Rebirth12 min read
If I Return, Let the Flower Bloom
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I remember the cart tipping and the world folding like a page, the river opening its black palms.
I remember someone calling me by my childhood name as if that small syllable could pull me back.
I remember cold water filling my mouth and then nothing.
"I don't want to be buried," my mother kept saying when she thought no one could hear.
"Let her rest where she should," my father answered to empty air, and I listened from where I couldn't be seen.
"I am—" I tried to say it, but breath was a thing left for the living.
I had been Isabella Combs, eldest daughter of Earl Bowers and Marianne Sutton's house, and the honored bride of Rafael Thomas.
I had been his for a breath, not even a full year, when a rock and a startled horse stole my days away.
"Isabella," someone sobbed by my coffin. "My little Bella—"
My baby name, Bella, made my heart shudder in the place that could still remember. I touched the lid from inside and could not be felt.
"Rafael never came to the funeral," I said, or thought it. I floated through the walls like dust and watched my parents nail the lid down with hands that shook.
"He will not come," a servant whispered. "They say he could not bear it."
I drifted like a thread pulled loose, and the world kept moving around me.
Soon the Thomas house took me as an absence. I liked the quiet of the garden with its central flowering tree—they had planted it when we were newly promised. The petals had always been mine, somehow, when I walked beneath them. Rafael used to carve names into its bark. Once he carved ours.
"Look," he had said, "Isabella Combs, Rafael Thomas, forever—"
The trunk still held the faint grooves of his clumsy knife.
"Rafael," I would whisper as wind wrenched at the chimes, "why did you not come?"
I had expected him to grieve and move on. Instead he carried a shadow of me with him like an ache.
Months became a rhythm of the living failing to see me and my insistence not to leave him entirely. I would stand by him in his study as he traced pencil portraits of my face.
"Enough," his mother said once, slapping the table. "You are wasting your life. Look at the estate. We have duties."
"He is broken," she told my parents when they came to ask. "He dreams of her night after night. He sits with her likeness and says her name until his voice is thin."
I wanted to laugh at how she described him—as if naming someone until the lips went dry was a crime. I wanted to laugh until it came out of me like breath and not like the hollow echo I had been.
One evening, he woke from a long, unnatural sleep and shouted my nickname, "Bella!" so loud the house trembled.
He stood there under the paper windows, all pinched and thin, and called into the emptiness. "I dreamed of you again. You came back and then slipped away."
I moved to him and reached out. My hand passed through his coat and did not stir him. I could not hold him. The sound of his voice—small and raw—was the sound that kept me bound.
"You came back," he said aloud. "Why won't you stay?"
He fell to his knees, pressing his forehead as if to touch the floor where my feet had once stood.
I had the strangest thought that some threads bind the heart in a way water does not break. Perhaps his love had become a tether and pulled me like a lost toy to him.
Years passed in the way of seasons. I counted them by the way Rafael's features aged in the quiet. He stopped traveling. He let the messy business of his career fall to others. He painted my face over and over in charcoal and ink.
"You should marry again," my mother said once, when she thought no one but me would hear, though I was very much only a memory on the air.
"I will not marry," he whispered to the night. "Not while there is breath for me to call her name."
People saw him and called him extraordinary for his constancy, and others whispered he had foolishness in him. The word "fool" would have stung me then if I could feel more than the ache of watching him.
"A man cannot bury his wife and then spend the rest of his days in a garden," his grandmother told him one evening.
"He is my son," she said. "If he wastes himself, what will become of the family?"
"It is her I have loved," Rafael said from the corner, "and she is not a thing to keep me from living. She is my beginning."
"That is enough," they told him. "You have to be sensible. There are alliances to keep."
It came to be that one year they decided on an arrangement for the sake of house and duty. Not out of cruelty, I thought then—out of the slow grind of obligation.
"Emma Mahmoud is well-born and sensible," Rafael's mother proclaimed. "She will keep the house. She will bear children."
The announcement was civil. "I would be honored," Emma said when presented. She was composed and kind, and she bore the necessary smiles with the poise of a woman raised for this role.
When she arrived formally as Rafael's wife I hovered at the edges, a spectator forced to remember. They called their child Myrtle, and the child my name's ghost—my small name stuck in the mouths of strangers.
"Isabella," I told him in the garden once, watching him stand as a father beside the cradle. "You have a life. You deserve it."
He only stared at the sleeping child and smiled the way some men smile when they learn to write with their left hand—uncertain, tender.
"She smiles like you," he said softly. "She has your mouth."
The sight of him with her was like iron in my chest. Part of me craved the warm weight of satisfaction—he had found a shelter—but another part felt like a stone let go into deep water.
I tried to be practical as a spirit can be. I warned him when the wind turned sharp and his cold grew too thin. I pulled his sleeve to remind him to eat. He never felt me. The world had built a new architecture of meaning without consulting me.
"Do you haunt him?" a voice asked in my silence, and the voice was not Rafael's.
"Who are you?" I demanded aloud, because speaking is the only rebellion a ghost can manage.
"I am Cillian Patterson," the young man answered from the doorway where the oil lamp pooled its light, "and I have seen worse than lost loves."
"You can see me?" I asked before I could stop myself.
"Only because you are stubborn," Cillian said. "You would have walked off to the next life but the knot at his heart kept you tethered. The master says some souls keep returning to complete their unfinished threads."
"I am not finished," I said, which to him was no explanation he ever heard.
Cillian brought me news of a place where breath could be returned to bodies. "There is a man in the hills," he told me one dawn when the stars were not yet done with the sky. "My master, Garth Kiselev, taught me that sometimes fate can be altered at the seams."
"You mean resurrection," I said, and the word felt obscene and holy at once.
"Not miraculously," Cillian corrected with a smile. "We call it settling a thread. It is work—ritual and medicine and a stubbornness that matches yours."
He looked at me with eyes more amused than compassionate. "Do you want to live?"
The question was as blunt as a blade. Living meant responsibilities, people to hurt by being alive or not. Living meant letting him go.
"I suppose," I answered. The admission surprised me. "Yes. To choose, truly, might be a mercy."
Cillian's master took me in, and my body was returned like a book reopened. It was bewildering and messy. My hair fell in messy knots. My voice was hoarse. People cried. My parents pressed me with hands that shook.
They kept asking how I had come back, and I answered with the simple truth that I had learned to be silent about: some things do not like being final.
"It was the master who insisted," Cillian said to my parents, grinning like a boy letting a secret out. "He said Isabella's thread was not cut."
"Isabella," my mother said, repeatedly touching my face. "You are truly here."
"Do you remember everything?" my father asked. He always measured life in concrete things—papers, ledgers, bread.
"I do," I replied. "I remember the river, the coffin, the man who called me baby, the paintings of my face."
We made a different life for a while. I returned to the house where my parents kept my things, though the world had gone on without me. The estate’s rooms smelled like old wood and lavender because my father insisted on it.
"People will want to talk about weddings and husbands and what comes next," my mother warned at night. "You must be careful how you answer."
"What will you do?" I asked her. I did not yet know what I would do with a life handed like a porcelain dish back to clumsy fingers.
"I will let you decide," she said, and I believed her.
Rafael came to see me in private at first. He was stunned, fractured with joy and something like disbelief. He was taller than when I had died and gentler, as if he had been folded smaller into himself to leave room for sorrow.
"You should not come here and trouble my household," my mother insisted when she saw him in the courtyard.
"Isabella," he said, simply, as if that answer could do everything that proofs and promises could not.
Days turned into a season of delicate conversations. I had to decide whether to go back to Rafael and take what I once had, or to step aside and let the life he had built continue without tearing it anew.
"I came back," I told him one evening under the old flowering tree. Snow had begun to skitter across the world.
"You walked out of the dark to me," he said, voice breaking. "I—"
"Stop," I said. It felt cruel to hold the strings of someone like a puppeteer. "You do not owe me your life."
"I do not know how to let you go," he whispered.
"Then do not try yet," I answered. "But I will not be a shadow between you and a life that made you laugh again."
He fell silent. He took my hands in his and pressed them as if to check that flesh and not memory lay within them.
"If I go to court and make the law right," he murmured, "would you stay?"
"No," I said with a quiet that felt like a step into a place with higher light. "You must live the life you chose to live when the world forced you to choose. I cannot step in as another wife when there is a family already mending itself."
"You ask me to break what men have bound," he said, astonished.
"I ask you instead to be honest," I said, "and if two lives match—let them be together; if not, let them be freed."
So I went to the elder in charge of affairs, and Rafael wrote a paper in my favor—an official release that bared our names like a sharp confession. "It will be ugly," he said to me. "It will be a thing for tongues."
"Let it be tidy," I replied. "Let there be no shame in truth."
We called the family elders and the household. The Thomas household sat with us beneath the tree that had watched everything happen.
"Isabella," Rafael said to the assembly, voice steadying, "this house, my duties, my child—they are rightful. I cannot drag everyone into my past by pretending the past had no consequence. I ask her leave." He looked at me as if asking permission. "Isabella asks that I be free to live without the sentence of her memory forcing me to linger."
There was an uncomfortable hush. Faces shifted.
"Do you wish to return to being my wife?" Rafael asked me then, surprisingly simple.
"No," I said. "I came back not to claw my way back into a life already changed, but to finish what was left loose. I asked Master Garth to bind me to life again so I could choose."
"Then what will you do?" his mother demanded, bristling.
"I will go to the mountain," I said. "There is a place where I might learn, where a master taught Cillian. I will learn to live a different life—one that is not married to Rafael." I had never realized how final the words felt until they left my mouth.
"You will be no help to our line if you leave us," said an elder with a sourness that smelled of paper and ledgers.
"It is not for you to measure what help I will be," I answered. "I must step away."
Rafael was pale when I left the house. We had not kissed in private. We had not rebuilt the bridges we once had. I think we both knew the truth—that some love is meant to be a bright season in the life, not the whole life.
"Isabella," he said the last night, touching the carved words on the shed where the tree's bark showed our names together. "Will you ever forgive me?"
"There is nothing to forgive," I replied. "We loved. We hurt. We did not know the end. If a day comes when you think of me, think of the petals on this tree and not of a chain."
I returned to the mountain with Cillian. The master, Garth Kiselev, was stern in a way that held no cruelty, only the refusal to patronize. "You came back to life, child," he said, "because you had threads to weave. Do it with your hands."
He taught me to sit with breath and with pain. He taught me to take the truth from the heart and make from it a shape you could live in.
"What does a woman who has come back live for?" I asked him one night.
"To be whole," he replied. "To answer not only the memory of past loves, but to hold a future that you make with your palms. Some things are not repaired by sentiment. They are rebuilt."
Years passed, and I practiced being a woman who belonged first to herself. I did not hold to pain as some smug possession. I learned to cook food that warmed me more than a memory. I learned to stitch for others. I taught children because in their curious faces I found a mirror that did not always show what I had lost.
When people came to the mountain with flags of apology, or seeking counsel, I listened. I learned that mercy is a practice as much as an act.
Once, near the end of an age of white hair and the bent shoulders of time, I visited the Thomas estate again at the ask of Cillian. Rafael, older now, recognized my shape before his son did—recognition that comes from a deeper place than sight.
"Isabella," he breathed, like a prayer.
"Rafael," I said, and the sound of his name no longer slapped open old wounds. It fit like a glove.
He took my hand and asked simply, "Would you sit with me a while?"
We sat under the tree that had been the witness to our youth. Snow had crusted over the branches like sugar.
"Do you remember when we carved our names?" He laughed once, and it sounded like someone turning the page of an old book.
"I remember the fear that it would all be a dream," I said. "And the insistence that we had time."
"Do you regret?" he asked me suddenly.
"Regret?" I repeated. The question was not what I expected.
"I regret that I could not hold you then. That I caused you to go. That I did not see how to anchor you. Did I love you enough?"
"You loved me enough to break yourself open," I replied. "You loved me enough to learn to smile again. That is more than many are given."
He seemed satisfied with that, as if absolution could be a domestic thing.
"Now tell me what you have learned," he asked.
I told him I had learned that love is not always possession, that sometimes the most loving thing you can do is let the other person thrive without the heat of your memory.
He listened like a student. Then he looked up at the silhouette of the tree, stark and noble in the falling snow.
"Isabella," he said, whispering, "I have been selfish in my sorrow."
"You have been human," I said.
"When I lost you, I thought life would stop. It did not stop for you. For that, I am sorry."
He held my hand with a tenderness finally unentangled from need. There was a quiet in the yard where the servant's steps had once echoed and the wind could make its own music.
"Do you forgive me?" he asked.
"I forgive you," I answered. Forgiveness is like the opening of a window—air moves in, and the room never smells the same again.
That winter, Rafael came to my side when I went to visit him at the end. His breath was short, his hands thin as little branches. He asked me to help him up to see the tree one last time. I did. He leaned against my shoulder and smiled when a single bud broke from icy skin and opened red as a secret.
"Look," he whispered. "A flower."
"A miracle," I said, and it was true in that it was beautiful and unlikely.
The flower opened like a memory that did not ruin the day. He shut his eyes. I felt his last breath against my skin.
"Isabella," he breathed once, and the sound was as gentle as falling petals.
"I am here," I whispered back, and I was.
He left the world with the confidence that love had been honest and without the shame of clinging. The family mourned and healed. Emma continued to care for the house faithfully; Myrtle grew into a warm-hearted woman who often came to visit the mountain, bringing the liveliness of youth like a generous gift.
I learned, over the rest of my days, to be less of a memory and more of a presence. I stitched clothes and counsel, sewed blankets, taught reading to children, and walked beneath the flowering tree when spring shook the world awake.
There are moments still when I stand in the yard and press my palm to where the carving once was, and I feel that Rafael has gone ahead of me to whatever waits, with the peace that is owed to a man who loved faithfully.
"Did you ever think you'd see the tree bloom in winter?" Cillian once asked me, grinning like the boy he'd always been.
"I thought I would see a hundred things I did not imagine," I answered. "But I never thought love could be both a chain and a gift."
He laughed and touched my shoulder with a companion's affection. "You used to be impossible," he said.
"I still am," I answered with the same smile.
I was wrong about many things. I thought returning meant stealing back what had been lost. It meant finishing threads, not pulling the cloth apart.
So if you ask me now—if you ask whether I regret any of what was done, of the choices made in the sway of grief—I would say only this:
"Live honestly. Love fiercely. And when the time comes to let go, do it with hands that have learned how to set things down."
The last time I saw the tree in the deep cold, it had a single poem of ice on its limb and one stubborn blossom breaking into color in a world otherwise white.
"Look," a child nearby gasped. "The flower blooms in winter."
"Yes," I said. "It always has a mind of its own."
I touched the bark where letters had once been carved awkwardly in youth. The mark was nearly gone now—time had smoothed it into remembrance—yet the tree held its story. And I, having been given a second portion of days, chose to write new lines along with what was there.
When people would later ask what changed me, I would point to a small, stubborn blossom that opened when the world had decided winter would last forever. It wasn't mine to own. It was only ours to witness.
The End
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