Forged by Fate

“Yes. My portrait.” He would come to terms with it, or he wouldn’t, but she was shivering and he was blocking the door. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get dressed.”

He shook his head, and stepped out of her way. She knew he was still staring after her, even when she had shut the door to the bedroom they shared.

The towel had loosened, and she rewrapped it over her breasts, leaning against the door. She half-hoped he would follow, but even if he had wanted to, he was already late. He’d leave, go to work, see to his business and give them both space to breathe. Time to settle.

She sighed. That damned portrait. She’d known it was only a matter of time before he noticed, but somehow she hadn’t seen him responding this way. She probably should have, but she hadn’t wanted to believe it would be a problem. She was still the same woman, after all. Abby or Helen, Anessa or Mary. She was still Eve. Names were nothing more than a different way to count her lives.

All things considered, it could have gone a lot worse. She was always pleased when the result of her confessions was not the threat of an insane asylum and medication, or an attempt to burn her at the stake for witchcraft. But this was her home. The land she had settled in with her people after leaving the Garden behind. The one place on this earth where she was permitted to be Eve, always. To be rejected here, however slight, made her heart ache.

That evening, Eve sat alone in the family library. It was her favorite retreat. The best place to lose herself for hours, determined as she was not to crowd Garrit. He’d find her when he was ready to see her. When he could look at her without seeing her as a ghost.

The shelves were overflowing with books, except for the one glass case from which she’d chosen the volume in her hands. That set of shelves was devoted to family history and impeccably maintained. Copied and recopied editions of books and manuscripts and even what had once been scrolls, every one given the space to air.

Eve turned the page. It was a reproduction of an old manuscript, written by her second DeLeon husband, Lord Ryam, centuries ago. Still, the volume was musty and old in its own right, and the leather binding flaked in her hands. Mostly, it tallied sheaves of grain and calves born, but there was the occasional personal reference. The births of her own children and grandchildren, and the incredible wealth of crops during the first year of their marriage. There had been so much rain, that year. She remembered it distinctly. But somehow the land had absorbed it all and turned it into a rich harvest.

Their estate had been very wealthy, then. Garrit and his father still cultivated the vineyard, of course, and the wine they sold had afforded his parents a good living, but Garrit’s real wealth came from investments and banking. Things she knew very little about, despite the significant advantages of reincarnation and telepathy. Or maybe it was because of them that she never found the accumulation of large amounts of wealth to be important. It wasn’t as though she could bring it with her.

The book was dry, but it kept her mind off other things. Filling her thoughts with easy noise without resurrecting memories. She’d been dreaming about the mental ward again. When it had felt as though she had been lost in her own mind. She certainly had a new sympathy for those diagnosed with dementia.

A knock on the door interrupted the thought. Garrit hesitated for a moment in the doorway before he crossed the room and sat down in the matching wingback chair opposite her own. She closed the book in her lap and set it aside. He looked less tense now that he was home from work, though he hadn’t changed out of his suit yet, which wasn’t exactly the best sign.

He pulled his tie free from his collar and draped it over the arm of his chair. “I’m not here to apologize.”

She leaned back in her seat. “I wasn’t expecting it.”

He seemed to stare at the fireplace. Eve couldn’t get used to the fact that it was gas instead of wood, and rarely lit it. What was the fun in flipping a switch on the wall? Even worse, it came with a remote control, which Garrit took from the end table beside his chair, toying with it.

“One minute, the woman I was making love to was just a woman, and then I happen into the hall and see you staring at me from a canvas.” He pressed a button and the fire whooshed to life, the flicker of light and shadow playing across his cheek, turning his frown into a scowl. “I don’t even know how I missed it all this time.”

“I’m still just a woman, Garrit.”

“The woman.” He tossed the controller away and ran his fingers through his hair. “Eve. The mother of all of us. Literally and figuratively.”

“I’m just the only one who lived,” she said gently. “Not the only one who mothered.”

“But you’re still our mother, our grand-mere, as Anessa, wife of the Marquis DeLeon.” He laughed and shifted in his seat. His face was almost gray. “I’m sleeping with my grandmother.”

“Five hundred years is at least seventeen generations removed. You would lose count before you finished listing the greats before my name. I’ve been born a squalling infant, grown old and died five times since.”

He studied her for a long minute, and she followed the emotions behind it, but not the thoughts. Discomfort. Embarrassment. Admiration. She had learned long ago how to filter the words from the feelings, and only hear what she wanted to listen to. She’d never yet heard Garrit’s thoughts, projected accidentally. But she felt his love, his grudging acceptance.

“I just need some time to get used to the idea.”

The ache in her chest eased. “I understand.”

He cleared his throat. “My parents called.”

“How are they?”

He shrugged. “Plutot bien. They’re on their way here for dinner. And they’re bringing someone, they said. What would you like to serve?”

Eve tried not to smile. How many more thousands of years would it be before men stopped asking her to make dinner? Or before she tired of playing that role? “Why don’t we order something in from town? Turkish, perhaps.”

He rose, moving to the door, then paused. “Lord Ryam’s journal is in the cabinet. If you want to take a look at something other than bunches of grapes and genealogy of the livestock. He had plenty to say about you.”

“Thank you.”

Garrit shut the door behind him.

Drumming her fingers on the arm of the chair, Eve stared at the cabinet. She’d shared this house with Garrit for over a year, in that time making liberal use of the library for her entertainment. How had she missed a journal written by her husband? For that matter, how had she not known about it when she lived as Ryam’s wife?

She crossed the room to the cabinet, carefully opening the glass door and walking her fingers along the spine of each book. The journal was bound in plain leather, the only marking on the spine an imprint of the dates he had lived. Now that she knew to look for it, it was clear what it was.

She removed it, letting it fall open in her hands. Clearly, it had been reproduced; it wasn’t written in Ryam’s hand, though his name appeared on the inside of the front cover. She wondered what had become of the original, if it was kept somewhere sealed in a cabinet in the basement with the other relics of her past, locked away from the general populace. Trinkets and tokens she had wanted to keep and shipped or mailed over lifetimes to this house to be stored.

She went back to her chair and sat down, holding the journal in her hands. As if it held some piece of the man who had died so long ago. The man who had loved and protected her, regardless of the shame she had brought with her.

It had only been her last life when she had lost herself in those lives, her pasts twisting together, crowding out sanity with memories of days long gone, men long dead. Only this life when she had felt herself whole again, grounded in the present, her fractured mind healed. She missed Ryam, missed the comfort of her memories. Missed the life they had lived together, indoor plumbing notwithstanding. She missed it, but she wanted to stay whole for a little longer; she wanted to keep her sanity.

She couldn’t bring herself to read it.