Page 43 of Jethro

The gardens of Belle Fleur had been planted by the Robicheaux ancestors generations ago, and nobody since had found the heart to tame them. Brick paths wandered between ginger lilies and old roses gone half wild, live oaks leaned over the walkways heavy with Spanish moss, and somewhere in the middle of it all a stone fountain trickled the same quiet song it always had.

And yet it all looked as if it had been planned by a landscape architect with the refined elegance of Versailles and the most ancient English gardens in the world.

It was the first morning of their forced time off since the wedding, and Jethro had not let go of her hand since they parked the truck.

His hand was big and warm and rough across the palm, and he held hers the way he did everything else, steady and sure and in no particular hurry. Every so often his thumb moved across her knuckles, as if he were reminding himself she was really there.

They wandered without any plan at all, past the fountain and the little iron bench with its brass plaque, and sat a long time without saying a word, because they didn't need to.

In her parents' house, silence had always been a weapon, a held breath before the next cutting remark. With Jethro, silence was a place to rest.

Near noon they found their way to the arbor. The gardenias had gone brown at the edges, but the roses still climbed the white lattice in pink and cream. Ten days ago, she had stood right here in a simple white dress and said I do to a man she had once been certain she would never let close enough to touch her.

Jethro stopped beneath the lattice and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

"That day in the diner, with your daddy telling lies about me, I wasn't angry for me," he said quietly. "I was angry because every word told me what it must have been like growing up in that house. You survived all of that, and you still came out the other side kind. You're the bravest person I know, Aurora."

Her eyes stung. She stepped into him and pressed her face against his chest, and he wrapped both arms around her and held on, his chin resting on the top of her head, while a mockingbird ran through every song it knew in the branches above them.

They went back the next morning, and it became their ritual. On the second day it rained, and Jethro held an enormous green umbrella over her the whole way, soaking his own shoulder. She kissed it through his wet T-shirt, and he went so pink around the ears that she laughed all the way back to the truck.

She learned he could name every bird in the parish by its call. He learned that if he simply squeezed her hand when a car door slammed, her flinch passed quicker each time.

The dock behind Jethro's house ran thirty feet out over the bayou on cypress pilings gone silver with age. That second evening the sun spilled copper and rose across the water, and the bayou moved past them slow and dark and patient, carrying water hyacinth toward the Gulf.

Jethro's arm was around her, holding her tight against his side. Not loosely, the way a man drapes an arm over a chair. He held her like something precious, his hand curved around her hip, her body tucked so close she could feel every slow, even breath he took. She rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder, where it fit as if someone had measured it.

"I used to sit out here by myself," he said after a while. "Every night for months. Walls felt too close. I'd watch the water go by and tell myself the world kept on being gentle somewhere, even when I couldn't see it."

"And now?" He pressed his lips to her hair and left them there.

"Now I've got a reason to go back inside."

"I still dream about it," Aurora said softly. "Over there. The smoke and the screaming and the door that wouldn't open." Her fingers twisted the hem of his T-shirt.

"Some nights it's my mother's voice, telling the doctors I make things up because of my nightmares. Some nights it's both, and I wake up not knowing which one was real. I haven't slept through a whole night in almost three years, Jethro."

He didn't tell her it was over, or any of the easy things people said who had never been there. He only tightened his arm until there was no space left between them.

"They were real," he said. "Both of them. The fire and the cruelty. You're not making up a single thing, and you never were." He found her hand and laced his fingers through hers.

"But so is this. This dock. This water. Me. When you can't tell which one's real, darlin', you reach for me, and I'll tell you. Every time. As many times as it takes."

She cried then, quietly, the way she had learned to cry in a house where tears were used against her. But this time she didn't hide it, and he didn't ask her to stop. He held her while the sky went from copper to violet to deep blue and the first fireflies blinked along the bank, and when the tears ran out, she felt lighter than she had in years.

On the third night, it stormed.

Just an early fall squall rolling up out of the Gulf. After red beans and rice, they piled onto the old leather couch with a quilt and a bowl of popcorn, and she made him swear on his Marine Corps honor that he would sit through an entire romantic comedy without once making fun of it.

He lasted eleven minutes.

She threw popcorn at him until he promised again. But by the halfway point the teasing had stopped, and by the time the heroine stood in the rain telling the hero everything she'd been too afraid to say, Aurora noticed that Jethro wasn't watching the television at all. He was watching her.

"You're missing the best part," she whispered.

"No, I'm not."

Lightning flickered beyond the windows, and the rain drummed on the tin roof of the porch. He lifted his hand slowly, giving her every chance to turn away, and cupped her face, his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone. She didn't turn away. She leaned into his palm and closed her eyes.