The Girl Underground

Chapter 17: Her Spirits Unrelenting

Chapter 17: Her Spirits Unrelenting

There is no worse a terror and torment for a powerful man than the breaking of his own home. Those were the words John's father always told him and his brothers when they were growing up. John used those words in his everyday life, always ensuring the welfare of his family over his own. For the longest time, he thought he was doing right by them.

That was until he realized that he was still capable of loving another. That there was still some love left in him, perhaps the only love. Maybe he never did love Abigail, but cared for her as a husband did a wife. He followed his father's words to a perfect tee, as if they were forever marked in his bones. He lived and breathed those words, and willed his home to never break. They became him.

That was why when he found the one thing that could break his home; he realized that it was not an evil, but a freedom. Those words bound him into dutiful servitude, and Malia was his saving grace. He loved her with no reservations, without any outside or verbal force. It was natural, it was real. It came from his heart.

So her reaction to his confession had shattered his heart, and those words came back to his mind. He was breaking his home for this girl, the only real thing in his life. He found himself mulling a lot over them, trying to figure out what his father had really meant. Words were words, of course, but when spoken or written down, they had a myriad of different meanings. The sequence of putting them together to convey feeling breathed life into them, and mankind would go mad interpreting everything they could mean.

Of course, these words meant exactly what they did. Powerful men fell when their homes did. When their families broke apart, it broke them. There was no other meaning to it. Yet, even though he knew that, John wasn't so stricken so as to quit the one thing breaking his home. He couldn't.

Sighing, John sat up in his bed and turned to watch Abigail sleep. Even at rest, she looked like she had an agenda. What was she dreaming about? What could be bothering her?

An unfaithful husband who is treating her like a suspect, perhaps?

Deputy Cromwell was still poking around, and she had yet not relented. John still wondered why she had not said anything to him about it. Knowing Abigail, she would have since had a thing or two to say about what was going on, but her silence slightly off put him. As long as he had known her, silence wasn't her outlet of choice. Still, he wouldn't ask her about it. Perhaps she was waiting for him to, and he knew better than to fall into that trap. He had been married to her long enough to know...

Well, everything. And yet how could he not love this woman, his own wife? The mother of his two beautiful children? Their marriage was always a turbulent one, the farthest thing from happy, with never a dull moment, but it was a strong union. Who knew that all it took was one woman with a spirit unrelenting to cause him to stray?

Malia... That girl was his weakness. Everyone thought he wasn't capable of having one, but then she came out of nowhere, as if she had been hiding from him all these years. She was the one thing in this world that was capable of breaking him. And that was wrong. It shouldn't have been her. It should have been Abigail. It still could be.

But did he want it to be?

Sighing, John threw the covers back and stood to his feet, running a hand over his face. This case coupled with what was going on with Malia was driving him mad. He needed some fresh air to clear his mind.

He threw on his robe and walked out of his and Abigail's room, striding down the hall with a brusque pace and taking the stairs down to the foyer. He didn't leave from the main doors, though, he never did. There was a garden door he made use of instead, in the greenhouse that led outside into the rose patch, and it made little ruckus when opened and closed.