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“Oh,” I whisper, shivering although I’m not cold. “How . . . ”
Bobby shrugs. We both know there is no answer to my unvoiced question. It’s like the arrowhead: magic. As impossible as it is, some part of me was here, and I left these words behind.
“I told my daddy you’d come back,” he says quietly. When he looks up at me, I am filled with a kind of love I’ve never known before.
I bend down and take him in my arms, holding him tightly.
He is the first to pull away. It couldn’t have been me.
“Come on,” he says, taking my hand again, pulling me toward the house. As we cross the yard, a wind kicks up. Suddenly the world is full of falling petals. It’s snowing pink.
At the door, Bobby stops and grins up at me. “Let’s surprise him. ”
“Oh, it’ll be a surprise,” I say, feeling my stomach knot up. It is one thing to get a boy to believe in magic; it’s another thing entirely to pin such impossible hopes on a full-grown man.
Bobby knocks on the door. Footsteps rattle inside the house.
I tighten my hold on his hand.
The door opens and Daniel is there, looking almost exactly as I pictured him. He is not quite as lean as I imagined, and his hair is shorter.
But it’s Daniel, all right.
Bobby is moving from foot to foot so excitedly, he seems to be dancing the Macarena. I, on the other hand, am as still as stone. “Look, Daddy. She’s back. ”
I try to smile, but can’t. All he has to do is shut the door or turn away and I’ll be lost. “Open the damn door,” I say, my voice catching on the swear word, just as Bobby had known it would. “It’s cold out here. ”
“Joy?” I hear the confusion in Daniel’s voice, the disbelief.
Bobby laughs. “I knew he’d know you. ”
I don’t understand. “How do you recognize me?”
“Bobby drew about a million pictures of you,” he says in that lovely brogue of my dreams. “And he talked about you ’til I couldn’t stand it anymore. But . . . ”
“But what?”
“You’re beautiful. ”
Heat climbs up my cheeks. I feel like a teenager, being noticed by the football captain for the very first time. It is a feeling I thought I’d never experience again. “This is insane,” I whisper.
“Joy. ” The way he says my name is like a prayer. It wrenches my heart and gives me hope.
Without thinking, I move toward him, put my hand on his arm. My cane falls to the floor in a clatter, forgotten.
He touches my face, and only then, when I feel the heat of his palm against my cold cheek do I realize how keenly I wanted him to reach for me. His touch is the gentlest I’ve ever known. I sigh, seeing a pale cloud of my breath.
“I feel as if I already know you. ”