Page 45 of The Secrets We Left Behind
“I’m one of the only other people alive, other than the Germans, who knows what truly happened that day. Me, you, Addy and Peter. You were part of it, and we witnessed it. So when I tell you that I understand, that I know you deserve to live, you can believe that I mean it. From the bottom of my heart.”
She watched as he swallowed, pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead, between his eyebrows, as he shuddered for a long moment, before looking back up at her and placing his hand where it had been before. Her fingers found their way straight back to him, like they’d never left.
“I want you to know that I’ll turn myself in, if it ever comes to that,” he finally said. “I will never let any harm come to you and your sister. If we’re found, I’ll say that I forced you, that you had no choice. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.”
She smiled, about to tell him he didn’t have to do that, but she saw in his eyes that he needed to. He was a man desperate to right a wrong, and in the end, she knew that she’d do whatever she had to in order to save herself and her sister, too.
“Thank you.”
Elise knew it was long past the point where she should have withdrawn her hand from his, but it was nice touching him. After a long moment, she forced herself to sit back and take her hand away.
“Tell me, if you were at home, who would you be with and what would you be doing?”
Elise was pleased she’d asked, because his face changed then, his smile making his eyes crinkle at the corners.
“I’d be sitting with my mother, probably. She’d have fed me up on a hearty rabbit stew because she’d tell me I looked too skinny, and we would have had pudding.”
“Pudding?” Elise asked.
Harry laughed. “Dessert. Most likely a warm bread and butter pudding.”
She could see it in her mind; him curled up in a comfy chair while his mother fussed over him and brought him as much food as she could. “What about the rest of your family?”
His eyebrows dropped a little then, dragging together as he started to speak. “My father was a miner, a coal miner, just like his father before that, and both of them died down there,” he said. “It left my mother with three daughters and a son to raise on her own.”
“How did she get by?” Elise asked, nursing her warm mug as she watched him, fascinated to hear more.
“I should have left school and started mining when I was fourteen, but my mother, well, she’s one heck of a lady. She made me stay until I was sixteen, wanted me to get an education, and she worked herself to the bone to make sure we didn’t want for anything.”
“Fourteen? That’s so young to start doing hard labor like that,” Elise mused. “Is that normal?”
“Boys I went to school with, they all started at fourteen,” he said. “Two of them were dead before the end of their first year.”
“Dead?” Elise gasped. “How? Why?”
“They send you down to collect tubs of coal with a pony all harnessed up for the job. And you just keep taking the full tubs up, and taking the old tubs down. But it’s nasty down there,” he said.“Accidents happen all the time, and not just to the boys, to the older men, too. I think my poor ma spent most of her life scrubbing her husband’s skin and his clothes clean, and then eventually she was doing the same for me.”
“She sounds like a good woman,” Elise said. “It must have been hard for her to keep food on the table.”
Harry’s eyes were shut, as if he were lost in the memory of home. “War seemed like an easy option to me. Being a soldier sounded far better than coal.”
She didn’t need to ask if he’d been right. After what he’d been through, seeing nearly everyone in his regiment killed, she bet he’d have rather faced coal-mining for the rest of his life.
“Do you have a sweetheart waiting for you back home?” she asked.
His eyes opened then, slowly. “No. Well, there was someone, but I didn’t love her enough to ask her to wait.” She went to say something but he laughed and stopped her. “Sorry, that makes me sound terribly heartless. What I meant was that I didn’t want her waiting for me, because I thought she deserved better than me, someone who loved her. We had a lot of fun, but when it came down to it, I didn’t want to ask her to marry me.”
“I understand,” she said. “Truly, I do.”
“You’ve had the same thing happen to you?”
She smiled. “No, not the same. But I never wanted to marry for marriage’s sake, if that makes sense? I would rather be alone than promised to someone I didn’t love.”
It was strange how easy the silence between them was as they sat sipping their coffee, lost in thought, until Harry finally spoke again.
“And you? Tell me, what would be different for you if we weren’t at war?”
Elise lifted her gaze, studying him and trying to find the right words to reply. “If the war had never begun, my house would be full of family. My brother would be here, although he wouldn’t actually be here because he’d no doubt have snuck into a pretty woman’s bedroom, knowing him.” She laughed, remembering him and for once not feeling so sad. “And my mother would still be alive, but maybe not my father.”
