Secret Vow

Kathy Cecala

She lingered for a moment in Ellie's garden and shut her eyes, inhaling the vaguely minty aroma of herbs wafting in the wind. Where are you? she asked silently. And what is this need I have to see you again, after so many years? She shook her head: it was absurd, completely irrational, this flare-up of longing and yearning for him. Completely irrational after all these years, but then her connection to him had never been rational or even sane. Her love for him had been something wild and unearthly, and even thirty years with another man, filled with children and farming and business, had been unable to extinguish it entirely, fed as it was—feebly—by the chaste, careful correspondence she and Ellis had maintained over the years. Two months ago, the letters had stopped. The last connection with him had been severed. It was something serious. She knew it. And she sensed that somewhere, wherever he was, he needed her.