Page 163 of When Hearts Surrender

The thought of me swollen with his child makes me smile—any child will be lucky to have him as a dad.But what if I can’t—

“Shhh… Quiet those noises in your head. It’ll happen one way or another. We’ll be great parents, as long as that’s something you still want to do.”

The ache subsides as I burrow myself into his chest. “You’re so good to me.”

“What? I’m no longer Mr. Bad Influence?”

I laugh. “My soulmate. That’s who you are.”

He sobers, and I can feel his heated gaze on me.

“My soulmate,” he repeats, “and you’re perfect, your beautiful pieces, your ragged edges, all fitting next to mine, just the way it’s meant to be.”

I close my eyes and relish the strong thumping of his heartbeat against my ear.

“I dreamed about you when I was in a coma.” I hear the rumble of his voice from his chest. “I was chasing you in the rose garden, but you were always out of reach and when I finally caught up to you, you were broken in my arms and I was devastated.”

He sighs. “It was strange. The dreams felt so real. Like memories. Like I’d lost you before. But that doesn’t make any sense. I’ve never seen you in the rose garden before.”

The hairs on the back of my neck rise. His dreams are echoing visions of mine.

He continues, “The dreams would repeat and each time I’d grow more desperate, needing to save you. And that wasn’t all… I’d been having similar dreams most of my life. Always a faceless woman in the rose garden. But now, I can finally make out her features.”

He turns to me and whispers, “She’s you. Your face. Your smile. I’d dream of you painting under the night skies, my arms around your waist.You’d tell me you wanted to go to Venice to paint the canals. We’d be dancing, kissing. It felt so real.”

My heart thuds wildly in my chest. How can this be? How are we dreaming the same things?

“I had dreams about you too.” I swallow the lump in my throat and tell him about the ones I’ve had—him in the rose garden sobbing, blood spreading on his chest, visions of us waltzing in the gardens. I tell him about the letter I dreamed Silas wrote to a woman he loved—how I knew Silas had dimples on his face, just like Maxwell.

“Then there was the locket. When I saw it on the display, it was closed. But I knew what was inside. Maxwell, I-I don’t understand how I could’ve known.”

His body stills, his muscles coiling in tension as he listens to the strange stories, things that sound ridiculous and fantastical to my mind even as I say the words aloud.

But they feel like the truth, not figments of my imagination.

How can that be?

“I’ve always thought my dreams of you are vivid because I have the overactive imagination of an artist.” He rakes in a sharp inhale. “But what ifitisn’t?”

“What do you mean?” It can’t be…what he’s implying. My mind spins to the stories I’ve read as a child—stories about reincarnation and ghosts, souls finding each other life after life.

I think back to what Mora told me in the basement kitchen when I asked her if she believed in the curse. She said there were many things science couldn’t explain. I brushed her off then, but now…now I’m not so sure.

“Have you heard of the story ofMeng Po?” I ask Maxwell, referring to a Chinese legend I read about when I was younger—all part of the Saturday Chinese school curriculum Mom signed me up for. She said it was a way for me to know my heritage.

Maxwell shakes his head.

“Meng Po is a goddess who serves a special soup indiyu, the realm of the dead, to the souls who are ready to be reincarnated. The soup wipes the memory of those who drink it, so they’ll be cleansed of the burdens of their past lives before they’re reborn.”

I let out a shaky breath, feeling ridiculous for telling this story and yet, there aren’t any other explanations that make sense either. “According to a variation of the legend, Meng Po was actually Lady Meng Jiang, who found herself so overcome with grief from the death of her husband, she couldn’t reincarnate. So, she dedicated herself to creating this potion that’d save others from suffering the same fate. It was said some souls evaded the soup or didn’t drink enough, and they’d go into their next lives with their memories of the past partially intact.”

Maxwell stays silent, but I hear his breath hitching.

“It’s a legend, of course. It has to be fake, right? I don’t know why I just thought of it—”

“My family believed in a curse for generations. Of course, it turned out Morris was behind this crap all along. But still, after everything that happened, I find myself open to ideas that we once thought were impossible.”

Something niggles in the back of my mind. I bolt up and turn to him. “Maxwell, but what about the branch? Morris’s journals mentioned nothing about him engineering that. And the other deaths in your family before your grandmother?” I can’t believe I’m even suggesting this since I was the one who kept telling him in the past that the curse wasn’t real.

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