Page 105

I glanced down and I was standing in tall grass, but weeds had my feet tangled and I couldn’t move. Fear surged through me, and I glanced back up. “I can’t—” Then I saw she wasn’t alone. “Elizabeth?” My little girl was playing with a doll at her feet, dressed in one of the sparkly dresses she’d just worn to show off for Justin.
“She’s safe,” Claire assured me as she ran a loving hand over her curls.
Again, I tried to move, to get to them, but it was as if I was trapped in quicksand.
“We don’t have much time,” Claire said as a beam of the warmest, brightest white light shone down on her, somehow soothing all of my anxiety and making me stand completely still and in awe as it illuminated her and the small lake just behind her, sparkling like diamonds off its surface.
“Time for what?” I whispered.
She reached down and scooped up Elizabeth as the light became brighter, nearly blinding. “Trust him,” she said. “Trust his love... it’s the only way to live again...”
I woke with a flash just as Claire disappeared into the white light.
It was just a dream, and yet . . .
It felt like so much more.
I rolled my head and glanced at the clock. Just after midnight. I wasn’t usually one to subscribe to the supernatural, but something wasn’t sitting right, and I knew I wouldn’t be going back to sleep anytime soon, not after that.
Gently, I slid out from Justin’s hold and slipped out of bed. I pulled on his shirt and padded down the hall to check on Elizabeth. She was sleeping soundly in her bed, and I shook my head at myself.
Claire was heavy on my mind as I headed to the kitchen to make myself some hot tea. I sat on the couch in the dark, remembering how she looked in my dream. So beautiful, so much like the girl I remembered, and yet, also so much more.
What if . . .?
No.
I shut that thought down immediately. My subconscious was just working overtime because I’d been super stressed with everything going on. That had to be it. I glanced over at the security system panel, reassured by the glow of the cheerful green light.
Trust him . . . Trust his love.
I sipped and mulled that over. Clearly, I was also still working out my trust issues too. I loved Justin. What I felt for Christoph paled in comparison, if it was love at all. That didn’t change the fact that he was Elizabeth’s biological father and how I’d been wounded by the horrible things he’d said to me before I left Italy.
Or the lies I’d told afterward.
Twenty-Five
Olivia
Then . . .
“There’s another letter for you on your nightstand.” My mother looked at me with that look. The one that begged me to let her in and let her share the burden.
But I’d already burdened her and my dad enough, coming home from Italy, full of shame and secrets, and though I’d told her most of the story in the throes of labor, I hadn’t told her everything—I hadn’t told her the worst of it—and she knew it. I saw it in her eyes every time she looked at me like that. And I’d nearly broken at least a dozen times in the last week as the postpartum hormones had their claws in deep and breastfeeding was hard and healing was hard and, well, it was all hard.
But I loved Elizabeth so much, it more than made up for all of it. Especially in the rare moments when she napped so I could rest.
“Thanks, Mom.”
She nodded and left me to it, making me all the more grateful that they’d let me come home to live with them and lick my wounds for a while until I figured out what I was going to do now that I was a single mom with no career to speak of anymore.
I sat on the bed, feeling the heaviness in my breasts that told me it was nearly feeding time, and picked up the envelope.
Christoph’s familiar curling script sent a wave of nausea through me. It dawned on me that he had this address from my emergency contact list on my application for the intensive. It just never occurred to me that he’d use it after the way we’d left things and the vile things he’d said.
His first letter had come about three months after I arrived home. His words were sweet and apologetic, letting me know he was getting a divorce and asking to reconcile, begging me to call him so he could explain. I could almost hear his voice as I read his words, like the Christoph I used to know.
I held on to that letter for days, agonizing over what to do with it. A part of me wanted to believe and forgive. A bigger part of me—the protective mother that now existed—was leery. She won.