As I Lay Dying

Forty

1 year later

1920

Evelyn

It's been the coldest June on record, yet this morning the sun tentatively peeked out from her cloaked gloom to cast her weak rays upon the gardens.

I saw Harry in the dim light before before dawn, pacing under the oak tree. It didn't surprise me, I had almost thought to go there myself.

I watched him, his lean body pacing up and down under the tree before I slowly replaced the sash.

My second wedding.

The marriage that should have been my first will be my last. I should be happy... I am happy... And yet fear of what must happen tonight thuds inside me. During the past year Harry has courted me as though we had only recently met. He has not so much as kissed nor laid a hand on me, as though we hadn't already had a child together, as though my naked body was unknown to him. He has courted me as though I was new to him.

I can't let him down tonight. I can't. He gave up his voyage to America for me. It must be fates last bitter joke on me, to finally get what I longed for so dearly and be afraid to take it.

"Ma'am?" My maid smiles at me, holding a towel and soaps. "Are you nervous Ma'am?"

"Yes. I am Kitty, I suppose all brides to be are."

"I'll say so. My sister almost ran away from the church! My Da had to nearly drag her inside!" Kitty chuckles and continues to talk. I barely listen to her happy chatter.

My mother will not attend the wedding. She won't even speak to me, or my father. Father finally displayed some courage and ignored the gleeful gossip and headlines in the local papers to back me in my choice marriage, although it shocked him deeply to find that Harry was my choice.

Harry. The child, boy, man, who has been part of me for so long that I no longer know where I end and he begins. But we are so different now. Sometimes I force it, I try to force myself to be Evie of old, I try to laugh happily and be carefree and spontaneous, just to please him, but I am pitifully pathetic in my attempts.

He has changed too. He's sad, brooding. He can disappear for hours on end, on long walks that I am not invited to join him on. We marry today as shadows of what we once were and my heart aches that perhaps we will never be the same.

Last night a traitorous question came to me in the hollows of night. Why are doing this?

But the answer came at once.

Because I love him. Broken, ruined and changed he may be, but I love him with such depth and passion that it almost scares me. It's no longer the memory of him that I love, it's the man in front of me, scarred and wounded, but more beautiful than he's ever been to me.

Last winter we sat and talked all night in his little cottage and I asked him why he loved me still. He smiled sadly and said that life can inflict all manner of harm on a person, but love isn't true if it cannot weather the storms.

But I bring a terrible secret to our marriage. In our childhood, secrets could never have existed between us, now I carry one, one which I will never tell. Harry will never know the truth about Adeline and Robert. I understand enough of Harry to know that what Robert did to our daughter would crush him, ruin him. Harry asks me about her so often and knowing that Robert took the thing that he wanted most in the world would be too much for him.

It's a terrible thing to carry alone. But for Harry's sake, I will carry the awful, choking darkness of it within me. It is mine alone too bear. He has suffered enough.