His heart broke – shattered, as a mirror dropped from a hand that had reached out uselessly to catch it. She was gone now, forever, and the idea that he had lost her before seemed cruel folly. She had lived! He had not lost her while she lived. If he had believed that he could not have her, could not touch her, it was a self-inflicted pain. Death had a permanence that nothing else had –
He looked at his own hands. They were pale and creased with red lines made deep by the way he clenched his fists in his sleep. These hands had touched her before – not as a lover but as a friend, even a brother to her. He had held her hand, stroked her hair, even brushed tears from her face. Now she was gone. Why had he not impressed these touches, these moments, more clearly on his mind? He could not remember now the way she smelled or the glance of her flickering smile. He could remember the way he had described them to himself but not the actual sensation of knowing, of sensing. She had been clear to him once. She had been a child, barely beyond the days when he chased her through the park, up trees, and caught her by throwing his arms around her. One day he had realized that he could not have his arms around her that way again for the very reason that he once could: they were friends. She looked to him for advice and love. He looked to her for both and more. He had no one but her. Even if he had, he would have loved her no less. He adored her because of everything she was. He said her name aloud and allowed a sob – a dry force of sound that wracked his lungs but brought no tears. He had no tears left to cry.
Suddenly, his fingers tingled with the remembered sensation of her hair beneath them. She had cried – oh, and it was a silly thing, some broken promise or betrayed secret, a girl's worries – and he had sat with her on the grass, under the trees, and finally put his arm around her and brushed her hair, awkwardly, with his hand. He had never been able to comfort with abandon, to be able to embrace, console, or empathize as she could. But he tried this one time, to give something of himself for her sake. And her tears had stopped.
It was his own fault – all of it. He had lost her by his own doing. She had died – oh God, how she had died – and for this, too, he was to blame. No matter that he had not meant for it to happen, that he could not have known she would be endangered. A ripple of self-loathing stole over him and another sound escaped him, a growl of rage and pain, and he wanted to destroy himself. He was worthless. He would not wallow in self-pity. He deserved a death a thousand times more horrible than hers, if he could devise it. He could destroy himself easily.
But of course he could not and did not. Whatever worth he had could not, to him, justify his existence, but it was his responsibility, his duty to protect when she had died for. She had given birth to a son. The child's father – a man he had disliked, even hated – was dead with her. But the child lived. And, never having seen him, he hated him for being another man's child. Oh yes, he would have loved her however she wished, if only he had been allowed to show his love for her. He would have been a friend, a brother to her and survived the pain of her marriage. But to be cast away from her completely had driven him to destruction and rage, and now he reflected that if he had only given her what she deserved – his unguarded love, his heart if she would take it, the truth – she might have returned his love. Did her husband ever know how precious a thing he had been given? Her love was something so perfect that he could hardly bear to believe he might nearly have had it. It drove him wild to think what she had given another man: her love, her devotion, the glances, the touches that he would have died for. And a child.
He would gladly have loved a child if it meant that he had her love as well. But another man's child…he would protect him for her and not for the boy himself. He would never admit to a living soul that he, a soul ragged and broken from birth, might have wanted a child of his own, that he could even have learned how to love it so that it would know.
She would never know, now. Never. Eternity stretched out before him – an eternity without her. He had loved her without condition or limit, and he could love her for the rest of his life. But his heart, aching for just one sight of her, the sound of her voice one last time, was buried in her grave. Death would now be a welcome thing, but he would live. He would live in the agony of being without her, a torturous existence of having loved and never having told her so.