Sunset Valley seltsam

She paused, considering his words. The ease of the normal lie was ready upon her tongue—I’m fine, she could say. Had said. Always, always said.

But this was Mahler. She did not need to protect him, as she did her trio of now-grown children. Her smile waned—a certain flash of understanding within her emerald gaze as she looked to him.

“There will always be a lingering sadness there,” she determined, her voice a gentle whisper as her tongue smoothed over her lips in pensive consideration. “But each day there is more clarity. And with it, light.”

To further this, she finally spoke the one dark thought that clung to her heart—a truth she could see more so with each passing day. “I don’t know that Stigmata would ever have been able to be the mate I so desperately wanted then—needed then. Not without taming the wildness in him—and reflecting on it now… I would never want to change him. Not truly.”

She hushed out the last thought, the ‘what if’s’ hanging throughout the air heavily—never to be answered, as the man’s final place lay within the depths of the mountain. What more could there possibly be to say?