The Traitor's Stain (wattys 2019)

Chapter Forty-Four: Setauket, Long Island

For months, Ophelia had drifted through her life in a haze left by her husband. She'd felt helpless while he was on the Jersey, and she'd felt like someone had ripped her heart out of her chest when Caleb told her that he was dead. She'd felt so lost for so long, she never thought that she'd be able to get out of that darkness, again.

For the first time since she received that letter saying that Noah had been captured - since she'd watched him row across Long Island Sound with Ben and a few other likeminded men, never realizing that would be the last time she would see him - she had a sense of purpose. She no longer felt hopeless in helping her husband. In getting through the war unscathed. The hardest of truths had finally sunk in. There was nothing she could do for Noah. Frankly, there probably hadn't been much she could do for him while he was alive, either. And now, the fact that there'd never been much of a chance for her to get through that revolution unscathed had finally set in. Noah had assured her that if she did everything in her power to remain neutral, she would be alright. She finally saw that none of that had mattered, in the end. She'd been forced to quarter two different soldiers against her will, anyway.

Wars, as it turned out, were a lot like hurricanes. They didn't care what they destroyed: if it was in their path, they ripped it up, tore it apart. Without a care of the pain and suffering that would come with it.

That war, for Ophelia, shared one more similarity with a hurricane: through the darkness, and the tempest, in the middle of raging winds, was a single moment of clarity. Of stillness, of uneasy peace.

She was involved in that war, whether she wanted to be or not. She might as well stand up and fight. For herself. For Constance. For Noah.

She wouldn't let him die in vain.

Once that finally settled into her, clarity returned. Suddenly, she had a purpose, again. A purpose that reached beyond simply surviving. Ophelia - and everyone else in the network - was going to put an end to all of this pain, all this suffering. They were going to bring freedom, so Constance, her children, and her children's children would never know any of this.

The people around Setauket seemed pleased by Ophelia's transformation. Happy to see that she was starting to return to her old self. Nobody would dare say this out loud, but there was something very uncomfortable about seeing somebody in mourning. Even if one hardly knew them It was a reminder that death was always just around the corner. That it would come for them at any moment, just as it had come to everyone else who'd ever walked the face of the planet. People didn't want that reminder; they wanted to continue living as if they were immortal, as if death would never come for them or anybody else they cared about. As Ophelia slowly became herself, things in Setauket were able to go back to the way they'd been, before.

Of course, what nobody in town could see was that she wasn't back to herself. At least, she wasn't the person she'd been, before. The woman that had felt so lost and hopeless without her husband, the woman who didn't have power over her own life, had died. A new woman had taken her place. One that was finally ready to fight.

There was one person who seemed to notice the change in her. More than Anna, Selah, or even Abraham.

"Do you need anything else, Miss Ophelia?" Beth asked after she'd finished cleaning the kitchen, that night. The last thing she normally did before retiring for the night.

Ophelia shook her head. She was working on the ledgers, searching for anything that might clue them in on what the British were planning in Setauket. If they were planning anything. "That's all, thank you."

She looked down, thinking that Beth would go to her home to relax for the rest of the night. However, she didn't. She stayed there, looking as if she still had something she needed to say.