Choking On Sapphires

46 Fortuna

The house had started to change. Just small things, mainly the what adorned the walls he'd noticed. Beautiful depictions of powerful women from the Torah, Ruth in the hallway, Judith in your office, Lilith's appearing in your study to join the ones that he had noticed in your bedroom.

The morning after you'd told him your secret, you'd made the same announcement to the rest of the staff. Some were indifferent, mostly the ones that worked on your crops and bees for Abeille. But the house staff that he was now noticing was composed of almost entirely quiet younger women seemed thrilled with the news.

Agatha cried, but that made sense to him. If she'd been with you since childhood she knew all your family's dirty little secrets and he was betting this was a day she never thought would come. Claire was quiet, with her face as indifferent as usual. She seemed a bit more at ease, perhaps it was pride for your courage to finally defy your father.

He hadn't noticed how many of your staff were Jewish before this, the oldest ones already knew, he could tell by the subtle smiles. Some had come with you from your family's home would've surely seen and heard all the terrible things you'd gone through over the years. But the majority of your house staff, the young women were moved to tears by your admission and story and embraced you with soft words of how happy they were that you were more like them than they had thought. How had he not picked up on this before? It seemed you'd been harboring Jewish women, giving them a place to live, a job and safety, which he's seeing now as you trying to help others where you yourself hadn't been helped at that time in your life. You kept pulling back layers of yourself, and he kept being surprised each time, finding a more complicated woman each time. But it also revealed a stronger, more resilient and in this instance, a much kinder woman than he'd known previously. And that nagging thought that you were too good for him was more prominent in his mind than ever.

He'd not been his best at work today. He'd been an awful man to deal with, he knew that, entirely short-tempered and unfocused. He didn't want to go home on a Friday night for the first time since moving in. He knew what Friday nights usually entailed, and he knew what you would most likely be expecting of him, and his guilt sat heavy and sickening in his gut. He had no one to blame but himself for this situation and no one but himself could get him out of it.

This connection that had grown between the two of you from the start, now on the verge of evolving into something substantial that couldn't be ignored was something that he'd not thought possible for himself. Much like you, it seemed, the thought of being with someone, dare he say falling for someone in a life like his was something he'd written off years and years ago. But isn't that what his mother had told him? That if you weren't looking... that if you worked on bettering yourself the right person would find their way to you. He didn't know about being better than he had been but he most certainly hadn't been looking for whatever you two had found in each other when this began.

What would his mother say? He wondered as his eyes stared at nothing in particular, fingers moving mindlessly through his beard as he rested his elbows on his desk in his dusty office. She'd say he was being ungrateful. That God had bestowed a gift upon him and he should not shun it. He wasn't sure about all that, but he'd certainly dreamed of something like this when he'd been in the war. Drifting off in the trenches, caked in blood and shit and dirt and dreaming in those fleeting moment of peace about someone to fight for, to come home to. So many other men had already found that. But they hadn't made it. He had. And before the war penetrated his soul, making him calloused and hard in a way previously unknown to him, he'd been jealous of what those men had. Instead of a woman to make the fight stay alive in him, he'd fought to stay alive for himself. He hadn't wanted to become another body thrown in a ditch and forgotten like all the boys he had helped bury. All the boys on the other side he'd killed that had been left in unmarked graves. He'd gotten out for himself, and now on the other side of hell, he'd not really expected much out of life for himself. Certainly hadn't expected to find someone like you.