Bran buried his face in his hands and gave in to despair.
9
February 14, 1906
My children, my babies, are ten years old. Ten years. It hardly seems possible.
I watched them tonight at dinner. They’re healthy, thank God, and growing so quickly. I could see in their young faces the adults I believe they will become.
Mary Anna. My sweet, darling girl. Still as headstrong and impulsive as ever, but so loving. So thoughtful. She will be a good wife, a devoted mother. She radiates love. I can think of no more fitting birth date for her than St. Valentine’s Day. I hope she will one day meet someone who will understand what a true and rare treasure he has found in her.
Ian. I am shaking my head even as I write his name. How can a child be so difficult, and yet so very special? There are times when I cannot imagine what is going on inside his head. He’s changed so much since I married Gaylon. He is no longer the little boy he once was. He keeps his thoughts to himself now, for the most part, except with Mary Anna, who knows him better than any of us. He doesn’t have many friends. I believe he intimidates the other children. He is so serious, so intense. So much an adult in a child’s body.
He is a beautiful young man. He has thick, dark hair, and smoldering dark eyes, and his smile is devastating. I could never forget what my darling James looked like. I have only to look at Ian to call his father’s image to mind perfectly.
Ian is like James in so many ways. When he gives his love, he gives it completely. Fiercely. He feels that way now about Mary Anna, and about me, and about our inn. I hope that someday he will share that devotion with a woman who will love him as passionately in return, a woman who can calm the storms of his turbulent soul, as James once told me I did for him.
James has been so prominent in my thoughts recently, perhaps because I know how proud he would have been of our children on their tenth birthday. Gaylon is jealous. He has finally realized, I think, that I will never love him the way I loved James.
He actually shouted at me the other evening, when we had a disagreement about the running of the inn. He accused me of living in the past, of being unfaithful to him in my thoughts and my dreams: In my heart. I told him quite frankly that I will continue to be a good wife to him, as I have tried very hard to be these past two and a half years, but that I will never forget my first husband, the father of my children. I didn’t want to hurt him, but he should not have criticized me when I made no secret from the beginning that my love for James has never waned. Nor will it ever.
Mary Anna overheard our quarrel. I thought she was in bed, but she had gotten up for water. I regret deeply that she heard Gaylon’s accusations. I tried to explain to her later that all married couples have their disagreements, but she still seemed troubled. She is fond of Gaylon, in her way, though Ian continues to treat him with the polite distance he maintains with guests of the inn and members of the staff.
I have given up hoping that Ian will ever accept Gaylon as a father. Gaylon, too, seems to have stopped trying. If, in fact, he ever really did. Sometimes I wonder if his pretty words of family were motivated more by his desire for the inn than his true feelings for me or my children. He shows favor to his own son, which is natural, I suppose, and he is kind to Mary Anna, but he does not reach out to Ian. At least he is never unkind to the children. He knows I would not tolerate it. And he is not a cruel man. Merely a thoughtless one, at times.
It grows late. I should go to bed. My husband will be wondering what is keeping me.
BAILEY SAT on the floor of the cottage, her back pressed to the door, her gaze fixed on the place where Bran had last stood. She didn’t.know how long she’d been sitting there—minutes? hours?—but she couldn’t seem to move.
Elva hadn’t seen or heard Bran.
She kept replaying the times she’d spent with him. The odd things he’d said and done.
“There are many things about me that you would probably find very hard to believe.”
“You make me want… things I can’t have.”
“I can’t be what you want. What you need.”
She thought of his almost obsessive avoidance of touching her. His sudden appearances and disappearances. The soundless way he moved.
He had never once knocked on her door, she realized dimly.
What was he?
A delusion? Had the series of misfortunes she’d suffered pushed her over the edge? Had she created a dark, handsome, brooding lover out of her wistful romantic fantasies?
He’d seemed so real.
An angel? He’d said several times that he wanted to help her. He’d listened to her problems, bolstered her battered ego, comforted her after her nightmare. And then she remembered his flashes of temper, his moodiness, the visible desire in his eyes when he’d leaned close and whispered that he wanted her.
She couldn’t really picture Bran as an angel.
One word kept echoing through her mind, despite her efforts to ignore it. It was the one word she just wasn’t ready to face.
But it simply wouldn’t go away.
Ghost.