Movement Eight — The Narrator, Closing the Account

I told you, at the start of this, that I knew a little of love, or perhaps a great deal, and that I wasn't certain which. Having told you all of this now, I think I understand a little better which of the two was true.

I think love, in a place like the Between, is rarely the thing it looks like from the outside. It rarely arrives the way the potato-soul described it, or the alien, or the human aching for nights he can no longer have. It arrives, more often than not, the way it arrived for Vesper — quietly, through a single honest answer to a question she never expected anyone to actually answer, and it leaves, when it leaves at all, just as quietly, curdled into something that wears the shape of hatred because hatred, unlike love, at least gives a grieving soul somewhere to put all that feeling down.

I've wondered, telling you this, whether there was ever a version of this story where she walked toward that meeting and found him alone, and said what she'd come to say, and heard something back that let the whole of it settle into an ordinary happiness instead of whatever it became. I don't think wondering that serves either of us particularly well. The Between is not, as a rule, generous with second versions of the same afternoon. What happened, happened, and this account has never once pretended otherwise, however much easier the pretending might make the telling.

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I don't know whether she'll ever walk back through that castle's doors on her own. I don't know whether the local homeless girl of this strange, sprawling household will ever decide to let it be a home at all, rather than simply a place she circles at a careful, wounded distance. I think, given enough time — and out there, in the gray, patient distance of the Between, there is nothing this world has more of than time — she might. I think, given enough time, most things that started as love eventually find their way back to being love again, however long the detour through everything else takes.

For now, I'll leave her exactly where I found her: walking away from a castle she hasn't yet decided to call hers, with two women trailing quietly behind her, patient enough to let her walk as far as she needs to, for as long as she needs to, before she's finally ready to let either of them catch up.

— End of Chapter —