After All These Years | ✔

44 - ZAC

He'd just finished packing down the soil around his mother's rose bushes when he saw it.

It crept up on him like Arthur's boat had on the lake's shore on a day long gone. And like that day, the movement he spotted out of the corner of his eyes startled him.

Zac stopped whistling and looked up to see somebody standing at the end of the brick path. He could tell it was a woman by her tall, slim figure, but her face was hidden as the bright sun behind her blinded him.

"Can I help you?" He said out of politeness, and he stood and lifted his arm to block the strong light. Just as he did, the woman's face came into view and he felt his heart leap in his chest.

"Lara?" The word came out before he even had a chance to think it over.

The woman didn't say anything to that, only shifted nervously, and he found himself moving towards her to see her more clearly. As he did, the sunlight shifted behind her, and her long hair darkened in the new light. The shape of her silhouette changed until she transformed into another person all together. No, it wasn't Lara, but her face held such a resemblance that for a long time he couldn't understand the connection.

He shifted his gaze from her, to what was in her hands. The familiar, yellow-tinged paper was peeking out from behind the flowers, and on it; a sketch of the very woman he had mistaken her for. Lara; created by the very hands that now shook as he took another step towards the oddly familiar stranger.

Zac still remembered tacking those very sketches to the wall of the shack. And after, whatever drawings he did in the solidarity of his cell, he sent along with handwritten letters to a young girl who lived in the city. But the person standing in front of him wasn't a girl. She was a young woman, and so beautiful he couldn't break his eyes away from her.

And then it was like the sun shifted to help him remember. It reflected and shone across the blue-green iris' of her eyes, until, suddenly, Zac was on a boat in the middle of a lake, or changing a diaper in a warm bedroom, staring down at those same eyes.

"No..." The realisation hit Zac all at once, and he felt the tears swell in his eyes. He knew her, even as she transformed into nothing but a swirl of colours in his blurred vision. But now Zac couldn't even speak her name, let alone stand up properly. He felt his insides break under the weight of it, and it was only then, as he felt tentative arms slowly wrap around his hunched form, that he truly believed she was real.

And Zac reached out his own arms, until he was clinging to his daughter like she was destined to disappear again. And as he held her, 15 years of separation and loneliness spilled from his eyes without any hesitation.

His breath hitched as he cried, catching the aroma of flowers on her; pure and sweet. And she was just that, he knew it then, as he felt her falter within his embrace, her walls of silence finally falling. Carlie's gentle sobs sounded softly in his ear, and that was the moment Zac decided that he never again would he ever let go.

"My baby." His hand found the back of her head as she began to cry more freely, and he couldn't help but run it down her long hair, "It's okay." And with her cries, Zac  found that he had transformed from what he had been all the way up to this moment: a lonely man overwhelmed with emotion, to a comforting father, as soon as he felt her break against him. Within their embrace, Zac slipped back into the man he wanted to be for all those years behind bars, and it never felt as good as it did now. He couldn't help but squeeze her gently in reassurance, "I'm here. You found me."

They were equally as tearful then, and a full minute passed before they broke contact, both not wanting to let the moment pass. Zac swayed back, wanting to search her face once more, to assure himself that it really was his Carlie. He guided it between his rough hands and spoke to her close, his thumbs tracing the soft skin over her jawbone that was so evidently inherited from him.