Page 161 of Because I Killed Him
“Everything’s possible.”
“Everything?”
“Sure,” he says. “If you want it badly enough. You don’t think so?”
The certainty in him, the brightness of his belief, draws a smile from me even as grief flickers behind it. I think of fencing, how fiercely I want to return to it, how I would give anything to feel a saber in my hand again, and how far out of reach it still feels. “I want to believe that,” I say. “But sometimes it feels like certain things are too far away, like trying to touch the bottom of the ocean.”
Edmund rubs his eyebrow, considering for a moment. Then he looks up at me and smiles. “If something’s too far away, I’ll bring it to you.”
I smile back, unable to hold on to any sadness in the face of that kind of hope, like fire burning in water. “Then I’ll wait, Edmund. And I’ll remind you to tell me when you’re free.”
“You won’t have to remind me.”
He wades toward me and extends his hand. I climb down to him, held to his chest by only one arm, yet I feel so secure that if we stood at the edge of a cliff, I’d have the fearlessness of a bird that knows it can fly straight over it.
The following days blur into hours that might as well be seconds, all spent in the privacy the forest offers us. When I’m with Edmund, I recognize the sound of my laughter more clearly than my own voice. Nothing exists beyond the ways I already know him and the ways I still want to.
He never arrives empty-handed. Each time, he brings me something he gathers on his run—a feather from a mountain bird, a shard of pale quartz, a smooth stone threaded with a natural vein—as if, piece by piece, he’s bringing me the whole world.
Somewhere along the way, it strikes me that since the night we first kissed, he hasn’t called me Miss Waldsten. In fact, he hasn’t called me by any name at all. My name now lives between us, held back like a promise, making me wonder whether, when he finally saysLoredana, he’ll be saying much more.
Within a few weeks, we edge beyond the forest and toward the ocean. We learn where the cliffs break into secret coves, where the rock folds inward and the water lies sheltered from passing eyes. We jump from jagged outcroppings into the cold blue below, kissing each other as wildly as the foaming spray when we surface. Sometimes we swim through narrow inlets where the stone walls rise high on either side, sealing us in with nothing but salt and sky. Other nights, we wade into tide pools tucked beneath overhangs, where the water stays warm and still… sometimes, too still.
One evening, we’re lying together on the sandy shore of a hidden cove when Edmund begins to shift beneath me, as if he can’t find the right position. I’ve noticed it before—the way his body never quite settles—but now, sitting in his lap with my back against his chest, I feel every small movement carried straight into me. It makes me wonder whether it isn’t only stillness that bothers him but the silence that comes with it.
“Edmund,” I say. “Does it bother you when things get too quiet?”
He looks down at me, as if I’ve caught him mid-thought. “I wouldn’t say I dislike it,” he replies after a moment. “I’m just used to noise… a lot of it. When things get too quiet, I don’t always know what to do with myself.”
I tilt my head back to meet his gaze. “What kind of noise?”
“Parties, mostly. My father threw parties all the time when I wasgrowing up. Even during school hours at home, there was music, people, and shouting. After a while, we couldn’t focus without it. Sometimes a single party went on for weeks.”
Though his voice stays even, the light in his face dulls, as if it’s being pulled inward. I know then that the parties he’s talking about aren’t the kind I grew up with. “What were the parties like?”
Edmund gives a small, dismissive shrug. “They made Rosamund, Richard, and me grow up fast.”
The picture is vivid enough that I don’t press further. It makes me think of the silence Mom and Dad gave my sisters and me when we were young, the kind that left room for imagination and creativity. They broke it only when we wanted it filled.
“What’s your favorite song?” I ask, lifting my hand to brush his face.
He grins and runs his thumb across my mouth. “Why? You planning to sing for me?”
I laugh. “I’m not sure that’s a sound you’d want to hear.”
Edmund looks out over the water, considering, then says, “We Who Fell in Love with the Sky.”
I curl my fingers around his, still resting at my lips, surprised. It’s a military song, often played during the Shield War, but it’s romantic too—in the way it’s romantic when soldiers finally come home, lay their heads in their loved ones’ laps, and let themselves rest.
I draw a breath, startled by the flutter of nerves in my chest. Then I shape my mouth and begin to whistle, smoothly and carefully, coaxing out the notes as best as I can remember. The sound carries into the cove, thin at first, then steadier, lifted and returned by the stone walls until it feels larger than us both.
Beneath my back, I feel Edmund ease, the restless tension leaving his body like a fist unclenching inch by inch. He presses a kiss to my neck and folds his arms around me, holding me so close it’s as though he’s fixing himself to the sound as much as to me.
Every memory we make feels like a jewel I tuck away in my mind, something to turn over when we’re forced apart by lectures or by time spent with Charlotte, Jack, and Dickie. One jewel comes from a stormy evening when I realize Edmund has positioned himself upwind of me, his bodybraced to shield me from the rain. Another comes from the day I cut my foot on a submerged rock while swimming, and he carries me on his back for the long three-mile walk home, moving carefully, as if a misstep might cause me more pain.
But the brightest jewel of all comes from the day we go kayaking. It’s shortly before sunset, and the water is empty and wide, the campus shoreline still close enough to see the striped sun chairs on the sand. Edmund tells me I’m not allowed to row unless I want to.
I don’t want to.
