His Realm

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Tom could guess why Ben wanted to see him, and he was proved right once they were sitting in the parlour once more, both drinking only water as they had decisions to make later.

“I wanted to speak to you about Ana,” was Ben’s opening gambit.

“I’ve been monitoring her via the spyware we put on her phone, she hasn’t spoken to anyone about us. The people watching her say she’s moody but she’s coping. She isn’t a threat.”

“I know. I was thinking more of your personal relationship with her.”

Tom sighed. This was exactly what he was hoping to avoid.

“My personal life has no bearing on the organisation.”

“No, but it has a bearing on you.”

Tom opened his mouth to reply but Ben cut him off.

“Please, just hear me out, that’s all I ask.”

Tom considered him for a moment, then decided that this would be over faster if he just acquiesced.

“I believe you met my late wife, Margaret, on two occasions, did you not?”

Tom nodded that had, but he had been too young for her to really make an impact on him. He remembered she was pretty, elegant and graceful. She reminded him of Princess Grace in her manner and style, if not in her looks.

“As you probably know, I adored her, and I was devastated when she died. What you probably do not know, is that she betrayed me early on in our marriage.”

Tom was shocked by that and it showed in his expression.

“I met her while she was still at school,” Ben continued. “She was 16, I was 20, and I was all she had ever known. With the women’s liberation movement, birth control becoming available, she began to feel as if she had missed out on something, and then we discovered that we couldn’t have children. She became very restless. Two years after that fateful fertility diagnosis, she came to me in floods of tears and confessed that she had got drunk and slept with someone else.”

Tom tried not to let too much surprised show. “What did you do?”

“What would any man do? I left, walked out on her. My pride was wounded, which I think was actually more important to me than my hurt feelings.” He said with a wry smile.

“But you got back together?” Tom prompted, interested to hear the rest.

“Eventually. It took several months for her to talk me around but eventually I decided to try again, if only so that she could finally see for herself that it was over, that our relationship was dead, only a funny thing happened. Her mistake actually made her appreciate me and what we had more. She had spent all that time feeling as if she was missing out on something and when she realised that different isn’t necessarily better, she stopped chaffing at the bit and realised what she risked losing.

“Of course, I in my anger nearly drove her away again but luckily, before I pushed her too far away, I had to travel to Japan to broker a deal there. The gentleman I was meeting with served me tea in a repaired teapot, the cracks having been filled in with gold resin. I asked why he didn’t just buy a new one, of course, and he explained the concept of kintsugi. They believe that when something is broken and repaired, it becomes stronger and more valuable, as signs of damage reflect the use of an object. The repairs are made using gold to highlight the damage as they believe it adds to an objects beauty.

“Suddenly I realised that everything my wife had been saying, about realising her mistake and never taking me for granted again, was true and if I could only find a way to forgive her, we might even emerge stronger for it, appreciating our marriage and each other all the more because it was almost lost to us.”