Page 46 of I Loved You Then (Far From Home #12)

Ciaran walked with his boots slung over his shoulder.

Claire had left her shoes at the bottom of the path.

After a while, bare heel and toe prints stretched a half mile behind them.

Claire loved the way the world at the water’s edge kept rewriting itself in small details, always had—the way foam swept round a rock, how the current left a strand of kelp like a ribbon across a pebble.

She paused and looked out over the water, the horizon a hard, silver line where sky met sea, never quite able to explain or define the satisfaction that came from standing by a body of water.

Then she turned to Ciaran, a thought coming to her. “Tell me,” she requested, tilting her head at him, “why the image of that woman—the one at Berwick—why did she stay with you?”

If he were surprised by the question, he didn’t show it, but he did take some time to consider his answer, watching the surf swallow and retch at the shore. The wind took his hair and the sun brightened the green of his eyes.

When he answered his voice had a thoughtful quality about it, of someone pulling something from the deep recess of his mind.

“?Tis nae easy to put in words,” he said.

“I’ve asked myself the same, many a time.

” He stooped then and picked up a round, gray stone, cupping it and tossing it in his hand as though it might answer for him.

“When I held her... she was quiet at the end. There was a look in her eyes like rest. I kent, foolish as it sounds, that I had given her a kind of peace, if only for those last breaths. Pride, maybe, for doing the thing proper when she needed it...or some other thing—she was the first woman I’d seen ravaged by war.

Aye, and...more than that—there were moments when I imagined, if only for a blink, that she kent me.

Even now, I still feel as if she was only calm then, waiting on me to recognize her.

” His brow lowered, while he thought about it. “It’s a thing that nags a man. Ye ken?”

Claire let that settle, feeling her own memory like a bruise, sharp and impossible to ignore.

“But do you think...” she began slowly, the idea returning to her once again, so difficult to discount, “do you think it’s possible we were seeing each other, Ciaran?

However that might have been?” She drew in a breath, and put forth her reasoning on the matter.

“You said that was in March, nine years ago. Around the same time in my life—March, nine years past—a man who looked like you came to me when I was broken and terrified. He didn’t speak.

He just...was there. I don’t know who he was or from where he came, but when he was with me I knew a peace that would have been impossible in that situation— and that I didn’t even feel when the paramedics arrived.

Even with the questions—who he was, how he seemed to materialize out of thin air, why he didn’t speak—that peace was there. ”

Ciaran’s mouth softened at that, a small, almost incredulous smile touching the corner.

He turned the stone between his fingers.

“Naught should surprise us, aye?” He asked at last. “I’d nae believed such things before—aye, I’m nae keeper of mysteries—but there’s a strangeness in some threads of the world.

If a thing has been knotted once, maybe it keeps knotting.

I dinna ken how. I can only tell ye what it did to me, what she did for me.

When she was with me—nae in the moment but in memory— something felt.

..put right.” He looked up, his gaze bright against the pale sea.

“I dinna ken how to explain it. It——” He broke off, smiling at what he would likely see as the foolishness of it.

Put right.

Claire smiled, completely at peace with what she now believed—that somehow that man had been Ciaran.

“That’s exactly what he did for me, over the years,” she told him. “Whenever I thought of him, nothing seemed sad or bad. I wasn’t anxious or worried. The memory of him always brought me peace, always put me right.”

Ciaran nodded and stared at her, a silent understanding passing between them. Maybe they would speak no more about it, any discussion possibly being only questions and conjecture, but she imagined they were in agreement, that they’d met before she’d come through time.

She stepped closer, until their shoulders touched, the contact small and steady. They stood that way, watching the tide, each holding the thought between them without needing to pin it down.

“It matters naught, mayhap,” Ciaran said quietly, turning his face so she could see him fully.

“Whether we ken the why of it or nae. Whether gods, witches, or curses put us here or there, what matters is what we do with what we ken now. I kent peace then when I held that woman and when she came to me in memory, and I ken peace with ye. If that’s fate or mercy or madness, it’s still truth to me. ”

She pressed her hand into his, fingers finding the callus at the heel of his palm by habit, and felt the steadiness there. “It was real,” she said simply, and the word was a small, hard thing that pleased them both. “I felt it with him. I feel it with you.”

They walked on after a moment, sand clinging to their heels, and Claire thought how strange and beautiful a life could be, how it could fold past and present over each other in the same way the waves rolled over the beach.

“I’m in love with you,” Claire said, the words slipping out, even as she felt they’d been waiting years to be spoken.

Ciaran didn’t pause, didn’t stop walking. “Aye, I figured as much,” he said, with the calm certainty of a man who dealt in hard truths and recognized one when it stood before him, all while wearing a crooked smile.

Claire laughed, unable to help herself. “Oh did you?”

“Aye,” he replied, a crooked half-smile lifting one corner of his mouth. “Ye keep showing up naked in my chamber. Either ye’re in love with me or I need serious words with the washerwomen.”

She shoved him playfully with her shoulder. “Maybe I’m just hot for your body.”

“I have nae doubt about that, lass.” His answer was both joke and honest comfort.

“Did the nakedness give that away, too?” she teased.

“Nae secrets when ye’re bare, Claire.” He nudged her with one finger at the ribs, mock stern and absurdly domestic.

They walked on, trading small provocations and sweet looks, the kind of easy, near-silly intimacy that belongs only to people who know one another fully and without pretense.

It was ridiculous and tender in equal measure, and Claire felt a bright warmth lift through her chest that had nothing to do with the sun.

She looked at him then, at the angle of his nose, the line of his jaw, and felt as if she could say it aloud, believing it was probably true. “Maybe I loved you then, too.”

Finally, Ciaran stopped walking and faced her. His answer was a small lift of his brow before he took her hand and drew it to his chest. “Aye, same. And I love ye now, my Claire.”

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The End