Chapter 29

"Vincent…have you…I mean I've noticed that there seems to be some kind of…connection forming between us as well, and I was wondering if you had been aware of it too?"

"I have, but I've been trying to fight it or deny it," he admitted slowly.

"May I ask why?"

"Of course you may, Clara! I want nothing but honesty between us. You see, I've only ever had a Bond with Catherine, and later Jacob. I never had one with Father or Mary whom I've spent my whole life with, only with Catherine. I was afraid that if I was developing a Bond with you that I would be betraying her and what we had. I was also afraid of what it could mean…"

She waited patiently for him to go on, but when the silence drew on, she gently encouraged, "Can you tell me why?"

"I was afraid that since I had only ever had a Bond with Catherine, whom I loved, and that we had that Bond before we realized we loved each other, that it might mean I was starting to fall in love again."

"Vincent, I know you've probably been told that Catherine would want you to go on with your life and to be happy again. Everyone that has lost someone hears that, because it is all your friends and family know to say. Well, that and that the loss you feel will get easier with time. But when you lose someone that you love as much as you loved…and still love, Catherine, you never get over that loss. I watched my mother suffer the loss of my father and in the end I knew that I never wanted to love unless I could find a love as deep as the one they shared, and like what you shared with Catherine. If we are fated to love each other, then I can tell you that I will, and you should too, thank her every day for that love!"

He stared at her in astonishment. Never had he expected this response to his words! How could this woman, who had been hurt so badly, still have such an incredibly beautiful loving spirit? He had expressed fear that he might be falling in love with her and her reaction was to say that if it were true she would thank Catherine! "I don't understand. Clara, how…why…would you be grateful to Catherine?"

"Wasn't she the one that opened your heart to love? Didn't her love open an entirely new world of feelings and emotions to you? Feelings and emotions that you had only read about by the great writers in history? Didn't those words suddenly come alive when you looked into her eyes?"

Amazement. That was what he felt hearing her words. She described so accurately what he had only been able to express in his writings. How had she known? There was no way she could have read his journal, and from what Peter had told Father and him, she hadn't been loved before herself. Then how could she have known?!

The only way he would get his answer was to ask the question, but first he needed to answer hers. "Yes, that is what Catherine's love did for me. You describe it so exactly, how did you know?"

"It was the kind of love my parents had, the kind of love that I hope to one day have for myself. Catherine had to have been an incredible woman for you to have loved her like that."

"Catherine brought light into my world of darkness. It was as if I merely existed before she came into my life. I started to live that night I found her in the park."

"She was a lucky woman. Not just that you found her that night, but to have had someone as magnificent as you to love her."

"I was blessed by her love. To think that someone as beautiful as Catherine could love someone like me…"

"Oh Vincent! Don't you have any idea how special you are? Not just your looks, granted they make you unique, but you are so amazingly beautiful inside too! You have the soul of a poet, the mind of a philosopher, and the heart of a lion!"

To be continued….