Page 104 of Princess Redeemed

“I know.”She cups my cheek.

Her fingers are cool, but not cold like mine.Mine are always cold.

“You’ve been walking through fire, haven’t you?”

I nod.There’s no point lying.She never knew my true heritage.She died before I found out myself.

Butdidshe know?

She always hated my father.Hated that my mother married him.

She hated the divorce, hated my mother’s remarriage, yet she seemed to hate Richard less than she hated my father.

If she only knew…

She knows in my dream.

She knows who and what I am, and she loves me.Still, I’m her favorite of five grandchildren.

And she knows who and what my stepfather is.

I kneel and help her with the green beans.“I took the life of another,” I say.

“I know,” she says softly.

I look around the backyard in suburban Colorado, at the large olive tree, the ponderosa pine that she transplanted from a mountaintop, the concrete deck with the chairs I remember.

“Is this the ether?”I ask.

She shakes her head.“Not as you know it.This is the dream world, and I’m not really here in this garden.It’s a way for me to communicate with you that your brain can comprehend.”

I nod again.“Grandma, I have something I have to do.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I may lose my mother when I do it.”

Grandma turns away from the green beans and meets my gaze.She looks younger than I remember.Her hair is no longer gray but a beautiful brown, lighter than my own.

“Your mother is one of my biggest regrets,” she says.“I shouldn’t have been so hard on her.I should have taught her what she was worth.She was beautiful and smart, but I told her she was merely average.”

“Why?”I ask.“Why would you do that?”

“It was the way,” she says.“It was how my father raised me.I didn’t know any better.It led her to marry two men, neither of whom were worthy of her.She has never been happy, your mother.”

“Never?”I ask.

“Not like I was.Your grandfather plucked me out of a life of poverty and gave me a beautiful home and three wonderful children.If only…” She stares wistfully over the fence at the High Line Canal behind the house.A few horseback riders pass by.

“If my mother was wonderful, as you say, why didn’t you tell her?”

“I should have,” she admits, “but if I had, she wouldn’t have married your father, and then you wouldn’t exist.”She drops her gaze to my abdomen.“And neither would my great-grandson.”

I slide my hand over my belly.The love I feel for him and his father washes over me in such a huge wave that it almost hurts.

“Yes,” I reply.“I suppose that’s one way to look at it.”

“It’s the only way to look at it, Hannah,” she says.“Because it can’t be changed.Wishing doesn’t make anything so.And I wouldn’t give you up for anything.”