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At least most of them don’t.
Maeve’s brow rises in wry amusement. “Well, no one believes they’re the villain in their own story. Cronus ate his own children and still believed he was the hero in his story.”
“Maeve ...”
“No, don’t worry about it. Honestly. One day I will settle down and find a place that is mine forever, but for now, the universe has a different calling for me. To travel and help people connect with those they’ve lost.”
“How did you know what that calling was?” Once I thought I knew what my calling was—a straight line. Brandon, Kingsette, the hospital. I gave up so much of what I thought I wanted to follow that line. Point A was supposed to bring me to point B. But point B wasn’t where I thought it would be.
Now point A is a memory and point B is nonexistent, and I’m on an unlabeled, unknown spot. An infinite number of new lines with invisible end points spans out in every possible direction. How am I supposed to know which line to choose? What if I choose wrong again? What will the cost be this time?
It feels easier to just stand still. To go through the motions of living without actually living. Like on the Ferris wheel with Will.
“Sometimes you just know,” Maeve says. She gazes out the window, where a trio of butterflies has landed on the sill.
“What happened?” My voice is barely a whisper, but anything louder might shatter the intensity of the moment.
Seconds tick by.
“Please. I want to listen.”
She turns back to me, her eyes a shade of stormy gray. “A long time ago, I ignored my calling. I didn’t want to be like my mother—eccentric, outcast ... other. I married someone who was the exact opposite—from a white picket fence family—and we bought a white picket fence house. I got pregnant.” A ghost of a smile traces her lips, and my heart breaks for her. I know the bittersweet taste of that ghost smile.
“I went away for a girl’s weekend. I smelled smoke and could not get that smell out of my nose. Some part of me knew it was a warning. I ignored my intuition. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell my husband to check the smoke alarms. He—Nathan—died that night.
“I had a miscarriage two days later. Stress, they say.”
“Oh, Maeve.”
“I feel Nathan’s energy in butterflies. My baby ... she’s in the sunrise.”
We both look to the window, to the sun coming up over the lake. The cottage has a perfect view. “It’s not your fault.”
“I don’t blame myself anymore. But I never want to ignore my intuition again. Especially when it can help save someone.”
Maeve reaches for a bag of gummy bears. Red, yellow, green. She chews, and there’s a rawness in her expression I haven’t seen before. A vulnerability. A humanness. It’s the first time Maeve feels more like a friend I’m walking beside, rather than someone I’m following.
It must be lonely to always be the one forging the path for others. “Maeve ...”
“If you’ve finished with your tea, I’d like to show you something in the garden.”
In one graceful motion she’s up and out the door.
Maeve leads us to her rosebushes. Icarus tweets as we pass, and Maeve scoops him up and nuzzles him to her neck. The bird sighs into her affection. There’s so much more I want to say to Maeve, so much more she needs to hear, but the words I wanted to say vanish. What she needs from me isn’t language, but presence. What she needs is thething I wish others had done for me—let her take the lead and respect the boundary around her grief.
Maeve points to the rosebushes, which have grown so much in the last day they need to be pruned back. She beams. “Look at these roses. They were withering until you came. You made these grow when I couldn’t. Because you believed you could. You did what your heart told you to do, and it worked.”
“It’s easy with flowers. They’re just plants.”
Maeve frowns. Lightness returns to her eyes. “Shh, they’ll hear you. Flowers have feelings too.” She takes a breath. “Choices are never easy. There’s always a push and pull between our hearts and our minds, our fears and desires, our shoulds and our what-ifs. I’ll never know what might have happened if I’d listened to my intuition. Maybe the story would have ended the same way. The point is that choosing to stand still is still a choice.”
A cloud skids past the sun, and the tree casts a shadow over us. Without the sunlight blurring Maeve’s edges, her white-blonde hair looks a shade of brittle gray. Lines on paper-thin skin I hadn’t noticed before gather around her eyes, her mouth. Age spots darken the hands holding the bird.
I blink, and sunlight streams through the tree’s branches again. Maeve is Maeve. “So, Hope, your turn. What’s your choice? What do you want?”
It’s an echo of a question I’ve asked so many times since I survived the accident and Brandon didn’t.
My gaze sweeps around the garden. The colors blend. “I don’t know.”
