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Time had never been linear in Hester’s mind. Of course she knew objectively that the years went by in due course, knew it better than most with a career spent keeping the war office’s diary in order. But outside of her secretarial duties, time never stopped being dichotomous as merely before and after.
Before, there had been neither Tom nor Hester. During, there had been Tom and Hester. And then came after, where there was only Hester.
There was only one facet of life that remained continuous throughout the before and the after; Diana. Who Hester had first taught piano to and had returned the favour tenfold, by teaching her how to curl her hair and darn her socks. Who had led Hester to the love of her life, and when they’d lost him, had refused to lose Hester too. After a few years as pen pals, she’d followed Hester to London as soon as she came of age and shortly found herself with a young viscount’s ring on her finger. Hester felt like she had barely blinked between teaching a girl of ten her major scales, to being handed a newborn to the tune of “Aunt Hester, I’d like you to meet Thomas”.
Hester was a firm believer in the importance of names. It was why she’d put so much thought into choosing her own. And her nephew turned out to be the perfect aptronym, as he grew into the spitting image of the man whose name he carried. Blond hair and enormous brown eyes, and delicate hands that would shyly reach out for Hester’s when she arrived for their fortnightly dinners.
A sister would follow a couple of years later: Delilah, after her grandmother. The woman who had never quite understood this queer man? woman? that her son had brought home, but had welcomed her with open arms even so. Hester was almost glad when she passed before the second war began so she didn’t have to live through that same hell again. Thomas and Delilah had both been young enough to be evacuated at the onset of war and Diana had gone with them; Hester considered it a blessing to not fear for their safety on the home front. And when the Blitz ended and they all returned to London, family dinners resumed and Hester felt complete again.
But as the years crept by and Thomas’ eighteenth birthday crept closer, Hester felt like she was back in the before again. Existing in a content, fragile purgatory. Waiting for a telegram that would end life as she knew it.
It wasn’t long after Sicily’s conclusion that it came. She’d been preparing to leave for the office when her commute had been interrupted by Diana’s unexpected presence at her door, so utterly inconsolable that it had taken several minutes before Hester could extract the truth from her. The notice in Diana’s hand had borne the news in stark letters; Thomas was being called to the front.
“Please, Hester,” Diana had sobbed, gripping onto Hester’s hand. “You work in the war office, surely you can stop this? I can’t lose him again.”
And Hester had tried. Her sense of honour hadn’t allowed her to plead with the Colonel, knowing she couldn’t abuse her position to get one boy an exemption when there were thousands more preparing to serve their country. But she’d examined his every medical record in search of an extenuating condition, tried desperately to switch his conscription to the coal mines to no avail. And to rub salt in the wound, Thomas had spent every dinner since then regaling her excitedly with tales of his pilot training. Hester couldn’t bring herself to dampen his spirits. She could only hold Diana’s hand below the table and pray that they wouldn’t lose another soul too kind for the horrors of war.
His aircraft carrier had sailed for the Mediterranean 9 months later. Barely more than a week after the bombings had nearly taken Jean from her. She’d held herself together as the admiralty announced it at the morning briefing but found herself unable to curb her tears as soon as she was dismissed from the boardroom. Locked in the safety of her office, she allowed herself 10 minutes to cry before the war demanded her presence again.
“Ah, Hester!” Monty greeted her as she brought their customary morning tea down to the basement. Charles looked up from his desk with a smile, and Jean…
Jean’s desk was empty. Jean was still almost bed bound, fighting off the last clutches of infection from the bomb that had nearly killed her. A horrible reminder with Thomas’ departure of how much she had to lose.
“Are you alright, old girl? It’s not like you to be late, we’d been wondering what became of you.”
She bristled at first, considering asking why he hadn’t fetched his own tea if her minor delay was of such inconvenience. But then his gaze met hers as she passed him his mug; despite the jovial tone he’d welcomed her with, there was a faint look of worry on his face. Hester thought he somewhat resembled a concerned puppy as he regarded her with his head tilted sideways.
After considering for a moment, she pulled her chair over to the desk. “Mr Montagu, Mr Cholmondeley. I must ask you both for a personal favour,” she started. Clearly her exit from the boardroom had been less collected than she’d thought, as Monty immediately took his feet off the desk without even the hint of a joke. “Do you recall the carrier that was announced to have launched this morning?”
Monty hummed, glancing down at his clipboard. Hester was amazed he could decipher any information from the sheet of annotated scrawl and boat drawings. “800 Naval Air Squadron operating from the HMS Emperor?” he asked eventually.
“Yes, that’s correct,” Hester sighed. “Please forgive my lapse in professionalism, but I must ask if you could both keep an additional eye on that squadron over the course of their operation. My sister-in-law’s son is aboard.”
“Of course we can,” Charles said, looking at her in wide-eyed earnest. Realistically Hester knew there was nothing he or anyone could do to guarantee his safe return, but the sentiment was touching nonetheless.
True to their word, every morning there would be an additional report from either Monty or Charles before they left for the naval briefing. Sometimes as simple as a thumbs up that they had all landed safely, sometimes a hurried whisper that a plane had been ditched but the pilot had been safely recovered. As the days passed and the end of the operation drew closer, the iron grip of fear slowly began to release its hold on her chest. The Fleet Air Arm were spectacular chaps, Jean reminded her on the daily once she was well enough to return to the office. There wasn’t much that would stop them from coming home safe and sound.
She was in John’s office finishing up a transcript when the knock sounded. Monty’s head appeared around the door before John had called for him to enter, ignoring the office’s owner in favour of crouching down by Hester’s chair. “Does the name Clements mean anything to you?”
Hester felt her blood run cold. She opened her mouth, but no sound came.
Clearly sensing her answer, Monty continued in a soft yet serious tone. “His plane went down into the sea during landing approach. No one’s sure if he managed to bail out of the cockpit before impact, he was the last pilot airborne so no one got an aerial view of the incident.”
He paused to take Hester’s hand from where it rested upon her knee. “They’re not giving up on him yet, old girl. They’ve got all the destroyers combing the area for him. And he was close enough to shore that he might wash up there. We might have good news by morning,” he urged her. The furrow in his brow told her otherwise.
Silence followed his report. She almost startled when John’s hand appeared on her shoulder, the usually comforting weight somehow suffocating her. “Shall we go home?” he asked her, his voice impossibly gentle.
His words pulled her from her shock. “No,” she said, brushing off both Monty and John’s comforts to hurry for her bag and coat. “I need to be with my sister. She needs to hear it from me.” The telegram wouldn’t come until the morning; Hester couldn’t let her wait in ignorance for that long. Diana would never forgive her if she found out Hester had already known.
She looked back at John as she lingered in the doorway, suddenly looking very small from behind his desk. “I’d rather sleep in the guest room tonight,” she said quietly, not caring that Monty was still crouched by her empty chair.
John nodded; Hester turned and left.
For three days, Hester’s hopes remained undeterred. People were often surprised that someone so strait-laced could be so superstitious. But when Tom had been lost, she had known it with such certainty that she had fainted from the shock. No such feeling had come over her since Thomas had been reported missing in action. In its absence, she remained steadfastly convinced.
A tiny voice in her mind whispered that this was her fault. That she had become complacent, too assured by the final days of the operation that since no planes had gone down yet they would surely all return home. Just like what had happened the first time. After almost two years of consistent letters, the thought stopped occurring that they could cease in an instant.
She knew that John thought her in denial. He had been tiptoeing around their townhouse apartment like a mouse, clearly wary of saying anything wrong until they received further news from the aircraft carrier. For the sake of both of their comforts she remained in the guest room; it wasn’t an unusual arrangement, as they had both come together as fiercely independent people with decades’ experience of having their own space. John was a light sleeper at the best of times, and Hester was barely sleeping as each day’s worries crashed over her as soon as she closed her eyes. It wouldn’t do for them both to be exhausted.
It seemed like the entire office knew that something was awry too. She’d refused John’s offer to stay home from a few days, needing the familiarity of her work to get her through the days. The typing pool’s giggles sounded more muffled from behind her office door, seemingly afraid to be caught in a moment of joy while their matriarch was suffering. Monty and Charles would give her a solemn nod or a thin-lipped smile if they caught her lost in her thoughts. Jean had barely left her side, as if she thought that Hester might fall apart the second that someone wasn’t watching her. She was grateful for the distraction, even if the lack of solitude became a little draining by the end of the day.
As had become the norm, Jean’s chair was pulled up close to Hester’s at the basement desk when thundering footsteps sounded on the staircase above. The door opened to Charles tripping over his feet in haste and staggering across the room to save himself from falling. Monty was far more nimble, making a determined beeline towards where Hester had moved to keep Charles upright.
“We’ve just had word,” he panted, bracing himself on his knees. Hester kept her arms outstretched even after Charles was back on his feet, half expecting Monty to collapse from his sprint down the stairs. “From the HMS Emperor. They’ve got him.”
Hester blinked. For the moment she thought she had gone back in time a year, to the last time she’d been waiting for a body to wash up on the Mediterranean shore. “What?” she answered weakly.
Monty waved a hand at Charles to continue. “The port city of Toulon has just surrendered to the French Army,” Charles started, his gaze flickering back and forth to ensure Monty was still standing. “It seems that your nephew had swum ashore in the naval port, as he’d been held captive there by the Germans until their surrender. He’s unhurt, Hester.”
“Oh,” was all Hester could manage. All the blood seemed to have drained from her face.
“They offered to bring him home but he’s insisted he stay with his squadron. Sounds like your sister’s raised a stalwart young chap. He’ll have either got a hero’s welcome or a terrific bollocking – Hester? You’re looking very peaky all of a sudden.”
Relief seemed to have come in the form of every shred of tension in her body giving way. Monty’s words echoed oddly as if they were in a tunnel. Her vision greyed at the edges when she dragged her gaze up to meet his, the look on his face one of abject horror that Hester couldn’t quite make sense of.
“Ma?” asked Jean, quiet with trepidation.
Hester didn’t realise she was swaying until she felt someone seize her elbow, and Jean’s voice quickened. “She needs to sit down, one of you find her a chair.”
Clearly the requested chair failed to materialise, as Hester felt herself being lowered to the floor with her back against the desk. She was vaguely aware of her head lolling sideways, of voices shrill with urgency and heavy footsteps on the stone floor. “I’m fine, I just – I just need a minute,” she tried to insist, the words slurring together.
“You’re not,” Jean told her firmly. Hester tried to look at her, but the room felt as though it was spinning. “Just sit there, alright? Don’t do anything. Me an’ Monty are both here with you.”
She gave a faint nod, her breath coming in shallow gasps. Small hands clasped around her own and she held on weakly. Nausea curdled in her stomach, and she wondered in alarm if she was going to be sick.
The footsteps returned, though Hester couldn’t muster up the energy to react. She heard Charles’ nervous stammer but couldn’t work out who was with him, until she felt a hand brush her cheek. “John,” she breathed out, her eyes still closed.
There was a rustling sound before something warm was draped over her shoulders, a blissful reprieve from the freezing cold. “What happened?” John demanded in a hushed tone.
“I haven’t a clue, Johnny. We told her that they’d recovered her nephew safely and she just went a horrible colour. Poor girl’s run herself into the ground I think.”
“Is she alright, sir? Is there anything we can do?”
Jean sounded so afraid that Hester forced her eyes open, a quiet groan escaping from the back of her throat as she was hit with another wave of dizziness. Immediately she felt John’s hand on her forehead and relaxed into his touch.
“She’s in shock,” John answered. “Thank you for fetching me, Cholmondeley. I’m going to take her home for the rest of the day.”
Hester tutted aloud. Some of the fog had cleared from her mind after being sat down for a few minutes, leaving her with a deep burning embarrassment that she’d caused such a scene. “That’s a ridiculous idea. I’m just fine John, cup of tea and I’ll be right as rain,” she said, attempting to brush them off and stand up.
She was met with Jean and John’s hand on each shoulder, gently pushing her to sit back down. “You’re not well. You’ve finished work today and I won’t hear another word on it,” John murmured, his voice far too soft for where they were. Hester was glad that any flush to her cheeks could be explained away by her collapse.
“Take a good thing when it’s offered, Hester love,” Monty urged, crouching down beside her. “You’re the only person in this building who wouldn’t jump at the chance for a half day if the work allowed it. We’ll be just fine.”
She found herself giving an exhausted nod before she’d fully realised. “You need to tell Diana,” she suddenly gasped out, gripping the nearest person’s hand in desperation. A vision of her sister-in-law sat torturing herself in the absence of news flitted across her mind.
“I plan on telephoning her as soon as soon as you and the Colonel have gone,” Charles promised, awkwardly patting Hester’s hand. Staring pleadingly into his face, Hester was struck by how calm he seemed in the face of her intensity. But then she remembered a different underground, of coaxing him through panic while they sheltered from the planes beneath Soho’s streets. This level of anxiety was a norm for him; perhaps it was no surprise that he’d been so adept at providing the reassurance she needed.
John and Charles slowly and carefully lifted her to her feet, her head feeling heavier than lead while her limbs were cotton light. John’s jacket around her shoulders was replaced with her coat while Jean and Monty collected her personal effects into her bag. All Hester could do was look on helplessly. There was something so wrong about watching her colleagues – the young’uns, as John had taken to referring to the three of them – fussing about on her behalf, when normally it was her helping them whenever they stumbled. It made her hands shake in a way that wasn’t entirely physiological.
She had just taken John’s elbow to guide her out of the basement when Jean stepped suddenly in front of them, every inch a deer in the headlights. “You’ll, uhm… you’ll look after my Ma, won’t you?” she demanded fiercely after a moment’s hesitation, drawing herself up to her full height.
Hester’s instinct was to intervene, to apologise to the Colonel on Jean’s behalf and send her back to work. But to her utter surprise, he lifted his hand in a sharp salute and solemn promise. “You have my word, Miss Leslie.”
The drive home passed by in exhausted quiet. Hester rested her forehead against the window, offering half-hearted answers to John’s occasional query. They’d seen each other through the worst years of the war together; she trusted him not to take it personally.
Once the car was parked, John was opening the car door for her before Hester’s shaking hands could even fumble for the seatbelt clip. “You can go back to work now,” she said, somewhat reluctantly, as she stepped out of the car and forced herself not to lean on John’s proffered hand. “I’ll be fine, you don’t need to stay.”
Naturally that was when she stumbled, strong arms wrapped around her waist to keep her upright. “You’re not fine. I’m staying here with you,” John stated firmly, setting her back on her feet.
They were close that their noses were almost touching; what would the neighbours think, Hester fretted. “But the office needs you,” she protested weakly.
“You need me more.”
He let out a sigh when Hester refused to acquiesce. “Let me at least get you settled,” he bargained, leaving no room for disagreement. “Then, if you’re sure you’re alright, I’ll go back to the office. But I promise that staying will be no trouble.”
Hester just nodded, too tired to argue further. She let him help her up the few steps into their apartment, barely aware of her surroundings as she was guided through the hallway. The world started to tilt again as she sat on the edge of the bed, head in her hands, every energy reserve depleted by the journey from the office.
“Hester?”
She opened her eyes at the sound of her name, lifting her head to see John holding a tray with a cup of tea and plate of toast. Her stomach turned at the thought of food, a hand hovering over her mouth as she looked away. “You’re very kind but I don’t know if I can stomach that right now,” she muttered.
“You need to eat something. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you not having breakfast these past few days,” John pointed out, sitting beside her with the tray on his lap.
Something squeezed in Hester’s chest at the thought of such a thing not going unnoticed. “I’ll see if I can manage the tea,” she conceded, taking the cup in shaking hands.
John remained watching her closely as she sipped at the tea. Thinking of the care he’d gone to made her nibble at a slice of toast, rewarded by a look of contentment on his face. John took the tray back to the kitchen as she forced herself to change into her nightgown, unwilling even in her current state to dirty the bedsheets with her office clothes. Her entire body ached as she finally sank into the mattress.
She was just beginning to slip away when she heard her name called again. “What?” she croaked, uncharacteristically snappy.
John was empty handed this time, wringing his hands together in front of him as he stood in the doorway. “Oh – nothing, Hester, really. Just checking in,” he stumbled over his words, also deeply out of character.
Somewhere within her fogged mind, it dawned on her that he wasn’t hovering in the same way that some of her senior colleagues did. He wasn’t here to somehow micromanage her rest. He was here because he was worried.
“Oh,” Hester echoed, struggling to comprehend this new realisation. Another moment passed in pause before she managed to add “You can come in. I don’t mind.”
He nodded mutely, crossing the room to sit on the edge of the bed. Hester watched him curiously, slumped against the pillows with her fingers woven loosely over her stomach. “So,” he started, not looking at her, “Did you feel out of sorts this morning?”
Hester tried to cast her mind back to the morning. She’d not felt unwell per say, just the typical tiredness burgeoning behind her eyes and tugging at her limbs. “No,” she said, shaking her head.
John hummed. Hester was about to ask if he was alright, when he spoke again in a faraway voice. “You’re not feeling cold, are you?”
“Perhaps a little,” Hester murmured, lifting a shaking hand to her forehead. It wasn’t as bad as the chill she’d felt while down in the basement, but she still felt a little clammy by her own estimate.
There was no response. Hester looked on in growing concern as John stared listlessly ahead, giving no indication that he’d heard her reply. “John, is everything alright?” she asked, pushing herself upright with difficulty to take him by the hand.
He flinched away horribly as their fingers touched. It lasted for barely a moment before he blinked, but Hester was sure she’d seen undisguised alarm flicker across his expression. “Fine,” he rasped, nodding abruptly.
“Will you tell me what’s troubling you?” Hester prompted softly.
John shook his head, seeming to shrink in on himself before her very eyes. “I should be looking after you, not the other way around,” he muttered, running a hand over his face.
“I can hardly rest well when I know that you’re troubled,” Hester pointed out. She risked trying to cover his hand with hers again, concerned at how badly he was trembling beneath her fingers. “Please, tell me?”
He was quiet for another few moments. Then he turned his head towards her, and Hester wasn’t convinced whether he was seeing her or someone else entirely. “My fiancée. I lost her to the Spanish flu,” he whispered, his voice completely empty. “I saw you collapsed on the floor there and I thought… I thought…”
Hester’s heart ached for him. “John, I’m so terribly sorry,” she murmured, squeezing his hand a little tighter.
He nodded, eyes still glassy. Hester wondered if in his mind he was at a different bedside, holding another woman’s hand to keep away the cold. “Are you sure you’ve not felt unwell recently?” he repeated his earlier question, almost beseeching. “You’ve no tightness in your chest?”
“John, I promise you, I am fine,” Hester insisted, relieved to now understand the reasoning behind his questions. “It is too early in the year for seasonal influenza; I’m afraid I have merely driven myself to exhaustion. All I need is rest and then I’ll be as right as rain.”
She gave him a wan smile, but he didn’t return it. She’d found him in this state before, in his office after one of the earliest Blitz raids. He’d practically dragged Hester down behind the desk with him when she’d appeared with his morning tea, his face ashen and eyes unfocused as he muttered incomprehensibly about a war they’d long since lived through. All Hester could do was hold his pale hand and wait until she could bring him back to the present.
She wondered if Tom would have suffered the same, had he survived to see war take hold again.
That was what she did now, maintaining the pressure on his hand to give him something to anchor to. “Will you tell me about her?” Hester invited him softly, after a minute passed with no sign of him returning to her.
She wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do, to keep him thinking about what she guessed to be his own before. Because surely that was how it worked for everyone who had lost the person they thought they’d spend their life with. But with how lifeless he seemed, she found herself clutching at straws.
To her relief, a glimmer of recognition returned to John’s gaze as he started to speak. “Morwenna. Cornish lass, with the finest singing voice I’d ever heard. She served on the front lines as a nurse. Got knocked out by a mine and woke up to her singing beside my cot. Thought she was an angel.” A ghost of a smile graced his features; Hester thought he looked younger in that moment, the creases around his eyes softened by lingering love. “It turned into me trying to sneak into the medical tent at any opportunity to see her. Promised her that if we both made it home then I’d marry her.”
The thought of the Colonel sneaking around behind his superior’s backs to grasp another moment with his sweetheart was almost inconceivable. It would take a truly enigmatic soul to make the John she knew do such a thing. But then again, perhaps whatever he was yet to tell her would explain why the man before her seemed so far removed from the story he was telling.
“I kept my word; proposed as soon as the armistice was signed. She had no intention of returning to Cornwall so moved straight into the family home. And then…” He trailed off, swallowed hard.
“And then influenza came,” Hester finished for him sadly. She’d still been working as an auxiliary hospital nurse at the time of the epidemic, had witnessed several of her friends become stricken from caring for their patients. It was easy to imagine that Morwenna as a nurse would have suffered the same fate.
John gave a dull nod. “She laughed at me for worrying, was convinced that she was fine. I went out for a half hour and returned to find her almost gone. The doctor said she drowned in her own blood… it was everywhere.”
Even though Hester had known what was coming, to hear the raw grief in his voice was devastating. “John, I –”
Her breath caught in her throat with the worst imaginable timing. Her hand flew to her mouth as she coughed harshly, head pounding with every convulse of her chest. John’s head shot up to stare at her through panicked eyes, gripping her arms in sheer terror. “Hester?” he begged, holding onto her with a painful intensity. “Hester, please!”
“John! John, I’m alright,” Hester wheezed as soon as she’d caught her breath. Risking impropriety, she took his hand and held it over her sternum. “Do you feel that?” she asked. “My heart is beating, and my chest is clear. Look at me. I’m alright.”
Gradually his shallow breaths slowed, fear loosening its grip on him until his shoulders slumped with a sigh. “Hester I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me,” he said shakily, taking his hand back to tug at his tie.
“Don’t apologise for hurting,” Hester said softly. She hesitated a moment, unsure how her olive branch would be received. “I know how it is, to relive the past like that. It’s how I’ve felt, waiting for the news these last days.”
Her confession hung in the air as John fought for composure. When he eventually looked at her, there was a saddened, understanding smile on his face. “Your nephew, hmm?” he asked, an invitation to exchange roles.
Hester nodded. “Thomas – or Pilot Officer T. A. Clements to you, I suppose. Named after my Tom.” Her throat threatened to tighten as she spoke his name but she forced herself to breathe evenly, aware that it would be far harder to bring John back to the present a second time. “Diana, my sister-in-law, was barely twelve years old when we learned he wasn’t coming home. So when Thomas went missing it felt like we were losing Tom all over again.”
“Makes sense,” John said. Anyone else might have thought it a callous response, but Hester knew him better than that. “How, uhm, how did you meet him?”
“I met Diana first, actually. I was her piano tutor before the war started, which is how Tom and I became friends. And then when I was forced out of my home, their mother insisted that I stay with them as long as I needed. When Tom proposed to me it all just seemed perfect.” She smiled tearfully, still able to remember that day as clear as yesterday.
“Nothing perfect ever lasted during those days.”
Hester blinked at John’s bitter reply. In her minds eye, the smiling boy on one knee had gone, replaced by the dirtied bag that was all they could recover of him. Hester’s own handwritten letters returned to her. “No,” she muttered, leaning back against the pillows as exhaustion crashed over her. “No, it did not.”
Silence passed for a few minutes. Hester’s eyes slipped closed, though she remained aware of John’s weight shifting on the mattress by her knees. Then, out of nowhere:
“Perhaps this could, though.”
John’s face was red when Hester looked at him. When Hester had first invited him to dinner he had looked deeply and endearingly shocked; he wore the same expression now, as if the words had left his mouth unbidden. “I – ahem – I mean. Perhaps you and I, uhm, I mean. Perhaps we might face a little more fortune this time round.”
Hester’s gaze softened at the sweet, stammering man before her. In some ways he and Tom couldn’t be more different; Tom had been tall and gangly, as if he had never quite grown into his height in his twenty short years. Never once had he raised his voice, a soul far too gentle for the horrors of war. John, however, had a sturdiness to his frame despite being several inches shorter than her. Behind the brash exterior was a man who felt deeply and cared twice as much. Who bore the weight of ten thousand soldiers on his back and refused to let himself or anyone else forget it.
Hesitantly, he held out his upturned hand to her. Hester reached out and took it.
Truth be told, despite her forwardness in asking him to dinner, Hester felt out of her depth. She hadn’t engaged in a romance such as this since losing Tom; she’d exchanged occasional passions with women like herself who she’d met in Berlin, but that had felt different. Then she’d felt emboldened by her new physique, drunken on euphoria and the safety of a shared identity. Now, while still just as satisfied with said physique, she felt shyer than a schoolgirl whenever their hands brushed together.
A smile tugged at the corner of her lip as she recalled telling John that she was transsexual before they first shared a bed. He’d looked somewhat affronted as he’d answered with “What’s that got to do with me?”
Her suggestive, slow glance downwards had made his cheeks burn magenta.
As if able to read her mind, John cleared his throat gruffly. “I should leave you to get some rest,” he excused himself, struggling to loosen his tie even further.
“Oh,” Hester said, crestfallen. “I had rather enjoyed having you here.”
John paused just beyond her reach, his hand still outstretched where her fingers had slipped from his. “Oh. I had just assumed, since you’d been so adamant I returned to work this afternoon.”
Hester shook her head. She understood his hesitation, considering her insistence on sleeping alone the last few nights. But now, her emotions rubbed raw by the conversation, the idea of being left with her thoughts seemed unbearable.
She averted her eyes politely as John changed into a sleep shirt and joined her beneath the duvet. He sighed as he leaned back against the pillows, opening his arms for her to rest her head upon his chest. They stayed there quietly for several minutes, the tremor that still clung to Hester’s hands eased more by his presence than any modern remedy.
“Do you think they’d be happy for us?” John’s voice rumbled in his chest as he voiced the exact question that had been on Hester’s mind.
It was easy to answer from her perspective. ‘All I could ever want is for you to be happy’, Tom had once said, when she’d first confessed that she wasn’t the boy he’d known her to be. She had no such image to draw upon when she thought of Morwenna. But her mind supplied that of a young woman with gold hair, and a smile brighter than the sun as she passed a baton to Hester.
“I do.”