☆ ᴡᴀᴛᴛʏꜱ 2024 SHORTLISTER!! ☆
A tragic misunderstanding. A murder. A secret. An unlikely partnership. A spirited countess and an enterprising racketeer.
~~~
Manchester, England. May 1925.
The Roarin' 20s. An era of glamor, decadent parties, jazz mus...
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꧁ The Diary of Rose Sinclair ꧂
༺ 15th of May, 1925 ༻
Few things in the grand scheme of the universe are viewed as cliché as is a broken heart. It's physiologically impossible, after all. A heart cannot break. It's an organ made of soft tissue and blood vessels. A heart beats. It can speed up, slow down, clog, tighten, and even stop. But it cannot break.
So, why is it that the inside of one's chest aches in such agony when a loved one is lost?
It was a year ago today that I lost August. Two weeks before our wedding, he was taken from me. Gunned down. Murdered. Because his family is Jewish.
Despite my persistence, I never did learn the names of those who committed the heinous crime. The police did not go out of their way to find the assailants. “Gangs,” they said. As if that one word were both an explanation for violence in general and a viable excuse for their avoidance. “Lots of gangs around here. And lots of people hate Jews.”
I don't understand that way of thinking. So limited. So ignorant. Why hate someone simply because their beliefs differ from your own? It's disgraceful. Unforgivable.
I won't insult the memory of August with ugly thoughts of revenge or hatred. I will stay true to my course. No, I will never be Lady Rose Appelbaum, but I will preserve the person my fiancé loved.
The day we laid August to rest, I put my engagement ring on a chain around my neck. It rests beneath my clothing, against my heart. There it shall stay.
Life is short, fleeting, and precious. The pain of heartbreak reminds me that I am still alive. And as long as I continue to live, so too will his memory.
Rose
꧁ ༺ ~ ~ ~ ༻ ꧂
Rose closed the cover of her diary just as her cousin Daphne burst through the front door of the flat.
“Please tell me why I thought it would be a good idea to work for the local newspaper,” Daphne pleaded, a look of exhaustion on her fine-featured face. She kicked off her high-heeled shoes and wiggled the toes of her stockinged feet. “Do I enjoy punishment? Or perhaps simply think I deserve it?”
Rose smiled. She knew these questions were asked in rhetoric, as her ambitious cousin posed some version of them on an almost daily basis. “What horrible infraction have you committed lately?” she asked.
“It must have been something loathsome I did in a past life,” Daphne said. With a dramatic sigh, she collapsed on the sofa next to Rose. “Murder, adultery, theft...one of the old favorites.”
“Don't let our very Protestant mothers hear you say something so blasphemous,” Rose teased. Daphne's mother, the elder sister of Rose's mother, was known for being pious to an unhealthy degree.
