Wow, this might be the first fic I finish without a single review!
Oh, well. Here's the final chapter. Enjoy!
Lord, please give me the strength to get through today.
It was a prayer he had been repeating all day, and for several days prior.
She had a bad habit, Shane McInerney; a bad habit of pushing him one step further than he intended to go. And the worst part about it was she never seemed to know just exactly what she'd done. There was no way she could have, because he never expressed where he was on the path in the first place-especially not to her.
Admitting to himself that his wife wasn't coming back had been hard enough. He resolved himself to the fact that he poured all the strength of his heart out onto those flimsy few sheets of paper. As it stood, Holly simply had no intention of returning to him. Knowing he said all he could say gave him peace and an enduring strength. He was no longer a prisoner to the unknown, for he had faced and conquered what he could of it. The only word he could use to describe it was freedom. He was no longer a prisoner to the years spent simply waiting without action. He took comfort in his study of the Word, continued to pray, and continued to do his job well.
And then Shane came to him with that unexpected revelation that she had, in fact, found his letter in a pile of dead letters. It never even made it to Holly. To make matters worse, the letter was opened in order to make a determination about delivery. And, of course, Ms. McInerney had been the one to read it. She had promised not so very long ago that she would "never" do so. To her credit, technically the letter had been sent and returned, so he supposed that necessarily voided her promise.
But in an instant, the unknown once more imprisoned him. The letter was already on its way, presumably deliverable, to Paris.
It took months for Oliver to finally forgive and make peace with the situation with Holly and begin considering what the future might look like without her. Now all of that was gone, because all of it was a lie. Holly had not yet read the heart poured out onto that paper. She had not had a chance to respond.
That reality plunged Oliver into a depth of confusion for which there were no words.
Did he even want Holly to read it now? Wasn't it so unbelievably clear she was content in her current circumstances?
And what about Shane? She truly had grown on him in ways that he still found difficult to acknowledge or even describe. Her decision to send the letter put all of that into question, and placed her on the other side of a line he couldn't cross. She had seen how he longed for Holly to come back, but Shane knew nothing of the evolving feelings he had for her. There simply were no words to express all the ways Shane exhausted him. But for all she had broken, she had put every piece back together, and, somehow, stronger. All he could think about now were the pieces in her potentially broken from reading his letter.
While he did his best to carry on, it was finally catching up to him, and he relished the idea of spending a few quiet moments before afternoon tasks to decompose and re-evaluate.
He pushed open the second set of doors to enter the DLO.
Nothing could have prepared him to see, or contend with, the internal battle he had so valiantly fought now coming to life in front of him.
Two paths stood before him.
The first was the path he had been chasing after, that, apparently having received his letter, retraced its steps back to him from the other side of the world, now appearing on his proverbial doorstep.
The second was the path before him daily, delivered to him from the other side of the country that, while wrought with sharps turns and narrow straights, was now as natural to him as air or water.
Holly.
Shane.
It alarmed him, at first, the prospect of these two paths meeting. Because if they met, it meant he stood at the fork in the road, forced to choose.
But even more than that, he knew Holly. And when Holly was in an uncomfortable situation she often handled it poorly. He could only imagine how she had handled seeing another female, who, by all accounts, could have been her twin, in the dead letter office unexpectedly. Or perhaps it was his conscious catching up with him, as if he had betrayed or forsaken his own feelings in Holly's absence.
Oliver became acutely aware of a great truth that many years on the delivering-end of letters held for recipients, but from which Oliver himself had been shielded from experiencing: the truth is messy, complicated and every action taken once a letter is delivered changed lives. Until now, the lives changed were those of others. Today, it was his life that hung in the balance.
At their best, Oliver knew that both women's personalities were strong, decisive and forces to be reckoned with. Yet today, standing closest to him, Shane looked as though she had fought her way through a storm, still struggling not to drown. He couldn't reach out, he couldn't help her, because the storm was hurricane Holly-he had seen it before.
Then there was Holly. Oh, how he had waited and waited for her to come back to him-to come home. And she was as beautiful as ever. As sure as he was that the sky is blue, he was sure that even as he stood there two years estranged from Holly, he was falling in love with her all over again, right there in the dead letter office.
"Hi, Oliver," Holly said quietly.
It seemed the choice of whom to focus on would be made for him. It didn't sit well with Oliver, but he didn't know how else to handle it, inexplicably unable to choose.
Shane was crestfallen, as if Holly had won the battle she had been fighting since they met, and she exited through the side door. Oliver couldn't bring himself to watch. He wanted to call after her, but he was frozen.
With his attention fully fixed on Holly, the feelings that struck him only moments before intensified once again. He walked towards her, still deciding if she was something more than an illusion. He stopped when he was in arms reach, and he could feel a smile tugging at his lips that he didn't even try to fight.
"I, uh, got your letter," she said nervously, her cheeks glowing pink.
He saw her clutching it in her hands, and remembered every handwritten word. Oliver wanted to reach out and touch her, but he was overtaken by his overwhelming love for her.
"I see…that," he managed, unsure where to go from there. There was so much to be said, where did one start?
He could see Holly becoming uncomfortable with the silence, and allowed her to decide how to fill it.
"I always thought I knew what I was going to say," she admitted.
He had thought about it a million times, but now he could barely form a sentence. It occurred to him that for all the time he spent wondering why she left and telling himself that an answer to that question would be the first thing he would demand of her, in this moment that question didn't even matter.
"I know you're surprised to see me here, all the way from Paris…"
"Are you happy….in Paris?"
The words left his mouth before he even had a chance to ponder them. He regretted it almost immediately, whether because he sounded desperate, or because he was afraid of the truth, he wasn't sure.
"I am. I'm doing well there," she responded carefully, "You remember how I used to sit with you on the patio and go through the paper editing articles on Sunday? It came in handy, because I became an editor of the English-language version of one of the major regional publications in Paris."
He did remember. He used to sit across their small patio table on Sunday mornings before church, watching Holly chew on the end of her pen, which, while it personally drove him crazy, was endearing when Holly did it.
"Congratulations." He truly was proud of Holly. It was one of her dreams, and Oliver was glad she found it.
"Speaking of which," she began again, looking at her watch. "I have a deadline fast approaching for the next edition of the publication that I have to be ready for. You know me, I always wait till the last minute…"
Holly did have a knack for waiting last minute to do things, and he could feel the anxiety it once caused him at the memory.
It didn't last long, though, because his mind inexplicably drew up a conversation he had had with Shane about birds once.
It's a bird- they just fly. Sometimes you are there to see them land before they fly off and land somewhere else…They don't come back.
Shane was right, even now. Here for a second, Holly was already leaving.
"Oh," was all he could manage, distracted by Shane's still small voice reminding him to guard his heart.
What makes you think they come back to anything?
"I'm staying at the Brown Palace Hotel. You should come meet me for drinks," she said, preparing to fly off to her next adventure. "How does eight sound?"
Birds return to familiar places all the time, he argued. It is a miracle of nature.
Holly was here. It was a miracle.
"I will see you then," he committed with a half-smile.
Hope, after all, is the thing with feathers.
"You look well, Oliver," she said sweetly, squeezing his arm. "I will see you tonight."
I'm just saying that sometimes you have to get to a point where you stop hoping, and you let nature takes its course.
But nature had led Holly back to him, hadn't it? This was the course set in motion. Or was it Shane that set it that way?
Let nature take its course.
In the moment, Shane's words had felt like a rebuke of his character, of his stubbornness, of his weakness, of his conviction to do the right thing at all costs. Today, they were a stark reminder of the reality he now faced, and the decision he now had to make.
This bird has flown, my friend, Shane had said.
Let her go, Oliver.
Was it his head or his heart telling him to let go? Let go of whom?
Where is it that Shane's remembered words lived-his head or his heart?
Did it matter?
He had an obligation to Holly. He vowed before God to uphold that vow the day they wed. It was Oliver's priority to keep that promise. Yet Holly's decision to abandon him for a time had complicated that. Even so, it had not voided the vow. There was so much yet to know about Holly and her intentions for appearing in Denver once again, just this glimpse of her made him want to know everything.
Yet there was one reality taking definitive shape that Oliver couldn't avoid, and had wrestled daily with God about on numerous occasions. So far, He had been silent on the matter, but now, whatever His answer, the consequences were suddenly clear to Oliver: choose one, lose the other.
Choose one.
Let go of the other.
Alright, I think that's it on the From Paris with Love fics! Ok, onto my first #NoRita. Yep, you read that right, I'm going to tackle the show's other favorite couple, and I think you're gonna like what I come up with, so stay tuned!
