She shook her head. “When the wave hits, you’re underwater. What’s true suddenly doesn’t seem so true anymore, what you used to love isn’t the least bit lovely, and you could vow the world had gone flat. The air is weighted, keeping you down on your bed, and you have to push the weight off you just to get up and start the day.”

“I never would have guessed it. I don’t see a bit of melancholy in you. In fact, you’ve always seemed quite the opposite.”

“Those that have it the worst, we’re the ones fightin’ against it the hardest. Only, we lose the fight on the inside.”

“I’m so sorry, Bridget.”

She shrugged again in her affable way.

I looked down, laced my fingers up in the fabric of my gown. “I think I understand a little. The silence here, the lack of music . . . it has been heavy on my soul. How I wish there was music.”

“You’ve got music wherever you go, Vivienne Mourdant, inside your being, and you’ll come out all right. Music’s the enemy of melancholia. Your freedom.”

“Sometimes.” I wrapped my arms around myself. “Other times it lands you here.”

Bridget smiled as the wind tickled her face with her hair. “There’s music even here. You have only to find it—or make it for yourself.”

21

Off with you! You’re a happy fellow, for you’ll give happiness and joy to many other people. There is nothing better or greater than that!

~Ludwig van Beethoven

You should marry again, Doctor.

Those words hung in Mitchell Turner’s memory as he strode out to the gardens in the early morning. Somehow Nurse Branson, head matron of the wards, saw him as a sort of patient himself, and this, his remarriage, the mark of his cure. Nothing else would prove to her with any certainty that he’d healed from what had happened to his wife.

Missing her had been crippling at first, and his regrets were still a heavy weight, but time had mixed a sweetness with the pain too. Sweetness that had begun to eclipse much of the hurt on the good days. To be around Dahlia was to experience delight, for she was full of it, and her joy was contagious. That’s what he thought of now when he remembered her, and he smiled faintly to himself. It faded only when a wave of regret followed the sweet memories.