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And Neri gasped beneath me.
I lost myself.
To my wife.
To our love.
I fucked her.
I worshipped her.
Together, we said no to death and yes to life.
Yes to a life worth living.
Chapter Fifty-Three
*
Nerida
*
(Love in Spanish: Amar)
THE SILENCE FOLLOWING MY VOICE SOAKED UP our story and hoarded it in the shadows of the conservatory. The house that Aslan had built for us huddled around me, almost as if it didn’t want our secrets being shared.
But it was too late.
I’d confessed every shred of truth.
I’d spoken until dawn.
My throat was scratchy and dry, no matter how much lemon water I sipped. My eyes burned and blurred from exhaustion. And my old body was no longer used to all-nighters when I longed to return beneath the sea and the reef where I truly belonged.
It’d been a long time since we’d lived in this house on the shore. This wonderful house where Teddy and Eddie still lived and Ayla now dwelled with her husband and their two daughters.
Aslan and I had been too busy with creating Lunamare and running his empire in Turkey to spy time to have another baby, but we’d gotten the joy of grandchildren in our later years.
Needless to say, Teddy and Eddie had been beside themselves to have yet more children to dote on, and I had a sneaking suspicion that Melike and Bella preferred those two grandfathers to the one-legged one and strange Nana who lived beneath the sea.
Dylan shared a look with Margot.
I rubbed my eyes, doing my best to stay coherent for a little longer.
I hadn’t expected this to take as long as it did, but I was grateful I’d done it.
Grateful that our love story was told because that was my biggest legacy, my greatest lesson, triumph, and tragedy. Dropping my hands, the image of the two reporters before me was jarring after sharing the last moments of the romantic interlude in our sphere so many years ago.
I’d loved Aslan for twenty years at that point. An eternity for some. Yet for us, it’d merely been our beginning. Now I was seventy-two and had loved him for sixty. And I would keep on loving him because it was physically impossible to stop.
“Wow...” Dylan finally muttered, rolling his shoulders and forcing his body to wake up. “That...that is quite the tale.”
Margot grabbed a fresh tissue from the box on the coffee table, dabbing her eyes for the thousandth time. Ever since I started telling them what Aslan had suffered with his leg, the electrocutions, and the barbaric ways Cem Kara had tried to make him obey, she’d sniffed and cried and forgotten to write a damn thing.
I hoped their tape recorders had enough memory to record everything because...I would never repeat it.
This was a one-time thing.
