“I wouldn’t be marrying you if I was less than committed to you, Klaus.”
He smiled. “Of course, Liebling. Can I see more of these diaries of yours?”
“Not tonight Klaus. I can go to the bank tomorrow and get the actual journals out of the lockbox.”
“You trust me that much, Edwina, to share your dreams?”
“I trust you with my life, the lives of our future children, and with all I am, have, or will ever have, Klaus. I wouldn’t be marrying you otherwise. What are a few thousand dreams in comparison to a life together?”
Epilogue
Klaus and Edwina lay on the beach in the morning sunlight, looking out onto the crystal blue water of the Caribbean. The sound of children laughing filled the air.
“Momma, Papa,” a red haired lad of six called out as he ran to them.
“Sean, what is it, sweetheart?” Edwina asked.
“Mary won’t let me go in the ocean.”
Edwina looked at her dear husband, then at Sean, their youngest child. He was so like all of the fifteen other boys to whom they had given life over the nearly one hundred and seventy years of their marriage. Each of their sons, like their five daughters, had possessed unique and precious personalities. Looking at this child almost brought tears to her eyes. He was so like his father in personality. Of course, Klaus thought that young Sean was so much like her in looks. She frequently teased Klaus that the poor child had the worst of both sets of genes.
He would be small for such a very short time. The child longed to have his childhood behind him and to be all grown-up. Personally, she thought it such a shame that youth was wasted on the young who didn’t appreciate it.
“Sean,” Klaus reminded the child, “you don’t swim well enough to go into the water without someone with you. I told you that we would all go swimming in the protected bay later this afternoon.”
Sean’s lip pouted out in displeasure.
“Stick that lip out more, and I’ll hang a bucket from it,” Edwina advised quietly as she pulled the child into her lap and gave him a cuddle before sending him off to play with his brothers and sister.
Engineering a retrovirus had taken much longer than they had either one anticipated, even with her research notes from the dreams. Spending the day outside—lounging on the beach, going to a child’s ball game, puttering again in her garden, or just going about doing business like a normal person—had been well worth the prolonged effort.
They had changed identities twice. Klaus had “passed on” first, thirty-three years into their marriage, leaving her a “widow” when their oldest grandson had died suddenly from an a complication of chickenpox. Then, five years later, Edwina had taken on the identity of an unrelated two-year old child, Elizabeth Smith, who had suffered from xeroderma pigmentosum—a rare genetic disease that gave the child an absolute intolerance to sunlight. As a cover story, it hadn’t been bad. Young Elizabeth had been twelve when she had challenged the biology department of Yale University for her bachelor’s degree in biology. Two years later, she had defended her doctoral dissertation and had been awarded a double Ph.D. in botany and genetics. She had joined a nineteen year old Klaus in the lab. When she had turned seventeen and Klaus was twenty-two, according to the world’s reckoning, she had married Klaus all over again. They had lived together until their ninetieth wedding anniversary. Then their elderly forms had been found together in bed, apparently dying entwined in each other’s arms as they had slept peacefully. By then, they had created other identities for them to step into, young adult identities of Matthais Klaus von Bruner and Brigid Edwina Carstairs, who soon became a von Bruner.
One time of being separated from one another for all of a childhood, and having been forced to sneak around to see one another in alternate forms, had been all either of them had been willing to endure. The engineering the identities had not been something done quickly but it had been worth the effort. She counted every day with Klaus as a day well spent.
The world still wasn’t ready to admit the existence of their kind. So changing identities had been essential. Perhaps one day, it wouldn’t be necessary to hide behind names that weren’t theirs, just as it was now no longer essential for their kind to hide away from the sun.
For now, however, both she and Klaus were content to live their lives fully, moment by moment, enjoying the pleasure of one another and the joys of life that were theirs. Edwina had been wise enough to take the chance presented by her dream lover.
The End
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Also at Ellora’s Cave
Diane Whiteside Marilyn Lee Margaret Carter
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Dream Lover Page 22