Chapter Thirty-Eight Aletta
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Aletta
Aletta walked slowly up the stairs, a bag of groceries in each hand.
The first few times she’d barely been able to take more than half a dozen steps without pausing, her body exhausted from the incline and her lungs heaving for air, but today she’d only had to pause twice, which seemed like a small miracle.
She still felt as if she were panting, but after four weeks back at home, she was beginning to feel a little more like her old self.
The colour had come back to her cheeks, and she was slowly but surely putting weight on her bones, although she still had to summon all her strength to walk through the door to their apartment without seeing those last moments with her father.
The physical wounds, she knew, would heal much faster than the evils that haunted her mind.
She caught her mother sometimes in the middle of the night, when she couldn’t sleep either, scrubbing the carpet for the hundredth time where Aletta’s father had been killed.
There was no stain of blood that Aletta could see, not anymore, but still her mother cleaned it, as if doing so might erase the memory of what had happened there.
And every single time, Aletta would drop to her knees and join her, until her fingers ached and her mother’s silent tears had stopped.
They’d both go back to bed then, often curled side by side, and eventually fall into an exhausted sleep.
They’d been crammed together at Ravensbrück for so many nights, over so long, that it almost felt impossible to sleep without the comfort of another body pressed to her side, and she knew her mother felt the same.
Even though they were no longer cold or terrified of what might happen, it was still hard to be alone, especially when nightmares would wake them, leaving them both drenched in sweat and gasping at the thought of being back there.
When she finally stepped through the door, Aletta was lost in her thoughts, but she glanced up when she heard her mother clear her throat.
‘I was able to get a fresh loaf of bread and a piece of beef today, so it—’
‘Aletta.’ The tone of her mother’s voice made her look up, but it was the man sitting at their kitchen table who made her stop moving. The last time her mother had said her name like that . . .
‘We have a guest.’
It can’t be.
Aletta’s breath caught and the shopping bags slipped from her fingers as the man pushed back his chair and rose. She couldn’t tear her eyes from his face, and when his gaze met hers, as he stood by her table and blinked at her, tears filling his beautiful blue eyes, a cry lodged in her throat.
‘Harry?’ She finally said his name as a question, frozen as she stared at him.
‘Hello Aletta.’
No. It can’t be.
Harry. It can’t be my Harry.
But it is.
‘Harry!’ she cried this time, racing across the room so fast she barely felt the carpet beneath her feet and throwing herself into his arms. ‘Oh my gosh, Harry, I can’t believe it.’
His arms closed around her, his lips against her hair as she wound her own arms around his waist. He was too thin, just as she was, but his embrace was as warm as it had always been, and the way his lips brushed her forehead before he pulled away was exactly as she’d remembered.
She ignored the sharp angles of his bones beneath his clothes, feeling as if she’d almost knocked him off his feet with her excitement, but Harry didn’t seem to mind one bit.
‘How, I mean . . .’ She didn’t even know what she was trying to say as he held her at arm’s length, his eyes seeming to rove over every inch of her. ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t.’
‘I’m here,’ he said, his voice raspier than she remembered. ‘That’s all that matters.’
He was right, of course he was right, and she knew that whatever he’d been through in the time they’d been parted, he likely didn’t want to talk about it, just as she didn’t want to talk about where they’d been and the horrors they’d endured.
She stepped into him again, lifting her hand and placing it on his cheek.
She forgot that her mother was watching them, or maybe it was just something she wasn’t worried about any longer, not after what they’d been through together.
Happiness wasn’t something she would hide ever again.
‘I can’t believe you’re alive,’ she whispered, wishing his cheek wasn’t so gaunt beneath her fingertips. ‘I can’t believe either of us is alive.’
‘You’re the only thing that kept me going, Aletta,’ he said, folding her into his chest again, his arms warm around her shoulders as his lips whispered against her hair. ‘I kept telling myself that we’d see each other again. That one day, I’d find you.’
Aletta blinked away tears, holding on tight to the man she’d never expected to see again, to the man she’d loved for so long. She closed her eyes and felt his body against hers, heard footsteps as her mother walked away and murmured something about privacy, listened to the steady beat of his heart.
Harry didn’t speak again until she pulled back enough to look up at him, and he gently touched his lips to hers in a kiss that she felt all the way to her toes, one she’d imagined in her mind every day since they’d been parted.
‘I’m not going to let anyone or anything part us again, Aletta,’ he whispered against her mouth.
Words failed her, and so she raised herself on tiptoe and kissed him, her arms looping around his neck, their smiles the only thing interrupting what would have otherwise been a perfect kiss.
‘Now we just have to convince your mother to let me stay,’ he said, making her laugh. ‘I kind of went out on a limb here when I made my way back to Amsterdam, and I have nowhere else to go.’
‘You’re staying,’ she said, holding him tight and swallowing away fresh emotion as she savoured the feeling of being in his arms. ‘I’m not letting you out of my sight ever again.’