(Ross' POV)
Days bled into one another in the Maroon camp, a strange, suspended reality. I learned the rhythm of this hidden world. The predawn fishing, the mending of nets, the careful tending of hidden gardens. I was "Ross," the quiet, scrawny boy who was stronger than he looked, who kept his head down and worked. I hauled water, split kindling, and did whatever Maman Brigitte asked without complaint. I was building a new history, one chore at a time.
But my entire existence was a satellite orbiting a single, fixed point: Landy.
He was a ghost in the camp. He worked, he ate, he slept, but his soul was elsewhere, trapped in a memory of fire and loss. He spent every spare moment at his grove of cypress trees, which the camp had started to call "The Poet's Corner." The trees were now covered in his elegies, a forest of heartbreak. He’d graduated from flint to a proper carving knife, gifted to him by one of the hunters, and the poems had become more intricate, the letters deeper, as if he were trying to carve his way down to the root of his grief.
I watched him from a distance, my own heart a raw, exposed nerve. Every line he carved was a love letter I couldn’t answer. Every sigh was a caress I couldn’t feel. The wooden butterfly in my pocket felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
CeeCee watched me watching him, her expression a mixture of pity and worry. "This is torture, Rose," she whispered one night as we lay in the small, shared pallet in our hut. "You have to tell him."
"I can't," I whispered back, the words a familiar mantra. "What if someone hears? What if it gets back to Fred? This isn't just about us anymore, CeeCee. We have a community to protect. We can't bring that danger here."
"Then you have to find a way to live with it," she said, her voice firm. "Or you'll go mad. And so will he."
She was right. The distance was killing me. The performance was cracking. I’d catch myself staring at him with an intensity that was not boyish, but deeply, wholly feminine. I’d almost slipped and called him "Landy" with Rose’s inflection, not Ross’s gruff imitation.
The breaking point came on a rain-soaked afternoon. The camp was huddled under shelters, the steady drumming on the palmetto roofs a somber beat. Landy was alone, sitting under a makeshift lean-to near his trees, staring out at the silver curtain of rain. He wasn't carving. He was just… empty. The look on his face was one of utter surrender. A man waiting to fade away.
Something inside me snapped. I couldn't watch him disappear. If I couldn't be Rose, then I would have to find another way to reach him. A desperate, insane, and utterly brilliant way.
I waited until the rain eased to a drizzle. I took a deep breath, pulling the mantle of Ross around me like a suit of armor. I walked across the muddy clearing, my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest.
He didn’t look up as I approached. I stopped a few feet away, my boots sinking into the soft earth.
"You look like a man dying of thirst in a flood," I said, my voice low, but clear.
That got his attention. His head turned slowly, his dark eyes focusing on me with a flicker of vague recognition. The sad, quiet boy from the plantation.
"What?" he asked, his voice flat.
"I said, you look like a man dying of thirst in a flood," I repeated, crossing my arms over my chest in what I hoped was a masculine gesture. "You're surrounded by life, by people, by a second chance. And you're just… sitting here, letting yourself wither."
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A spark of irritation lit in his hollow eyes. "You don't know anything about me, boy."
"I know you carve poems to a ghost," I shot back, gesturing to the trees. "I know you walk through this camp like you're already in the ground. I know the look of a man who's lost his reason for breathing."
He stared at me, a long, assessing look. I held his gaze, refusing to flinch, though every instinct screamed to look away, to comfort him, to confess.
"And I can fix you," I said, the audacity of the statement making my own ears ring.
He let out a short, bitter laugh. It was a harsh, ugly sound. "Fix me? How? You gonna carve me a new heart? Whittle me a new soul?"
"No," I said, taking a step closer. The air between us crackled. "I'm going to help you practice."
"Practice what?"
"Wooing her."
The words hung in the damp air, absurd and profound. Landy’s expression shifted from bitterness to sheer, unadulterated confusion.
"What are you talking about?"
"You loved her, right?" I pressed, my voice gaining a strange confidence. This was the most Rose-like thing I had done in weeks, using words as my weapon, my strategy. "You had things you wanted to say to her? Things you never got to say? Looks you wanted to give her? Promises you wanted to make?"
His face tightened, a mask of pain. "It doesn't matter now."
"It matters to you!" I insisted, my voice rising. "It's eating you alive. So here's the deal. You practice on me."
He stared at me as if I’d just suggested he dance naked in the rain. "Practice… on you."
"Yeah. Talk to me like I'm her. Tell me all the things you never got to say. Look at me like I'm her. Get it out of your system. Stop carving it into the trees and… and say it to a living person." I spread my arms, a clumsy, boyish gesture. "I'm about her height. I can stand in. Think of it as… rehearsing for the afterlife."
The proposition was insane. It was a form of psychological torture for both of us. For him, to pour his heart out to a stranger. For me, to hear it and not break character.
But it was also a lifeline. It was the only way I could think of to let him love me, even if he didn't know it was me.
Landy was silent for a long time, studying me. The rain dripped from the leaves, a soft percussion to our stalemate. I could see the war in his eyes. The longing to speak her name, to say the words, battling against the sheer strangeness of the offer.
"Why?" he finally asked, his voice a rough whisper. "Why would you do this?"
I met his gaze, letting a fraction of Rose’s determination shine through Ross’s eyes. "Because watching you is like watching a song die before it's ever sung. And it's a damn waste."
Another silence. Then, a flicker of something in his gaze. Not hope, not yet. But a faint, fragile curiosity. A crack in the wall of his grief.
"You think it would help?" he asked, the question so quiet it was almost carried away by the breeze.
"I think holding it in is killing you," I said softly. "And I think… I think she would have wanted to hear it."
That was the key. The mention of what she would have wanted. His resistance crumbled. He looked down at his hands, at the calluses and scars, and gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod.
"Alright," he murmured. "Alright, Ross. We can try."
My knees went weak with relief and terror. What had I just done?
He looked up at me, a new, uncertain light in his eyes. "So… how does this work?"
I swallowed hard, my throat dry. "We start simple. You talk. I'll listen. Pretend I'm her. Say what you would say if you saw her right now."
He took a deep, shuddering breath, his eyes drifting past me, focusing on a memory. He opened his mouth, closed it, then tried again.
"Rose…" he began, and the way he said the name, with such a devastating blend of love and loss, was a physical blow. "I… I should have held your hand that day behind the mill. I should have kissed you. I was so afraid of breaking you… but the world broke you anyway."
He looked at me, his gaze searching my face, seeing a boy, but speaking to a ghost. "And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I couldn't catch the butterfly for you."
The words hung between us, raw and true. I stood there, Ross, the stand-in, the shadow, and felt Rose’s tears welling up behind my eyes. I couldn't let them fall. I couldn't speak. I just gave a single, stiff nod, a boy acknowledging a man’s pain.
It was the beginning. The first step into a beautiful, agonizing dance where I would be both the partner and the audience, the recipient of a love that was meant for me, delivered to a stranger.
The deal was struck. The lessons had begun. And I had never been more heartbroken, or more alive.