When I met your grandmother, I dared to dream again. But Sophia could not be with me. She was not content with what I could offer her. She wanted forever, but this was not mine to give.
What happened next is her story to tell, and her words are enclosed in the second envelope I have left for you. Perhaps after reading her letter you will be able to answer your last question yourself. Choose well.
I love you.
Forever,
Nonno
BORACAY, PHILIPPINES
Now
Paolo set the letter down. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He let them fall. He looked like a man finally coming to terms with the fact that he had lost his entire family and his dreams, all at once. Shelley could not help but go to him. She would not leave him now.
“I forgive you,” she said.
Paolo and Shelley held each other, sobbing in each other’s arms until they were too tired to cry. They cried for themselves and for Max, the choices they had made and had not, and for their shared loneliness. The envelope containing Sophia’s letter was now wet with their tears. Paolo opened the yellowed envelope, already knowing what it contained. He translated it for Shelley.
Chapter Twenty-four
Failure and forever
Amore mio,
If you are reading this then it means that it is morning, you have woken—and I have not. I have failed. To me, the chance I took was worth it. To be with you forever was the only life I have ever wanted to live.
I beg you, do not hate me. In failure I am selfish, but had I succeeded, what I would have gained would have been for both of us. We would have had each other for always.
I know I have no right to ask you this, but please do me the kindness of keeping the truth of my death from our son. He is a boy and will not understand. Tell him and the world that I died peacefully in my sleep. If not, others will judge what I have done as an act of weakness and desperation, a coward’s escape out of life. I do not want to taint our son’s life with what the world calls suicide. Only you and I will know that when I took my life, I was not seeking death. Immortality is a choice, but perhaps not a choice meant for all.
You told me once that you had half a soul. I thought that if I surrendered half of mine to death, the half that was left I could give to you. Together, we could be whole for all eternity. I am sorry for placing too much faith in destiny. It appears that you were meant to be mine only for a little while.
Do not blame yourself or regret telling me the truth about who you are. What has happened is a consequence of my choice, not yours. You gave up death for your dream, I gave up my life for mine. My only regret is that in pursuing my dream of being with you for always, I have left you forever. But you are not alone. I have given you a son and restored the family that was once torn from you. You are the father you have always wanted to be, and no one will ever take that away from you again.
Though it shatters my heart to say this, find love again. Perhaps one day a woman will be born who can be with you forever, a woman strong enough to make the same choice that you have made.
I am looking at you now as you sleep soundly by my side and I am hoping that when the sun rises I will be alive to shred this letter into a million pieces. Perhaps tomorrow will be the first morning I wake up and not feel my body withering next to yours.
I have read that the poison I will take is painless and I would like to believe that it is. I will kiss you in your sleep for what I am praying will not be the last time, but if it is, know that in this kiss I am promising you a love to last all your lifetimes.
Forever,
Sophia
BORACAY, PHILIPPINES
Now
She killed herself.” Shelley was frightened by how much she understood Sophia’s intentions.
“Because she thought she could be immortal.” Paolo shook his head sadly.
“And what about you, Paolo?” Shelley asked slowly, uncertain that she would like his answer. “Do you still want to be like Max? Do you love life so much that you are willing to die for it?”
He walked to the window and looked out at the sea. “No, it’s not what I want anymore. At first I envied him. Who wouldn’t? He has no deadline to accomplish his dreams, to have adventures, to experience everything tomorrow has to offer. But I’m beginning to see things differently now. I’m part of a larger story and I was not born to be its end. It is too ancient to squander for my vanity. I will not be the last leaf to fall from the tree.”
She watched the waves turn to froth against the rocks. “Then what will you be?”
Paolo smiled. “With any luck, I will be an old man who cooks baked eggs and cheese for his grandchildren on Sundays. I will have chickens—lots of them. And when I am gone, my family will remember me and wonder what I put in those eggs to make them taste so wonderful,” he said. “There are other ways to live forever.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Letters and lies
BORACAY, PHILIPPINES
Now
Shelley’s letter fluttered in her hand.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” Paolo asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think I can.”
“Why not?”
“I’m only here because you needed a storyteller. I already know what my letter says—an apology, a thank-you, a good-bye.”
“You don’t know that.”
“But I do, Paolo. If the letter wasn’t a good-bye …” Fresh tears stung her eyes. “Then he would be here.”
“Shelley …”
“I already mourned my husband once. I can’t do it again. I won’t.”
Paolo took her in his arms. “I know it’s difficult, but not knowing will be worse.”
Shelley chewed on her lip. For all the pain she was feeling, she had to admit that she was still glad that she had learned the truth. Max was alive and he had left her—but he had not meant to be cruel. Those were simply the terms of the trade he had unknowingly made.
“You don’t have to read it to me,” Paolo said. “But clearly he had something to say, something he wanted you to know. He asked me to find you, and I know in my heart that he did it as much for himself as for me.”
Shelley knew that Paolo was right. She retreated to a quiet corner while Paolo went outside. She ran her fingers over the creases of the letter and imagined Max’s fingers pressing them into place. She unfolded the paper slowly. Beneath the folds were the last words Max would ever say to her. It was the good-bye that she did not want to hear. She closed her eyes and pressed his letter to her lips. It smelled like a place she had once been to. Salty. Faraway. She smoothed it on the table.
Shelley,
It is barely morning and the bed is still warm from where you lay in my arms.
Shelley stopped reading. What was Max talking about? When had he written this letter?
I watched you creep outside, careful not to wake me. I listened to you dress in the hallway and walk out the front door. I listened—until there was nothing left but the sound of my own breathing. I do not know where you are going. I do not want to know.
Tears burned Shelley’s eyes. This was the night she had run away from Max, the day after he had asked her to marry him.
Yesterday, I asked you to be my wife. I asked you to think about your answer. I wanted to give you the chance to do something that I could not do myself—to run away. I could never willingly leave you, Shelley, though I know this is what a less selfish man would do. But I am half a man, wholly in love, and so I have chosen to let you leave me instead.
Was I hasty in asking you to marry me? In my eyes, I could not have been slower. In a blink, you will be gone. I see the sand of your life flowing—fast and freely between my fingers. I am not a god, but you are mortal. I wished only to snatch you from the meadow before time laid you beneath it.
You make me laugh, Shelley. You also make me cry. Your heart is so soft that it pities monsters. Basilisks. River Men. You see beyond their crimes. It fille
d me with the hope that you would see beyond the one I have just committed—because make no mistake, asking you to be my wife is the sin of a madman.
I am writing all this because I know I have no intention of ever giving you this letter. I just needed a place in this universe to tell the truth, even if only on a page that will never be read. But I have never lied to you. All the lies I have ever told have been to myself. I have never promised you anything I couldn’t give. The lie was that I didn’t want more.
I want forever with you, Shelley.
I want your days to be as long and endless as mine.
I want to hear your voice next to me on the nights I fear to dream.
I want you to choose me, to choose us, every day, and always.
But the price is too high for what I want, and I will not let you pay it. And so I have let you steal a boat—and my heart—and pray that we shall never meet again.
Run, Shelley. Run away with your thoughts, your answer, and your heart while you can. Run from me and my hopeless secrets. Run and hide, Shelley, because if I find you, I will never let you go.
So leave me, my love, on this island, my sanctuary in every apocalypse, and let the world I dared to dream for us end.
Max
Chapter Twenty-six
Tea and tomorrow
WHERE SHELLEY IS
Now
The chicken was noticeably quiet as it sat in the back of the rented motorboat. The fact that it was lying between a generous layer of mayonnaise and a soggy lettuce leaf might have had something to do with its demeanor. But the cold sandwich was the closest thing Shelley could find to a chicken at this time of the night and she needed all the luck she could get. She had also stuffed two hard-boiled eggs in her coat pockets for good measure. (She had no idea what she was going to do with them or the sandwich, but she thought that taking them with her was probably the least mad thing she was doing that evening.) She rubbed her chest. It hurt.
It had been two weeks since she and Paolo parted ways. She had flown back to London while Paolo lingered at The Shell to perfect the fine art of making baked eggs and cheese. Dex had become quite an egg expert and was happy to share Max’s elusive secret ingredient with them. Shelley was more than mildly stunned when she learned that the great mystery behind the dish was actually just a few drops of—
A fortress of cypress on the horizon caught Shelley’s attention. She inhaled sharply. She pointed in its direction. “Over there.”
The rugged man behind the helm nodded. He smelled as salty as the lagoon he made his living on. He steered the boat toward the crumbling dock.
Shelley stuffed the sandwich into the back pocket of her jeans and climbed onto the walkway.
“Should I wait for you?” the man asked.
“No,” Shelley said. The boat sped away.
She shivered. She turned her collar up against the sea wind and shoved her hands deep into her pockets, jostling the hard-boiled eggs. The wooden planks creaked as she made her way to the shore. Not much had changed, she thought. She took another step forward. Her foot shot through a gap in the walkway. She stumbled forward and grabbed onto a post, then pulled herself up and rolled back onto the dock. Her sandwich talisman smashed into a pulp under her weight. She groaned. Still, squished chicken salad was better than nothing.
The path was overgrown with wiry branches and shrubbery. Shelley pushed her way through. The caretakers had stopped coming to the island when Max died. They had never forgiven her for stealing their boat despite her profuse apologies and the Christmas cards she sent them every year. She had not bothered to replace them and now had several sufficiently arduous minutes of getting snagged and scratched along the bristling path to regret this decision. She emerged from the thicket with a nest of twigs and leaves hopelessly entangled in her hair. She pulled off what she could, thankful that there weren’t any house-hunting seagulls in the vicinity.
The moonlit courtyard opened in front of her, opalescent like a fading dream. Alex looked paler than she remembered. She took a breath and walked across the mosaic chicken. Her shoe scraped against a hole where a loose tile had been. Her heart stopped, then began racing.
Shelley reached the threshold of the main house. She dug into her pockets for a key and unlocked the door. She ran her hand across the wall, feeling around for the light switch.
A Murano glass chandelier sparkled to life. A prism of colors fell over the room, and Shelley narrowed her eyes at what she was seeing or, rather, what she was not.
Unlike the dock’s familiar state of disintegration, in this room everything had changed. The grinning jade Buddha was not smiling at her from his temple of vinyl records. Fabergé eggs and ancient armory no longer littered the floor. The marble floor glistened. The maze of Max’s past was gone.
Shelley felt colder. She blew into her hands and rubbed them together.
She walked to the foot of the stairs and looked up. She gripped the carved wooden banister and braced herself for the climb.
Every step sent a sharp pain shooting through her body. Shelley stumbled over the last step and crumpled to the floor. She lay on her back and waited for the world to come into focus. It never did. Her vision remained blurred like a fogged-up window. But what she did see was enough to let her know that she was now just a few feet away from her destination. At the end of the hallway was the room she had fled from a lifetime ago. Behind its wooden door was what she had come to find. She picked herself up and dragged her numb feet toward the door. It was ajar. She peeked through.
The wrought-iron bed lay in a pool of moonlight, white cotton sheets draping over it like frosting. The pillow on which she had laid her head five years ago remained slightly rumpled. It was exactly the same.
He was exactly the same.
Max’s face was nestled next to her empty pillow. He still slept on his side of the bed, Shelley thought. She pressed her frozen palm against her heaving chest. She walked to the bed, emptied her pockets on the nightstand, and undressed. She climbed into the bed and slipped under the warmth of Max’s arms, melting into every curve of his body.
“Shelley …” he whispered into her nape.
Her name. His voice. It was a marriage of sound and meaning that she thought she would never hear again. She turned to Max and saw that he was still asleep. She began to cry. Hot drops fell on the back of his hand. He stirred from his dream.
“Max …” Shelley’s heart broke in her voice.
Max reached out to touch her face. “Shelley, you look so real.”
She wondered if any of this was real. Her vision remained blurry. The room was fading into mist and only Max’s arms around her kept her from flitting through the window. She heard Max calling her back.
“Are you?” Max asked.
The pain in Shelley’s chest was greater now. She dove into Max’s eyes, searching for some place where it did not hurt. She had to say something—anything—while she still could. “Max,” she said, “you … cleaned the house.”
“Well, um, yes,” he said. “I did. It was making me sneeze.”
Shelley winced through another wave of slicing pain.
Max looked at her worriedly. “Are you hurt?”
“I was,” she said. “Not anymore.” There was no part of her body that was not in pain, but she was not lying to Max. Max’s death hurt. Learning he was alive hurt. But finding him and lying in his arms—that did not hurt at all.
“Shelley …”
“Max, please,” Shelley said. “No more words.” She pressed her lips against his, and for a moment she forgot the pain.
Max kissed her back.
And then there were no words spoken between them for a long time.
A very long time.
Max and Shelley caught their breath, gasping from all the words they didn’t exchange.
“I never wanted to leave you, Shelley.” He rolled on his back. “You don’t know how many times I had to stop myself from going back. One time I even got as far as you
r doorstep. I knocked …”
Shelley’s breath caught in her throat.
“But you weren’t home.”
She regretted for the second time in as many weeks that she had not listened to Brad and hired a butler.
“I was glad,” Max said.
Shelley’s heart crumpled. “Why?”
He cupped her face in his hands and gently ran his thumbs over her cheeks. He wiped away her tears.
“I wanted you to be happy.”
“I wasn’t.” She looked away.
“In time you would have learned to be.”
“Like you?” Shelley asked. “In your little café in the Philippines?”
Max took a deep breath. “Did you see the water, Shelley?”
Before Ever After Page 29