The Rose Garden

I would know, and remember, and that was enough.

‘Life is always uncertain,’ he said with a shrug. ‘We cannot let the fear of what might happen stop us living as we choose.’

‘I’m sorry.’ ‘So you should be. Leaping into judgment.’ There was humor in the dark glance angled down at me.

‘I want,’ he answered carefully, ‘to see him with a woman who will love him in the way that he deserves and know the value of the man whose heart she carries.’ In his voice I heard that same fierce challenge I remembered from the first time we had met, when we’d squared off across the corner bedroom with me in my borrowed gown and him as mad as bla

‘Whatever time we have,’ he said, ‘it will be time enough.’

His face relaxed. ‘’Tis you I want.’ He trailed his fingers warmly down my cheek and brushed away the single tear that had escaped my lashes. ‘I care not on what terms.’

‘All of this, this life that I have lived, it has already passed and faded from the memories of the people of your own time. It is rather like that poem you did speak of, with the moving finger writing words that cannot be erased. My page is written,’ he said, ‘and not even I can change a line of it.’

‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.’

‘I would argue ’tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories. That is why we find that having lived them once, we never can recapture them.’