Chapter 40: The Synchrony of Two Heartbeats

Chapter 40: The Synchrony of Two Heartbeats

After several more kisses, the kind that are given with the urgency of someone who has been thirsty in the desert, we separate with our breath short. We stared into each other's eyes, and deep in our pupils I discovered the same fear: we both had an excruciating fear that all this was just a beautiful dream, a fantasy from which we would wake up at any moment to find ourselves alone again on the cold beach of Vik.

We went to lunch with the firm intention of returning to the publishing house soon and, later, returning home. That meal was completely different than any other we would have shared. We were no longer two castaways measuring each other cautiously; We fed each other, sharing bites, knowing glances, subtle touches under the table, spontaneous caresses on each other's hands and innocent kisses that tasted like a newfound tenderness.

When I returned to the publishing house, I said goodbye to him with a slight touch of my lips and walked to my office. I sat down at the desk, opened the lid of my laptop, and went back to work. My fingers slid across the keyboard with renewed strength. I kept writing, venting from each year of humiliation, freeing myself from the chains of Anthony's contempt, but also doing something else: falling in love, dreaming again, and looking forward to tomorrow.

In the midst of the silence of the office, surrounded by the smell of paper and ink, the definitive miracle occurred. I felt my own heart again. After months of believing it was just a piece of inert stone in my chest, I heard its sound again with perfect clarity: boom, boom, boom. I felt alive in such an intense way that it was difficult for me to hold back my tears.

But this time there was something radically different in the air: I was no longer alone in the universe. I found that, if my heart dictated that boom, boom, from the office next door Ethan's heart would respond in exactly the same way. We were synchronized in our healing and in our rebirth. In my late forties, holed up in a small town in the north of Iceland, I was beginning to feel what I had never, not even in my prime youth, ever felt.