As if you would understand the extent of her broken heart. Her soul bled in mourning over the one she lost to the chilling, dead waters of the North Atlantic. For months she lived like this, helpless and lost, a woman wandering a city full of people, a city full of reminders of the one she lost—the American man.
Every painter she saw while wandering through Central Park reminded her of him, those smooth strokes his hand made when he drew. Every night she would look up and sigh, for she was unable to see the stars that had shown that very night, the night she lost him.
Even when the time came for her child to be born, she mourned and cried every single night for him, staying up past midnight. Every night she had dreams, nightmares of escaping the lower levels of the Titanic, the hallways filled with freezing sea water. But in all those dreams they were together, the last few hours of his life playing over and over again in her sleep.
She had known him for only a few days, ever since the night when she had almost jumped off the ship. She'd gotten over the railing, thinking that no one really loved her, that even her mother was truly heartless, just like her fiancé, and what a monster he was. But this new man was there, a man who would take her on more adventures in just a few days’ time than she would have ever done in her lifetime.
Eventually she found a husband, a man she could at least trust. She loved him and had a child with him, but he was nothing like the one she met on the ship, her first and only true love.
Every day her husband brought a rose, a single, elegant, crimson-red rose from the flower shop a block away. When he came home every evening he would kiss her forehead and place the stem, wrapped in a handkerchief, in her hand. But she would not be the placid wife and put it in water to preserve it—every night after he was asleep, she went to the porch and threw the rose into the wind.
Her husband never found out about the precious item she kept hidden in the back of the closet. She never even touched it until he died in World War II and she moved out of the apartment, her children all grown up and married and with their own children on the way.
She lived alone for years, becoming older and older until she was nearly a century old, one of the last of the living survivors from the ship of long ago. Her granddaughter was with her then, beautiful and young, so much like her grandfather, the one on the ship, the one who lay frozen at the bottom of the ocean.
How shocked she had been when the news came on talking about scientists searching the Titanic wreck and finding the drawing of a beautiful woman—her! She had called them right away, almost a hundred and one years old, and told them it was her. Then she got to go to the research ship.
She saw the picture and nodded, staring at the young woman posing for the artist. All those years, lying miles beneath the waves, immense pressure beating at the side of the safe. So skilled the artist's hand had been, how realistically he had drawn her.
She told the scientists her story, captivating them, telling of emotions so big that any minute someone could've broken out crying. But none did. it was the first time her granddaughter had heard, for she had never told anyone about him—ever.
Her heart almost broke all over again when they told her that there was no record of him on the ship. Anyone who knew him, anyone who saw him there, or at least knew his name, was dead, whether they died there, on that night, or had survived and passed on later.
That night, on the research vessel, she walked outside to the side of the ship. She stood on the lowest rail, leaned over, looked down, and extended her arm. And she dropped it, the one thing that the scientists had been looking for, the necklace that was meant to be a wedding gift, the one thing that Rose believed belonged to Jack now, miles beneath the waves, living forever on in her heart.
The End.