Page 54 of Echoes
“You,” she replied. “Just you and me and that house, and maybe a ring on your finger one day.”
“Maybe?”
“If you want that,” Rosie said. “And if you getmeone, I promise I won’t lose it over the side of a ship.”
“Oh, I’ll get you one, but it’s not coming off your finger once I put it there. You’ll put some tape over it to keep it in place or wear a damn glove when you work, but it’s not coming off.”
Rosie moved until she had Felicity beneath her and stared down at her.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. And it’s okay; it’s okay that it took us a minute to get here.” Felicity wrapped her arms around her neck. “But do you still have that thing? I wouldn’t mind taking it for a test drive. Maybe I’ll see what you saw, and it’ll make more sense to me.”
Rosie smiled down at her and replied, “No. I buried it beneath the pool I had built in the backyard of the house I just sold.”
“You buried it? Why?”
“Because I have this unverifiable belief that its purpose was to bring me to you, and I didn’t follow it once and paid the price.”
“Then, how do you know–”
“Because I pressed the button again, and let’s just say that it left me wanting in the end.”
“What?” Felicity laughed.
“I think it showed me what I needed to see to let it go. Does that make sense?”
“What? No,” Felicity said, laughing again.
“It showed me that I didn’t need it to help me see my present or future because my present and future was sitting right in front of me.” She kissed Felicity’s forehead.
“Oh, my love.” Felicity wrapped her arms around Rosie and held her tight.
FUTURE
“Have you seen this?”
Violet turned to her assistant, Courtney, who was sitting on the sofa next to her.
“Seen what?” she asked.
“The guy who was about to go on trial for that murder.”
“Did you mean to finish that sentence?”
Courtney turned her phone toward Violet, and Violet read the headline of the article.
“Okay?”
“He killed a guy in the mountains a couple of decades ago now, I think, and then he confessed to the daughter of the guy that he’d done it, but he refused to take a deal, I guess. Anyway, he was supposed to go on trial next week after, like, a bunch of postponements, but they found his body in his cell this morning.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Andwhydo I care about this?”
“I don’t know. I was just scrolling through the news on my phone and saw it. It’s weird because it’s been taking forever to get him to court, for some reason. The article says they’ve had to move him from one prison to another because he kept getting attacked by other prisoners or something. Anyway, they say it’s a suicide, but they don’t know how he got a belt in there because he’d had his taken away, according to the jail people they interviewed about it.”