But these changes were radical.
Her effortless compassion toward even the lowest foot soldiers gained Ella loyalty across the continent. It took little work, in the end, to convince our North American infantrymen and -women to take orders from Juliette Ferrars; they moved quickly when I bade them to do so on her behalf.
Their superiors, however, have proven an altogether different struggle.
Even so, Ella doesn’t see yet just how much power she wields, or how significantly her point of view changes the lives of so many. She refuses herself, as a result, any claim to credit; attributing her decisions to what she calls “a basic grasp of human decency.” I tell her, over and over again, how rare it is to find any among us who’ve retained such decency. Even fewer remain who can look beyond their own struggles long enough to bear witness to the suffering of others; fewer still, who would do anything about it.
That Juliette Ferrars is incapable of seeing herself as an exception is part of what makes her extraordinary.
I take a deep, steadying breath as I hold her, still studying the house in the distance. I hear the muted sound of laughter, the bustle of movement. A door opens somewhere, then slams shut, unleashing sound and clamor, voices growing louder.
“Where do you want these chairs?” I hear someone shout, the proceeding answer too quiet to be intelligible.
Emotional tremors continue to wreck me.
They are setting up for our wedding, I realize.
In our house.
“No,” Ella whispers against my chest. “It’s not true. You deserve every good thing in the world, Aaron. I love you more every single day, and I didn’t even think that was possible.”
This declaration nearly kills me.
Ella pulls back to look me in the eye, now fighting tears, and I can hardly look at her for fear I might do the same.
“You never complain when I want to eat every meal with everyone. You never complain when we spend hours in the Q in the evening. You never complain about sleeping on the floor of our hospital room, which you’ve done every single night for the last fourteen nights. But I know you. I know it must be killing you.” She takes a sharp breath, and suddenly she can’t meet my eyes.
“You need quiet,” she says. “You need space, and privacy. I want you to know that I know that—that I see you. I appreciate everything you do for me, and I see it, I see it every single time you sacrifice your comfort for mine. But I want to take care of you, too. I want to give you peace. I want to give you a home. With me.”
There’s a terrifying heat behind my eyes, a feeling I force myself always to kill at all costs, and which today I am unable to defeat entirely. It’s too much; I feel too full; I am too many things. I look away and take a sharp breath, but my exhalation is unsteady, my body unsteady, my heart wild.
Ella looks up, slowly at first, her expression softening at the sight of my face.
I wonder what she sees in me then. I wonder whether she’s able to see right through me even now, and then I surprise myself for wondering. Ella is the only one who’s ever bothered to wonder whether I’m more than I appear.
Still, I can only shake my head, not trusting myself to speak.
Ella experiences a sharp stab of fear in the intervening silence, and bites her lip before asking: “Was I wrong? Do you hate it?”
“Hate it?” I break away from her entirely at that, finding my voice only as a strange panic seizes me, making it hard for me to breathe. “Ella, I don’t . . . I’ve done nothing to deserve you. The way you make me feel—the things you say to me— It’s terrifying. I keep thinking the world will realize, any second now, how completely unworthy I am. I keep waiting for something horrible to happen, something to reset the scales and return me to hell, where I belong, and then all of this will just disappear. You’ll just disappear. God, just thinking about it—”
Ella is shaking her head. “You and I— Aaron, people like us think good things will disappear because that’s how it’s always been. Good things have never lasted in our lives; happiness has never lasted. And somehow we can only expect what we’ve experienced.”
I’m sustaining full-blown anxiety now, my traitorous body shutting down, and Ella takes my hands, anchoring me.
I look into her eyes even as my heart races.
“But do you know what I’ve realized?” she says. “I’ve realized that we have the power to break these cycles. We can choose happiness for ourselves and for each other, and if we do it often enough, it’ll become our new normal, displacing the past. Happiness will stop feeling strange if we see it every day.”