Chapter 110
[Rose's POV]
I couldn't breathe.
Benjamin's words hung in the air between us, each syllable carrying the weight of two lifetimes. I found you. And I'm never letting you go again.
My hands gripped the hospital sheets so tightly my knuckles went white. The logical part of my brain screamed that this was impossible. People didn't come back from the dead. Souls didn't transcend time and space to find each other again.
"Wait." I forced the word out past the tightness in my throat. "Benjamin, I need to understand something."
He pulled back slightly, though his hands remained cupped around my face with devastating gentleness. "Anything."
"The person who lived this life before—the Benjamin Sullivan who grew up in this family, who became an actor, who had friends and memories of his own—" My voice cracked. "Where did he go? Did you... did Robert's soul somehow take over his body? Because if that's what happened, then this is—"
"No." Benjamin's answer came swift and firm. He released my face and took my hands instead, his thumbs tracing gentle circles across my knuckles. "Little Apple, listen to me carefully. I didn't invade Benjamin's body. I didn't erase someone else's existence. Benjamin Sullivan and Robert Anderson were never two separate people."
I stared at him, trying to process his words through the fog of confusion and residual shock.
"We're one soul," he continued, his voice steady despite the emotion flickering across his features. "I've always been both. Benjamin Sullivan lived his entire life with this incomplete feeling, this inexplicable emptiness he couldn't name or understand. That was because half of who I am—the memories, the experiences, the love I carried from my first life—was locked away somewhere I couldn't access."
His grip on my hands tightened fractionally. "Do you remember what I told you about the headaches? They started the night at the restaurant. That was the beginning. My subconscious was trying to break through, to remember. And in the car, when you said it —" He closed his eyes briefly, as if reliving the pain. "Everything came flooding back all at once. The dam broke. I didn't lose myself. I finally became whole."
The explanation made a terrible kind of sense. One soul, two lifetimes, memories reunited. Not possession. Not replacement. Just... completion.
"So you're really—" I had to stop and swallow hard. "You're really Robert? All of you?"
"I'm Robert," he confirmed softly. "But I'm also Benjamin. I have both sets of memories now—dying on that beach in Normandy and growing up in this modern world. They coexist. I remember proposing to you in Cambridge and I remember filming my first movie at nineteen. I remember the war and I remember graduating from Juilliard." His eyes searched mine with an intensity that made my breath catch. "I'm the same soul you loved in 1943, Little Apple. Just in a different body, in a different time."
My mind raced through implications, possibilities, impossibilities made real.
Finally, I managed to speak. "We can't tell anyone else about this."
Benjamin blinked, clearly not expecting that to be my first coherent response. "What?"
"About your memories returning." I kept my voice low despite the privacy of the closed door. "Even James—my Jimmy—he accepted my time displacement because he remembered me from childhood, because there was physical proof. But this?" I gestured between us. "A soul reincarnating with full memory recall from a previous life? That's..." I trailed off, searching for the right word.
"Beyond comprehension," Benjamin supplied quietly.
"It would cause chaos," I said firmly. "Questions we can't answer. Scrutiny we don't need. Fear, maybe, from people who don't understand."
"I agree." His answer came without hesitation, and relief loosened something tight in my chest. "Actually, I prefer it this way. I don't want to live as Robert Anderson's ghost. That life is over—ended on a battlefield eighty years ago." He shifted his weight, his expression turning thoughtful. "In this world, I'm Benjamin Sullivan. That's who I want to be publicly. An actor. James's grandson. Part of this family."
He paused, his gaze dropping to our joined hands before rising to meet my eyes again with renewed intensity. "But with you—only with you—I want to be the man who waited eighty years to find you again. The one who promised to come back and finally kept that promise, even if it took dying and being reborn to do it."
The rawness in his voice made my throat tight. I had to look away, focusing on the window.
"Benjamin." I pulled one hand free to press against my temple, where a dull ache had begun to form—not from injury but from emotional overload. "This is all happening too fast. Yesterday you had amnesia. This morning you kissed me and claimed to remember everything. Now you're asking me to—what exactly? Pick up where we left off in 1943?"
"Yes." The answer came immediate and unapologetic.
"We can't." I forced myself to meet his eyes again, to see the hurt that flashed across his features. "Benjamin, we're not the same people anymore. I'm not the twenty-eight-year-old physicist you married in Cambridge. You're not the thirty-year-old engineer who shipped off to war. We're strangers wearing familiar souls."
"We're not strangers," he protested, but I held up my hand.
"We are," I insisted gently. "You have an entire lifetime of experiences I wasn't part of. You grew up in modern Boston. You went to drama school. You built a career I know nothing about. And I—" My voice caught. "I lived through eighty years of scientific advancement and cultural change. I traveled through time itself. We've both been shaped by things the other never witnessed."
Benjamin's jaw tightened, frustration and something that looked like desperation warring in his expression. "So what are you saying? That because our lives took different paths, what we had means nothing?"
"That's not what I'm saying at all." I reached out to touch his face, feeling the unfamiliar contours of Benjamin's younger features where Robert's had once been. "What we had was real. What we have—this connection that survived death itself—that's real too. But Benjamin, if you want to be with me in this life, you need to court me properly. Like we're meeting for the first time."
He stared at me like I'd just announced plans to colonize Mars. "You want me to court you? Rose, I've been waiting for you for eighty years!"
"Exactly," I said, unable to suppress a small smile at his scandalized expression. "Eighty years, Benjamin. You've waited that long. Surely you can wait a few more weeks to do this right."
"A few more weeks?" His voice rose slightly, cracking on the last word with an almost comical note of despair. "Little Apple, you can't be serious. I died thinking about you. I've spent this entire life unconsciously searching for you. When I finally—finally—found you and remembered everything, you're telling me I have to start over from scratch?"
"Not from scratch." I caught his hand again, lacing our fingers together. "We have history, Benjamin. More history than most couples could dream of. But we also have new lives now. New bodies. New circumstances." I paused, letting that sink in. "I want to fall in love with you—with Benjamin Sullivan, the man you are now. Not just with the ghost of who you used to be."
His expression shifted from protest to something more complex—hurt mixed with reluctant understanding. "And what about you?" he asked quietly. "How do I know that the Rose Evans sitting in front of me, not just the memory of the woman I married, actually wants to be with me?"
The question landed with unexpected weight. He deserved the truth.
"I don't know," I admitted, watching his face carefully. "That's why I need time. When you kissed me earlier, my first thought wasn't 'my husband has come back to me.' It was 'my great-grandson is kissing me and this is wrong.' " I saw him flinch but pressed on. "Those eighty years changed me, Benjamin. They changed my reference points for what's acceptable, what's possible, what I want from life."
I took a deep breath, gathering courage for the next part. "I need to know that Benjamin Sullivan, independent of any past-life memories, genuinely cares for Rose Evans as she is now. Not as an echo of someone you lost. And I need to figure out if I can love you—this you, this life—without it just being an attempt to recapture something that's already gone."
The silence that followed felt dense enough to touch. Benjamin's eyes searched mine, and I could see him processing, weighing, struggling with the logic of my words against the emotion driving him.
Finally, he exhaled slowly. "Okay."
I blinked. "Okay?"
"Okay," he repeated, though his tone carried clear reluctance. "If that's what you need—time to see me as Benjamin rather than Robert's shadow—then I'll give it to you." He stood from the edge of the bed, running his uninjured hand through his hair with visible frustration. "But Rose, I need you to promise me something in return."
"What?"
"Give me a real chance." His gray eyes locked onto mine with unwavering intensity. "Don't let our current family relationship be an automatic barrier. Don't use the fact that I'm technically your great-grandson as an excuse to keep me at arm's length. Because whatever our blood connection says, our souls know the truth."
It was a fair demand. If I was asking him to court me anew, I owed him the honesty of genuine consideration.
"I promise," I said quietly. "No automatic barriers. You'll have a fair chance to win me over as Benjamin Sullivan."
Some of the tension left his shoulders. "Then I'll do it." He moved toward the door but paused with his hand on the handle, turning back to face me. "But I'm warning you now, Little Apple—I'm not going to make this easy on you. I waited eighty years to find you again. Now that I have, I'm going to pursue you with everything I've got."
Despite everything—the confusion, the ethical complications, the sheer impossibility of our situation—I felt my lips curve into a genuine smile. "I wouldn't expect anything less."
He opened the door, and the sounds of the hospital corridor filtered in. But before stepping through, he looked back one more time, his expression softening into something that made my chest ache.
"I love you, Rose Evans," he said simply. "I loved you as Robert, and I love you as Benjamin. That's never going to change, no matter how much time passes or how many lives I live." He paused. "And I'm going to spend however long it takes proving to you that this version of me—the one standing here right now—is worth loving back."
Then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him with quiet finality.
I sat alone in the sudden silence, my heart racing and my mind spinning.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. I picked it up to find a message from Ava: Rose! We just got to the hospital entrance! Can you tell us your room number? Sophia and I are so worried about you. 💕
I typed back the room number, then set the phone down and pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to steady my breathing.