Wish's tutorings ended up illuminating some of the strangest of my dreams and a lot of the peculiar events that had happened to me along the way in life; these things had been like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, strewn about at random in my life---and with Wish's help, a lot of those pieces finally began to fit together, and the beginnings of a coherent image of things began to form. She warned me that I might never be able to see the whole picture clearly, but at least I was beginning to make some sense of what was going on.

In the end, I could no more deny the connection between us than I could voluntarily stop breathing on a permanent basis; like Wish, I came to believe in the existence of that past life with her, and Tommy, and the Professor...or more properly, the people they'd all been in that particular lifetime. These things, and the all-too-obvious chemistry between us, led me to the conclusion that we were, indeed, soul mates in the fullest sense of the word; Wish and Tommy were soul mates in the sibling sense, just as they'd said---but Wish and I were soul mates in the deepest, husband-and-wife/lovers sense of the term.

According to Wish, subsequent past-life regressions had brought out the existence of more than a dozen other lifetimes in which the four of us had all been together in some close apsect; it seemed that we were all fated to be together in some manner, moving on from one lifetime to the next, being separated by death and the machinations of Nicodemus Castevet and his ilk, and still finding one another all over again each time we reincarnated in the physical world. For all of us - but for Wish and me in particular - it appeared that any separation...even death...would be a temporary matter at worst.

It would be charming and romantic to say that we fell in love with one another all over again while she read her journal to me, but that would be a gross inaccuracy: We were already in love with one another, and we had been for more than a thousand years, if Wish and the Professor had the time periods of each of Wish's documented past lives right. We didn't so much fall in love all over again as resume the love that was already there, waiting to be taken up yet again in its journey across the ages.

Because of all this, it seemed inevitable that I'd take the next step...and I did, finally; mostly because it was "the thing to do" in those liberated times. I asked her to move in with me after my temp duty with the tour was over.

To my embarrassment - and considerable pain - she laughed and turned me down. But when she saw the hurt in me, she hastened to soften the rejection by telling me, "Don't you get it, silly man? We've been married in one lifetime after another for century after century; with a history like that, the only thing I can accept is to be married to you in this lifetime, too!"

I'd read about people's hearts leaping in their breasts, and all that, but that was the first time I was ever aware of it actually happening to me. I swallowed, slowly and deliberately, then reached into my pocket and pulled out the little jewelry box I'd had hidden there.

As I opened it, I told her, "This is what I wanted to do to begin with, but I wasn't sure how you'd react---so I decided to try the living-together idea first. If that went okay, then I was going to give you this."

Her eyes widened at the sight of the ring inside. She gasped, "Rain!"

I removed the ring and held it out to her; the diamond on it was a five-carat sparkler. "My great-grandfather gave this to my great-grandmother when they became engaged, back in the nineteenth century. He'd just struck it rich with a silver mine in Montana, and he was feeling really ostentatious at the time. It's been handed down through my family ever since, from father to first-married son; I called Mom a couple of days ago and asked her to FedEx it out to me, just in case. So---" I took a deep breath, "Will you?"

She smiled; it was such a radiant thing that it left me feeling half-blinded. But I had no trouble whatsoever hearing her when she said, "Yes! Of course I'll marry you!"

She threw herself on me and gave me a kiss that left me cross-eyed and winded---and in no condition whatsoever to complain about the condition she'd just left me in.

When we could both see straight again, she held her left hand out, fingers spread to present the ring finger; the hand was shaking, but her smile was as steady and sure as anything I'd ever seen. The ring slipped onto her finger as if it'd been made for it; there was no need for re-sizing. We planned the wedding for September, right between Tommy's and the Professor's birthdays.