Page 167 of When Hearts Surrender

Then there was the feeling of my heart stirring when she sat in my car for the first time, like it was finally awake after lying dormant in my chest for so long.

My breathing grows ragged and I stare at Belle, watching her eyes well with moisture as she looks at the diary—pages and pages of love and devotion from a man I feel a distinct kinship with to a woman who feels very much like her.

The same tugging of the soul. The same warmth on a dreary day. The same spark of light in the gloomy skies.

Belle whispers, “Do you sense it? The answer to the riddle?” She wrenches her gaze away from the journal and stares at me, her familiar tawny eyes darkening. She places her hand on her chest, and murmurs, “This feeling inside me…it’s like…coming home. Do you feel it?”

The answering beating in my heart thuds louder in my ears, a rioting warmth spreading to every atom in my body, chasing away the emptiness and cold I’ve always felt my entire life.

Until her.

A crinkled piece of paper falls out. I pick it up, finding the ink on the surface marred by water marks. I set down the diary and read.

My Beloved Silas,

If you read this, then I and our unborn child have already departed this world. I have risked everything and given you my all—my love, my dignity, my reputation, and being the foolish woman I am, if we could rewind time, I’m not sure I would have had the strength to stay away from you.

It details the heartbreak of a desperate woman who endured unspeakable tragedies, who felt she had no other way out. A woman who thought she was abandoned.

I clasp my hand over my mouth, my eyes burning, chest heavy with grief. The scene from my dreams. The sketch from Eleanor. The broken woman in my arms, the letter in her grasp.

It’s this one. I’m sure of it.

I get to the bottom of the letter.

I wish for your family to learn not to give love so cruelly, so selfishly. To learn the meaning of true sacrifice. Should a firstborn son of the Anderson name fall in love and marry, the person of his affections shall fall to an untimely demise lest the lesson be learned.

Yours, faithful in death,

Emma

“The curse,” Belle gasps. “Does this mean what I think it means? That it exists?”

My heart thuds loudly in my ears, blood rushing swiftly to my head. I reread the words, my mind sifting through all thejournals and letters I’ve read in the past about the curse. All the deaths in the family before grandmother. The unexplained branch shattering the windows. The ardent belief in the curse by every Anderson generation since Grandfather Silas’s time.

I look at Belle, suddenly fearful for her life again, but then the last few sentences of the letter echo in my mind.

True sacrifice. Lesson be learned.

And I feel a crushing sense of relief. One that feels as true as my love for Belle.

I look at my beloved and murmur, “I don’t think we’ll ever know definitively, Belle. But…ifthere was a curse, we’ve broken it. I know it deep inside.” I point to the last lines of the letter.

Belle’s eyes rove over the sentences. She murmurs, “Of course. Sacrifice. Y-You almost died for me. Y-You—” She chokes up, unable to continue.

“Shhh…” I tilt her face up and find her eyes shining with tears. “Everything worked out the way it was supposed to.”

A breeze blows by, the pages of the diary fluttering, catching our attention, until it lands on a page.

October 2, 1863, Wraithmoor Abbey

My Beloved Emma,

I’m standing at the spot where you took your last breath, wondering what you saw before you closed your eyes three years ago. The hopelessness you must have felt. The agonizing betrayal. The desperation.

This is the sameplace where my lungs took their last breath, the last breath that filled my body with life, not merely life-sustaining oxygen.

Because my life ended when your soul left this earth.

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