. In fact...that would be a great angle for the article. You’re right that we have enough content to make this far longer than just a puff piece. I’ll run it by my boss to see if we could do a feature or even a series of podcasts and blogs. I’d love to talk to Ayla about her medical background and growing up half Australian and half Turkish.” Dylan’s eyes swam with ideas. “We could include photos and testimonies and—”
“If you don’t mind, Dylan, I’d like to get back to the story.” I interrupted him. “Like you said, it’s late, and I have something I need to do.”
“Of course. Sorry.” Dylan scratched his bearded jaw. “We’ll call your company next week and set up a tour.”
“Just tell them Nerida cleared your access, and you’ll be shown the maintenance side of things. I could even arrange meetings for you with Theodore and Edmund. They don’t work every day anymore—none of us are getting any younger—but I’m sure they’d be happy to go over the technical aspects with you and introduce you to their team.”
“That would be great, thanks.” Dylan settled back against the mismatched cushions. “Now...you were saying?”
Taking a sip of lemon water that Tiffany had brought a little while ago, I sucked in a breath and said, “For five years, I stubbornly clung to the idea that Aslan wasn’t dead. I researched everything I could on soul links and the often-ridiculed notion of spiritual connection. As each month passed and I waited for a sign that Aslan was truly gone, Ayla kept growing. She evolved from an adorable toddler into a wonderful little girl. A girl with my feisty streak that used to drive my father up the wall. She kept me on my toes, she leaped into our deep swimming pool the moment she’d wake up, and was obsessed with Turkish food. Teddy, Eddie, and I did our best to teach her about a culture she’d inherited yet never visited and regularly took Turkish cooking lessons, courtesy of YouTube.
“She was so bright and inquisitive and showed an aptitude for medicine early on. She was always trying to patch up her uncles’ cuts and scrapes as they fiddled with the latest prototype. She knew all the words for bandages, painkillers, tonics, and creams. In fact, I knew she’d become a doctor the same week I realised she shared the genetic trait that made Aslan see numbers in colour.”
“She has synesthesia too?” Margot asked.
“She does. She was obsessed with puzzles when she was younger. Didn’t matter if she had no idea how they went together. She would rather play with a Rubik’s Cube or number blocks over a doll or cuddly toy.
“One day, after preschool, she mentioned the teacher had told her off for saying that the colour pink was called six. She’d been a little stubborn, and the teacher had been a little demeaning, and in the end, Ayla had burst into tears because to her pink was six, orange was three, tens were grey, and the rainbow held numbers in every spectrum.
“I’d been tempted to call Cem that night and tell him that the Kara family trait was alive and well, but I’d never called him outside the anniversary of him killing Aslan before, and I didn’t want to slip onto an even slipperier slope of madness. Instead, I threw myself into researching synesthesia. I learned how intelligent my child was. How much she’d inherited from Aslan. How much she could contribute to the world. And just how special she was...just like Cem had said she would be.”
I sucked in a breath. The fire that’d burned my life down was slowly dying and leaving nothing but ash in its wake. Ash that I’d risen from. “That night, I walked on my silent, empty beach and finally heard a little whisper deep inside me that it was time.
“It was time to let go.
“It was okay to let go. To admit that he was gone. To say he was dead. For so long, I couldn’t even think those words. Couldn’t visualise him as a corpse. Couldn’t bear to imagine that he’d been nothing more than ether for five long years.
“I walked beneath the moon for hours, splashing through the sea, and I slowly, painfully, unwillingly said...okay.
“Okay, he’s gone.
“Okay, I’m alone.
“Okay, I’ll never see him again because as special as Aslan had been, he couldn’t stay. Not after he’d given me his equally special daughter. They were too unique, too wonderful, too bright and blazing like a shooting star to stay on earth for long.
“I would never be able to live the life I wanted with him by my side.
“I would never know blistering happiness.
“I would never fall asleep with someone beside me.
“I would never love another or be touched by another, and...that was okay too.
“I was...okay with saying goodbye. It’d taken five long years to reach that level of acceptance. It was the greatest struggle of my life, a constant battle to stay in reality and not slip deeper into insanity. But...in the dark on that beach, I finally took that first unwilling step out of grief, shedding denial and slipping into anger, bargaining, depression, guilt, hope, and acceptance.
“I doubted I’d ever truly accept, but I accepted that fact. I was okay with always living a half-life, just as long as I did the best I could while I lived it. I stopped feeling guilty for laughing with Ayla and I gave myself permission to find pockets of happiness here and there.
“I hoped by finally letting go, I would’ve found closure. Instead...it brought the worst pain I’d ever endured. Accepting his death felt as if it’d just happened all over again.
