More Than a Mission (23 page)

T
he stone-and-bronze marker matched the one laid over a decade earlier for her parents.

Elizabeth knelt and ran her hands over the words engraved in the bronze.

She wondered who had decided to add the last. Corbett Lazlo possibly?

“Lizzy, you okay?” Aidan asked and kneeled beside her. In his hand he held a bouquet of flowers she had cut from the garden earlier that morning.

“I'm okay.”

“There's a big ‘except' there, Lizzy. What is it?” he asked and laid his free hand over hers as it rested on Dani's grave marker. The sun caught the gold band on his ring finger. It glinted brightly against the darker color of the bronze and the even deeper brown of the freshly turned earth.

“I've been waiting for months for Dani to come home. I thought it would bring closure.”

“But?” he pressed.

“I can feel her, Aidan. As if she was still alive. Still with me,” she urged; for in the many months since Dani had been carried away in the ambulance, her sister's presence remained strong.

“Lizzy, I can't begin to understand this twin thing. But I do understand you. If you believe this, I won't argue with you.”

She smiled, leaned close and kissed the side of his face. “How like a husband, you sound. Indulging me in this even if you don't believe.”

Aidan laid the bouquet of flowers along the top of the grave marker and then cradled her face in his hands. “I will always be at your side. Stand by whatever you believe, Lizzy. Believe that.”

The amazing thing was that she did. She trusted Aidan as she had no else before, except for Dani. But unlike Dani, Aidan had shown her he was here to stay.

It might have started off as just another mission for him, but now it was more. He was her champion. She was his home. It couldn't be any more perfect than that.