[[OLD]] A Handful of Daffodils (Forgotten Series, #7)

Epilogue: Part Two

I looked outside, seeing Brochan sitting on the step, watching the sunset. I had an urge to go out there and sit with him but I walked away, pondering on it. I was still hurt, so hurt about everything that happened and sometimes when I looked at him all I could see is every ugly thing he had thrown at me, every ugly thing that had been done to me because he hadn't listened. It was hard to move past that. So very hard.

I had asked Amber for help and she had asked me if I was okay with reading some of his thoughts. She had assured me that he was okay with it and after a few months I had decided I had wanted too. I hadn't at first, I had been so angry and hurt I couldn't bear to hear or read anything he said. She had asked me if I was okay reading heavier things or would like to read smaller things first.

I has chosen the smaller things first.

I didn't really know what I expected but I hadn't really expected what I had gotten. Small notes about his day or something funny that happened but those were mixed in with how much he loved me, how much he loved the girls. It was things he had never said out loud, not even before Simon had arrived and fought for my honour as my Protector. One thing he had written that stuck with me was he had described how he had glanced at me and I had been laughing at something and he noticed my dimples and he wrote how they were always hidden but every time they made an appearance he was stunned at just how beautiful and warm it made me look. He had then gone on to express that Chrissie had been his sunshine, something that brightened his day but I was his hearth, the heart of his home, and without me everything was that much colder.

I wasn't quite sure why it stuck with me like it did. I had deconstructed it a hundred different times but I still couldn't quite figure it out. But watching Jason and Mabel have the start of something, something like Ellie and Jay had, something that Bennett and Mari had. It had me thinking. Perhaps not quite about relationships like that, perhaps not right now, but it had me thinking about just what love was and if it could survive things like what I had gone through.

Amber had been no help. She told me my ability to forgive was my own and I was the only one who could say when I was ready to forgive, if I ever was. It made me feel like I was walking blind, uncertain of the terrain and terrified I would fall. I just wished someone could tell me what having forgiveness was, what it could be. I knew what Simon felt, I knew was Ellie thought and even Lisa. Duffy hadn't said much about it and I doubted she would. But there was no one that could come out and tell me when I was ready, if I ever would be, and that bothered me more than it should have.

The mark on my neck itched unbearably some days but there was nothing I could do because I was hurt. While the months had caused it to fade to an ache, there were still times when it flared up so vicious and brutal it took my breath away. I didn't know how someone could get over that. But still that little note clung on. I paced back and forth from the kitchen to the living room and I knew I was irritating Duffy because I could hear her huffing.

"Trouble, go out and sit with him before I nail your to the floor to get you to stop your incessant pacing." She hissed it at me and I looked at her with a small frown. "Don't give me that look. I know you enough to know what's bothering you. Go out and sit with him and ponder your dilemma where you won't pace a hole into the floor."

"I'm trying to figure it out." I was, I was trying to figure out what I had to do.

She rolled her eyes. "I can tell."

"I just don't know what to do." I threw my hands up as I said it because I didn't. I had no clue what to do or where I needed to go from here.

She shrugged, focusing intently on her knitting. "Do or don't do. It doesn't matter."

"Yes it does." My voice raised in pitch despite trying very hard to remain calm.

Duffy huffed, setting her knitting down. "Menza, I spent seventy years with my male. He died, after all the years he spent promising me that we would make it to the end, that he would be with me and hold my hand when we took our last breaths. He died." Her voice was sharp and she stared at me. "And I hate him for it." Her expression was sharp and I was surprised. From what she had said of Drew, she loved him a lot. "He left me to this world alone. He left me, passed on, broke all of those promises, and I sit here, alone, without him beside me and I hate him for that." She snapped it out, her lips pinched together and her eyes shined with tears. "There is not a day that goes by where I can get rid of the ache that his death caused me. I lost the love of my life. I have to endure this world alone."