Once by Cameron Dokey

Author:Cameron Dokey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

IT WAS THE CAT WHO DECIDED THINGS, IN THE END. A TURN OF events I don’t think any of us, not even Melisande, could have foretold. Not that I made the final decision to stay and help lightly. It was merely that Mr. Jones enabled me to catch a glimpse of something I might not have been able to see on my own. And this turned out to be what tipped the scales and changed the balance, weighing it down on Rue’s side.

Prior to that particular moment, however, in spite of all my noble intentions, it was pretty touch and go. It’s one thing to think you understand what the right thing to do is. Actually doing it isn’t always as straightforward, or as noble, as it sounds.

“Rapunzel, this is my daughter, Rue,” Melisande said, once we had all shed tears for our own reasons and things had settled down. “Rue, this is Rapunzel, who is our hope.”

She looked at me then with those violet eyes. In them I could read absolutely nothing at all. When Rue looked at her mother, her eyes seemed vivid and alive. But when she looked at me, they were flat and dull. I recognized the look; it seemed I was not the only one who was afraid and unwilling to show it.

“Why?” she asked simply.

Well, that’s getting right to the point, I thought.

“Because I love her as I have loved no one else but you,” Melisande answered, as honestly as always. “I hope this love may help her break the curse that binds you.”

“She’s supposed to find the way to free me?” Rue asked, and all of us could hear the disbelief in her voice. “But why can’t you do it? I thought it would be you. You were the one who—”

I pulled in an audible breath and Rue broke off.

“I thought so too, for a time,” Melisande answered after a moment. “But when I saw Rapunzel, I began to see another way, and so I made room for her inside my heart, took her in, and raised her as my own.”

Rue’s eyes flickered to me, and then away. They definitely held emotion now.

“All this time,” she said. “She’s been with you the whole time we’ve been kept apart?”

“Not all of it,” Melisande answered, and I thought I could hear the effort she was making to keep her voice steady and calm. This meeting was hard on all of us. “Just the last sixteen years or so.”

“I’ve been trapped in this tower, waiting,” Rue continued, as if her mother hadn’t spoken. “And you’ve been trying to replace me. You’ve been loving someone else.”

“That’s not altogether true,” I said quietly. “Your mother loves me and I love her. That much is true enough. But she’s never tried to replace you. She’s never even let me call her mother. I think her heart is big enough to hold the both of us.”

“What do you know about it?” Rue flashed out. “I never asked for your opinion, in case you didn’t notice.

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