"I shall get him, Maeve," Selena answered.
Maeve frowned, worked her lower lip nervously with her teeth, gripped the animal to her chest. "He cries when I touch him." Tears glazed her eyes. "Why does he cry?"
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Selena gazed across the table at her. "Maybe he does not know it is you."
Maeve swiped at an invisible fly. "The bathwater is too hot. Bring the wine."
Ian closed his eyes and sagged forward, resting his elbows on the wobbly table.
Maeve jumped to her feet with a scream. Yanking up her skirt, she cast a quick backward glance, then surged toward Ian, reaching for him. Her gnarled fingers curled around his wrist and tugged hard. "I can't find my baby." She looked up at him through glassy, hazel green eyes. "Help me find my baby."
Images slammed through Ian's head. My baby. Oh, God, my baby. Herbert will want to see his son. The words catapulted into his brain, cycling through in an endless litany. Then came the images, the amorphous transference of thought. Panic. Fear. Desperation.
His mother's emotions swirled around him, sucked him in. He could feel her anxiety; it caused his own heartbeat to speed up.
And then suddenly, through the red mist of frustration, he saw her. His mother, sitting at the cockeyed table in the middle of the forest. Deep, deep within the barking l
ayers of dementia, she was there, watching him, hearing him, needing him.
The revelation stunned him. He'd never thought she was even marginally conscious of reality when she was in this state, but now he saw the truth. She was in there somewhere, fighting off the whispering voices of her imagination, the myriad fictional images that besieged her. She was there, small and frightened and alone. "Mother?"
She blinked up at him. For a split second, he thought that she would see him, speak to him. Hope brought him to his feet beside her.
She swiped at another nonexistent fly and shook her head as if to clear it. "The rain is ruining the rhubarb."
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He released his breath slowly and waited for the inevitable sense of disgust to settle in.
Amazingly, it didn't come. For once, all he felt when he looked at his mother was compassion.
Maeve wrenched away from him and hurried back to her seat at the table.
Ian stood there, still too stunned to move.
Selena rose beside him, touching his arm gently. "She will be herself again soon. Would you like some tea?"
Ian almost laughed. Slowly he turned and looked down at Selena. She stood beside him, tall and proud and beautiful, her hair in wild disarray around her face. Smiling. Always smiling.
He knew suddenly, as surely as he'd ever known anything in his life, that he could fall in love with this woman. Not the woman he'd created or saved or imagined, but this woman, with her quixotic smile and exuberant nature. This woman who in two days had turned his world upside down.
He drew back, frightened of her and himself and everything that this moment held. Things like this didn't happen in life; at least, if they did, they didn't happen to men like Ian. Good things happened to good people, and Ian was far, far from good.
"I am now to make apple and flower necklaces," she said. "You would like to help?"
He glanced down at the apples on the table and smiled.
Jesus, apple necklaces. It was a whole new world.
He nodded. "If you want me to."
"Oh, Ian," she said with a throaty laugh. "I always want you to stay with me. I feel love for you."
Ian almost crumpled at the simple, oddly worded sentence. It was the first time anyone had ever claimed to love him.
Chapter Sixteen