Sweet Romance13 min read
This Time I Stopped Waiting
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I have nine memories stitched under my ribs like old stitches that never quite healed.
"I will wait for you in every life," he said once when the world still fit inside our palms.
"He swore it," my maid Sophie Bolton used to whisper, "till the moon forgot its name."
But vows wear thin. I am Juliet Finley, daughter of Chancellor Cason Dean, and this is the ninth lifetime I remember. I have lived him in soldier's mud, in palace gold, in a common woman's rag — and always he is Alejandro Campos in some honorable shape, always he loses me.
"He comes now?" Sophie asked softly.
"He comes," I answered.
Across the yard Alejandro Campos walked toward me in white, the way snow travels down a roof and refuses to melt. He paused three paces away, eyes cool as river stone.
"Juliet," he said, "I should not meet you in secret. But there are things I must tell you."
"Tell me," I said.
"I am promised—" He stopped, and the promise hung like winter light. "I have affections for another. I cannot marry you. I must ask that you dissolve this match."
I held my breath so long I thought the world might hear it crack.
"You may say the name," I said quietly.
He shut his mouth like a door. "No," he said finally. "It is not my place."
I had been promised to Alejandro since childhood. Our faces had grown together like two maps of the same city. But each of my eight past lives had been a proof he loved others and not me. I had learned to make space for his choices. I had honored his choices. I had stitched his happiness into my life like a seam, always pulling thread to make room.
"I have done this eight times," I said. "This time I will not be your shadow."
He looked at me like a scholar examining a broken seal. "You speak oddly."
"I will not make room again, Alejandro," I said. "Not eight, not nine."
He did not understand what those eight lives meant. He could not have: he never carried my memory. He never remembered the thousand little deaths that taught me how to be patient and how to die softly.
Two days before the wedding he left the house with a bag of silver and a curt bow. He told me the marriage would be delayed because he would be sent south to oversee relief work. His hands were polite, his words colder than any winter.
So I brought him his favorite things a day later: a dish of crisp fish I'd spent the night learning to make—and a book of calligraphy by Master Vicente Dunn, the only thing he never refused.
I reached Alejandro's gate to find him placing a slender woman in a carriage. The way he looked at her was the shape of something I had seen in the cave of a lifetime's memory—the gentle arc of recognition and an ache that belonged to a different sky.
He did not see me at first. When he did, his expression hardened as an iron trap.
"Don't come here," he said.
"I have carried your meals for you," I answered. "I will carry them to wherever you go."
He tossed the food and the book aside like they were mud. The servants watched, bewildered.
"Why?" Sophie hissed behind me. "You made those with your own hands. He throws them away as if they are trash."
"They were never for his hands," I said. "They were to hold a memory. They held nothing."
That night I finished the wedding robe. My fingers moved as though stitching would stitch my sorrow away. Sophie watched quietly.
"Why do you let him go?" she asked.
"Because sometimes a line of fate goes one way and I will not chase it further," I said. "Sophie, if he will not see me even when the pieces of my life and his are laid out, then I will stop waiting."
On our wedding morning the city celebrated. Lanterns were bright, drums rolled like low thunder, and my father—Chancellor Cason Dean—smiled as though the world had been made right again. He clasped my hand and said quietly, "After this, we will go south to the riverbanks and breathe in spring air."
I tried to hold to that small promise as the sedan bounced toward Alejandro's house. The sedan's curtains were drawn, but through the slit I saw a row of mourners in white procession, carrying a black coffin. My mind swallowed and left me gasping.
"My brother," I whispered. "Tatum—" My brother Tatum Ferguson was supposed to lead the troops home. He had sent letters painted with humor and tiny maps. His last laugh inked across the paper was, "I shall return to carry you to the carriage."
When I demanded the truth, no answer came quick enough. That night in Alejandro's study I found the words that felled me. "Your brother died in a border skirmish," Alejandro said, as though reciting a history lesson. "It was necessary to hide it so morale would not collapse."
"Necessary?" I said. "You hid his death from me like a secret plan. This is how you are polite? This is how you thank me?"
He left me there. The cowled lamps of the house cast him a pale silhouette as he walked away. I went back to my father's house and kneeled by my brother's coffin. I saw the armor I had sewn for him stained with his blood. My father did not tell me. He could not let the truth break my marriage day.
I sank into a place where the wind tasted of old prayers.
When I tried to return to Alejandro's home, his mother Leonie Perkins welcomed the woman I had seen—Imelda Olivier—with open arms. Imelda was already calling her "sister", and Alejandro, always a gentleman, did not bother to hide his impatience with me. His words cut like a blade wrapped in velvet.
"She will remain here. If you cannot accept it, then perhaps you should not think of this as your home," he said.
"I am your wife," I said, in the place between shame and command. "I will not cause a scene."
That night I suppose I waited like a tide—slow and inevitable. Alejandro did not come to the bridal bed.
Morning came and the household murmured. I walked to the garden and found Imelda smiling with Alejandro's mother. He never looked like that at me. I sat and plucked the strings of a zither, and the music spilled out like a confession.
"Do you not feel it?" I said to no one in particular. "How can I be bound to someone who does not bind himself to me?"
Sophie came running, pale. "Miss, they accuse me. They say I tried to harm Imelda."
My blood ran cold. "What?" I demanded.
Before I could reach the kitchen I heard the scream. Sophie lay on the snow, her hands bloodied with unseen wounds. Imelda's face was streaked with tears. The palace watch had dragged Sophie out and set a sentence without trial.
"It was her!" Imelda cried. "She tried to poison my child. She must be punished!"
"No," I said, and my voice fell away. "Sophie would never do that."
But the house did not listen. The law was swift and indifferent. Sophie was beaten until she whispered no more that day. She died at dusk with my hand pressed to her brow, and her last look was not one of plea but a soft apology, as if she had failed a duty she could not name.
"I did not do it," she gasped at the very end. "Tell them—"
I held her. The world was reduced to a mouthful of snow and the sound of distant drums.
"Sophie," I said. "Sophie—"
She closed her eyes and the breath left her as if someone had folded a sheet. I walked away with the dead weight of truth in my pockets and a fury hot as a smith's iron.
"Who did this?" I asked no one and everyone.
Alejandro watched me with the same cold that had first refused me. "It is not our concern," he said. "Do not trouble us with accusations."
Not trouble us? The phrase tasted like blood.
My father, once a great man with councils and courts, grew thin and readied his own death like a man fastening a cloak. He returned to bed clinging to his honor and to his private shame. "Stay for the funeral," he said once, voice cracking, "and afterward I will step down. Go to the south with all simplicity."
I knelt by the coffin for a while longer. I did not know why Tatum's face was pale in the wax of death, only that a red thread had been cut through our family—one made of sacrifices and silent pairs of hands.
When I came back, the house was full of the sort of silence people keep when they are afraid.
Days later my father bent over his scrolls and coughs that tasted of iron. I found him slumped one morning, blood rich and sudden across his hand. He had not told me he had been poisoned by rumor and slander and the lonely weigh of his office; he had not told me the court had condemned him for imaginary crimes to save their faces.
"Father!" I cried. "Father, wake!"
He tried to speak and could only whisper, "My child—do not let them—" and his mouth closed. The life in his chest left like steam from a kettle.
I sat and did not move at his funeral. My hair went white as the snow that fell upon the tomb the moment the last dirt was cast.
The house that had once thrummed with courtiers and servants now wore only funeral banners. I gave Cason Dean the last rites and then left him under the earth.
I had been faithful to Alejandro nine lives. I had waited across centuries for one half of a vow. The world, it seemed, had other accounts to balance.
After the funerals I decided to leave. "I will go," I told the steward, handing him a pouch of silver. "Live simply. Take care of what remains."
"You cannot leave, Miss," the steward said, throat thick. "There is no home anymore."
"There is my own chest of memories," I said.
I walked away.
Snow fell and the city became hollow. I went to the place where we had once carved our childish promises, the old pavilion whose name I had once written on the stone with a trembling hand. It said, in my hand, the vow he'd once given me. I pressed my fingers to the stone and tasted blood as if a wound had opened.
"I will not wait again," I told the silence.
Then I collapsed.
I thought I would die with that single bitter sentence on my tongue. I thought I had lived long enough and long too little.
Instead, everything unraveled and the world spun backward.
"I am sorry," Alejandro said one late afternoon in the snow, his face older and devastated, a man whose black hair had become flecked with gray. "I remember. I remember all of it."
The words hit like a snowfall that breaks trees. He had been Alejandro Campos, a man of honor and cold habits. Across my nine lives he had been many things—general, minister, prince—but now he brought back the weight of the star-god he had been before we were ever born.
"You remember now," I said, astonished. "After my life is gone, you remember."
He dropped to his knees in the snow. "Why did you die?" he asked. "Why did you leave like that?"
"You were busy living," I said, and the answer was more a stone than a sentence.
He pressed my chilled hand to his face. His tears were hot on my frost-brittle skin.
"It was always you," he said, voice ragged. "I should have seen you. I failed you nine lives."
"You failed me eight times," I corrected. "I failed myself the ninth."
Then Alejandro did something neither of us had done before: he took my story and made it into armor.
He stood, rushed into the capital like a man with a map of the world on fire, and used everything he had—rank, word, influence—to tear the evidence of lies open. He called witnesses. He found the men who had lied for gain. He dug into the papers and the servants' whispers.
"True or false, we will know," he said, his voice like a judge's hammer.
There was a hearing, not of law but of social reckoning. Imelda Olivier had smiled her way through weeks of courtship; she had been the soft, favorite face in Alejandro's home. But a crowd gathered when the truth came to light.
"Imelda," Alejandro announced in the middle of the courtly hall, "you accused my wife’s maid of a crime to protect your own house."
Imelda's smile slipped. "I did what I had to," she said, voice small.
"You set a trap with poison, then staged the scene to appear as Sophie’s doing," he continued. "You conspired with court functionaries to smear Chancellor Cason Dean to secure your claim."
The hall gasped. Servants pressed to the back. The magistrates rose like reeds. Imelda paled.
"You lied under oath," he said, and then, a second later, "and you first planted false witnesses. You also stood with Alejandro's mother to prevent justice from moving."
Leonie Perkins's face showed nothing at first, then the traitor's color ruddied her cheeks. "I only wanted—" she began.
"Save your breath," Alejandro said. "You shall speak to the people you wronged."
They placed Imelda on a raised platform in the central square under winter sun. Alejandro had called for witnesses, had brought forward the soldiers who had served his brother Tatum and the steward who had pretended ignorance. The crowd was thick enough to damp the cold. People held their breath; servants withered with shame; old women shook their heads with cloth-wet eyes.
Alejandro walked to the platform, his chest bare under the thin robe, his voice carrying. "This woman plotted to ruin lives for the sake of her child and your favor. She made me blind. She will not be allowed to vanish into a gilded lie."
Imelda turned pale as milk. "You cannot do this!" she screamed.
"I can and I will," he said. "You will atone in front of those you harmed."
He ordered the strings of false witnesses to be read aloud. He set the steward who had thrown Sophie's gifts in the yard to confess. Under every confession Imelda's face went from anger to shock to denial to horror.
"She used you," he told the crowd. "She used status to hide cruelty."
Then it began: the punishments were to be as public as the crimes. He had them remove Imelda's silk robe and have her stand in the center of the market. The crowd's murmur felt like the world shifting. He had them lift up the ledger of false charges and set them on a pole for all to read. He had those who had sworn falsely tell each lie in full voice while the marketplace listened. Some wept; some shouted. The air tasted metallic.
Imelda's face shifted: first defiant, then broken, then small. She tried to drag words back like fish from a net. "It was for my child," she said. "It was for my future."
"Your child's future does not come at the price of another's life," Alejandro said. "You have robbed us all."
The crowd watched, faces a blurring map of surprise, anger, pity. Someone spat at Imelda's feet. An old woman began to chant a law I had not known existed: that a woman who stains another's hand with blood out of falsehood must do public service to mend the lives she broke. The magistrates agreed—part because it was just, part because the wind had changed.
Imelda was made to kneel before Sophie's grave and name each lie she had told. She was made to walk the streets for days bearing the weight of a simple rope on her wrist and handing out food to the poor, reparations to those she had slandered. Alejandro required her to teach at the hospice, to tend the linaments Sophie had once prepared, to stitch the quilts Sophie had once sewed. He decreed that she must return the favor she had stolen by serving those she had wronged.
"And you, Leonie Perkins," he said, turning to his mother, "you will remove yourself from the household until you can be trusted."
Alejandro's mother waited like a wound; then the world tilted. She stepped down from the standing she had taken for granted. She stumbled as though her steps were foreign to her feet.
"Look!" cried a vendor. "She goes! She will give back the seat!"
The crowd's response flickered—some clapped; others remained shocked. Faces recorded it all. Alejandro stood at the center like a tower that had finally been set upright.
Imelda's expressions ran the gamut: a slow, collapsing arc. At first she tried to claim innocence, then anger, then betrayal, then defeat. She reached, once, for Alejandro. "Forgive me," she mouthed.
He did not look. He had forgiven but not forgotten; forgiveness without justice does not heal.
The magistrates imposed a larger edict: that public betrayal that led to death or ruin must be answered with public restitution to the victims' families—repair of graves, support for dependents, restitution of honor. Imelda must return gifts she'd been given; she must stand in public and confess.
The square buzzed. Men recorded the event. Women kept careful watch. Children followed like curious birds. Some took notes. Some took pictures with the new daguerreotype thing a visiting craftsman had introduced to show the likeness of one's face to the world; some clapped; many simply stood and watched a woman fall from grace and a man claim the ledger of truth.
Imelda's reaction was a performance of collapse. The progression was vivid—first the tightness in her cheeks, then a hand over the mouth, then the flit of denial, the cough of shame, then the small child's plea: "I didn't mean…"
Sophie was dead. My brother dead. My father's name grown into black ash. People watched the consequences unfurl like a rope. Alejandro gave the speech that would be quoted: "We are a city of laws, not whispers. If law is only for the powerful, our city dissolves into rumor. We will not let that happen."
When the crowd dispersed, some followed Alejandro to the court. Some stood at Sophie's grave and cried. Some spat. Some watched and grew still. The punishment had been public, measured, and humiliating where it needed to be. I watched Imelda and Alejandro step from opposite sides of a bitter road.
I found myself exempt from celebration. I had wanted no vengeance; I had wanted my life back. But justice came, and people watched, and truth felt large and solid under my feet.
Alejandro stood before me later that night. "I had to make it right," he said simply.
"You made it public," I replied. "And in the noise some kind of meaning returned."
He knelt and took my hands—hands that had sewn armor and embroidered funerals, hands that had patted Sophie's brow and stitched my brother's last quilt.
"I will not let you wait again," he said.
"Words," I said.
"This time I will do more than speak. I will remember."
He had learned, painfully, what it meant to keep memory. The world had made him forget, but now he carried what I'd carried for nine lives—the weight of grief, and of vow.
He accompanied me to Tatum's grave. He spoke soft and long. He told stories I had already known and some I had not: a hero's last laugh, an aunt's small kindness, a child's first cartwheel. His memory was a map of all the moments he'd been blind to before. Listening, I felt something thaw.
"You could have said any of this sooner," I said.
"I could," he said. "But I didn't."
"Then the future is ours in that space," I said.
We did not marry in the opulent way the world expected after calamity. We married in winter, low and quiet. I wore a robe that carried Tatum's sigil, a small thing stitched into the hem. Alejandro wore a coat that had once belonged to his father.
"I will not break you," he whispered at one point, his breath clouding in the air.
"Don't tell me not to be afraid," I teased back. "Tell me you will be intolerant of lies."
He laughed then. It was a small thing that felt like sunlight cutting through frost.
We fought after that. We loved after that. I was never his shadow again.
Later, I learned of gods and of histories. I learned that Alejandro's soul had once been a star-god named Warm-Leo—though his mortal name we call Alejandro—and that he had been forced into a cycle of forgetting. I learned that there were others behind the scenes: gods like Kendra Palmer, who had once been my maid in other lives and had acted for reasons small and monstrous and human.
I forgive where forgiveness is owed and demand punishment where it is needed. Imelda's public penance lasted years. Leonie Perkins retreated to a cottage where she tended a small garden and came to us once to ask for forgiveness. The magistrates made new rules about slander. The steward who flung my cooking away lost his post.
Sophie lies in a small patch of grass I planted with my own hands. There are days I go and sit with my back to the sun and tell the stones what I have learned.
"Why do you stay?" Alejandro asked once as we sat behind the pavilion where we had first sworn to wait a lifetime.
"Because some vows are a test," I said. "You were my test, and now I hold the answer."
He reached and took my hand into both of his like a child taking a treasure. "Will you let me try for the next life? For real?"
"I will not make the same choice twice," I told him. "But I will give you this one life. Remember it."
He squeezed my knuckles. "Always," he said.
I smiled then, at last, and the way he smiled back was not the cold of a winter wall but the warm of bread fresh from an oven—soft and forgiving and home.
Long after the courts and the punishments, when snow fell and the city hummed with ordinary life, we would stand and look toward the garden and remember the public square where a woman had been forced to face her lies. People would murmur of justice returned, of a man who finally saw, of a woman who finally stopped waiting.
And sometimes, when night came down thick as a cloak, I would touch the stone of the little pavilion where our hands had first learned the shape of promises, and whisper to Sophie, to Tatum, to my father, "Rest. I will keep watch."
The End
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