Page 85 of These Godly Lies
“Worse than what?”
“Anything. Everything. I hate it.”
Carefully, she coaxes his grip from the armrest and threads his fingers through her own. His grip borders on painful, her fingertips prickling with the beginning signs of numbness. She’s glad he sits on her left—her right hand is healing, but the burns are still tender. “It’s the fastest way,” she murmurs, studying his face closely. “Do you feel sick?”
“What I feel isterrified,” he grumbles, a growl in his voice. “We’re flying in a tin can.”
Anna turns to the window, tracing the shapes of the clouds they’re flying over. “You’re concentrating on the wrong thing.”
A moment of pause, filled by the idle chatter of the other passengers and the hum of the engines, before he gives. “What should I be concentrating on?”
Sometimes, Anna still catches herself expecting one face but finding another. Fleeting moments where she has to remind herself that there are no flecks of blue or green to be found in his irises, no dark curls of hair to twist around her fingers. Habits, she finds, are hard to change when they’ve had centuries to instill them. She finds herself thankful for all those years, all those different forms, he’d once visited her in.
Thankful for having already learned to recognize him no matter the face he wore.
Anna squeezes his hand, her smile soft. “That we’reflying.”
When they finally turn the corner and see their pale yellow cottage off the California coast, Anna is surprised to find it in far better condition than she expected. The garden is in full bloom, tended and cared for. In the apiary, there are significantly fewer hives, but she spots at least four. The siding is still yellow, but the hue is just a touch brighter than she remembers it—indicative of new paint.
Someone is living here.
Her heart drops, thinking they’ve journeyed across the world for a home that is no longer theirs to claim. She wonders if they’ve kept the little treasures she’s painted—the vines and flowers caressing the trim like a mother. Then the front door opens. A middle-aged man, familiar but not, pauses in the threshold. It’s only when he smiles that Anna recognizes him.
“Took you long enough,” he says. The years have added depth to his voice, sand shifting beneath the tide. There are wrinkles around his eyes, around his mouth, that she doesn’t recognize—spoils of a life lived well. A life with laughter.
His name is a memory on her tongue, sweet and nostalgic. “Jiro?”
Maybe it’s the question in her voice or the trembling beginnings of a smile, but his expression softens. “You told me once, that this place was your first home.” There are so many missed years in his gaze, Anna only recognizes the shadow of who he was before—a boy angry at the world that turned its back on him. He pats the porch rail fondly, like a friend. “I knew you’d come back.”
His eyes move to Khiran, a shadow of confusion passing over his face. It’s not until his gaze falls to their laced fingers that he understands. His expression softens into something gentle, as if he can read all their scars in the gaunt lines of Khiran’s face.
Her throat tightens, tears threatening to spill. “This whole time?” she asks, voice as weak as her heart. She repeats it, because it sounds as wonderfully impossible as it feels. “You stayed this whole time?”
He smiles, and it’s so soft and warm—so at odds with her memory of him. No longer is he a lanky teenager with so much hurt it soured into rage. The man before her is content. Happy. “Welcome home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
His reflection is a patchwork of parts he didn’t choose, his skin sallow and his body traitorous. It pains him in ways that go beyond physical—an ache made sharper with knowing he would choose to bear it all over again if it meant staying by her side.
CALIFORNIA, UNITEDSTATES
1976
Anna plants the peach pit in the heart of her garden.
It’s the wrong time of year for it, but as Khiran helps her bury it one handful of soil at a time, she can’t help but feel that it’s right. Magic doesn’t wait for seasons.
Off to the side, Jiro watches with his hands in his trouser pockets.
They had exchanged stories over wine the night before. Trading histories until they could see the framework of the tapestries Life had continued to weave while they had beenapart.
He doesn’t live at the cottage full time, but he drives up almost every other weekend to maintain the place. His home is in Santa Cruz, where his restaurant, his wife, and young daughter are. The three of them like to spend the summers up here. His daughter, Ami, took her first steps in the same kitchen he learned to cook in. She likes to play in the garden and listen to him tell stories about gods masquerading as humans between the stems of rosemary. Sometimes, he overhears her trying to retell the same stories to the neighbor’s little boy.
They’re only stories to her—myths and legends spun of the same magic as cursed princesses and magic spinning wheels—but sometimes he catches her on the front porch, staring out over the horizon with her favorite stuffed bunny in her hands as if she’s waiting. Stories have a way of snaring hearts—of following children as they age into adults until they pass it down to the next generation. Jiro admits that was his hope—that the gods who gave him a home could live on in his daughter until they could return and prove themselves real. It’s why he strived to leave their home unchanged.
Time has left a patina on every item within its walls, but everything Anna once cared for has remained the same. Her little murals still decorate the doorways and float down the halls. There’s an entire corner of the greenhouse devoted to storing all the faded remnants of artwork she hadn’t had the heart to get rid of. In the living room, Khiran’s leather wingback sits in the corner, the shelves framing the fireplace still carrying the weight of all their books. Anna can even recognize some of the titles. By the record player, the Ray Charles album they danced to their first Christmas sits on top.
It feels, in all ways, like the home they left.
