Prince Rainier

Everything hurts, but it's not a guilty type of hurt. I arrive back home and stumble into bed and I know that I won't have any trouble falling asleep because it's done. I've done everything that I can, said everything that I could say, and now it's all up to her.

Father looked surprised when I rode back in earlier, as if he was expecting her to be there with me. But then he just smiled. He gets it. How extraordinarily lucky I am to have a father who gets it.

How extraordinarily lucky I am to have finally gotten it myself.

I can't sleep in this bright morning sunlight, so I put the cover back on my window and pull the curtains shut on my bed, lying there in the dark and willing sleep to come.

She looked horrible. Worse than I've ever seen her. There are no more injuries in evidence, but she still managed to look worse. Her bags had bags. Her eyes were dull. Her skin is pallid and sickly pale. Even her hair seems to have suffered. Something in her is withered and slipping away. She doesn't want my help, and I know that I couldn't give it to her.

How funny it is, this love of mine. I knew there were only two sides to it—paradise or burning Hell. But no one told me about that gray area in between—that blank, empty nothing that stretches out before my feet—where you're hurt but untouched by hurting. Whatever it is that she should choose, this love is going to stay, is going to grow, is going to thrive and I don't mind it anymore.

So it's not a toxic, poisonous, noxious, lethal, venomous, mephitic love that I'm carrying. It may have felt that way before—to any ignorant mind it would have—but it doesn't anymore. And she's not dangerous, hazardous, perilous, menacing, treacherous, malicious. And I suppose that when I was still innocent, naïve, immature, infantile, juvenile, unripe I was physically closer to her but that was all that had mattered because I had been too idiotic to see that my Ambriella was a million miles away.

But I get it now. I understand. She makes so much sense to me and I see her and this love in a way that I could never have seen it if I had caught her that last day when she ran.

I had to lose her so I could learn how to really love her. The irony should hurt, but it just doesn't. It just makes me laugh into the dark quiet space. Because if I hadn't lost her, then I would never have understood her and now that I have understood her she seems closer to me than she's ever been.

I saw it, just now, when I looked in her eyes. It was there. A flash from the past. I saw the girl she was, the hope and the joy and the youth and the worth that she's lost. I see the woman that she's turned into. I could never have dreamed it was possible for someone to have come so far all on their own, but Ambriella is strong. She's strong enough to overcome anything, and I know that she'll overcome this. I know she'll overcome this and that somehow—when she's ready—this love will endure.

I don't feel like I lost her. I feel like I've found her. I feel like I've found some great hidden truth long since forgotten. Because this love of ours is alive and steadily beating and regardless of what she chooses to do with it now that I've placed it in her hands it's left a permanent mark on the both of us. It's free and breathing soundly and sparkling like a pair of diamond eyes, glowing in the dark, and no matter what comes now I know that this love will be my strength to face every day and night that I'll have left in the world.

Father was right. It's dark down here in this abyss. The darkest place to be. But I wouldn't go anywhere else. So I'll just pull back the curtains a little and let in some sunlight and smile at that orchid bush thinking of the day that she'll join me here and we can waltz through this dark, deep abyss together.

"You're looking a few inches taller than the last time I saw you," Father says when I head down to breakfast.

I feel a few inches taller. And if it were up to me, I'd be camping out at Royce Manor being tall for the both of us, but I know things better now. This last step is one she'll have to take alone.

She's a shooting star, but even stars burn out and fall. We have a lot to learn, but I'm not going to stop looking up. She's going to make it. She's come too far—been too strong—to give up on herself now.