Hello! Rest assured I haven't abandoned these oneshots, I've just been busy with work and it turns out I don't have the time to write a ficlet/drabble a day like I thought I would. So while I'll keep updating until I've done all 30 chapters, they won't be as frequent as I'd like them to be.
"Do you miss him?" asks Lorenzo, one afternoon, when the sun is high and bright in the cloudless sky. "Your father, I mean."
Jessica stills, pulling her hand away from his. Her first instinct is to lie, to deny she has any love for her father; instead, she asks, "Wherefore do you ask? I have not spoken of him in almost a year."
He reaches for her, gentle, an unspoken whisper of please do not push me away hidden in there somewhere. "I wondered. Surely, you must. I would miss mine, too."
"What would you have me confess to you?" she asks, unable to stop the bitterness seeping into her tone. "That I do miss him? That your gentile wife is still part Jew? That she holds onto that part of herself still, without any shame?"
'Tis Lorenzo's turn to still. His brows furrow in confusion. "That is not what I meant," he says slowly. "I just –" He stops, thinking over his next words. "If you wanted to speak with him, to see him … I would not object to it."
Her eyes widen in surprise – and hope, too, she thinks. "You would not?" she asks. "Verily?"
"He is your father," he says, as if 'tis all that simple. Then he grasps for something else, another thought he has kept to himself since Antonio's trial. "I wish we had done this properly." His tone is apologetic, eyes soft with regret. "I wish I had met your father, asked his permission …"
"He would have said no," Jessica reminds him, not unkindly. "He would have said no, and turned you away, forbade us from seeing each other …" She takes his hand again. "He would have had me married before the Sabbath arrived, Lorenzo. What we did was the only thing we could have done."
"I would have done anything," he assures her, lowering his voice to say his next words. "Converted, even."
His confession stuns Jessica into silence – and himself, too. Is what he said true? Would he have converted for her? Abandoned the very men who saved him and gave him a home, to run away with a Jewish girl?
He does not know the answer to that. He does not know what he would have done, had the roles been reversed. Perhaps he would not have had the courage to run away, not really.
Or perhaps he would have.
"I love you," he says, quietly, almost shyly, like the first time he said it to her.
"I know," she replies. She does not understand why he is saying it, why now … but she knows all the same.
"Every part of you," he adds, almost frantic to reassure her. "Even the parts that are still Jewish. Especially those parts, because …" He fumbles with his words for a moment. "They are you. I do not want a good Christian wife, even if that is what you have to pretend to be. I want you."
And 'tis those words that make her stumble, stop her in her tracks, and she stares at him, completely dumbfounded … and she understands. The reckless decision she made little over a year ago suddenly does not feel so reckless; it feels right, as though she was supposed to go with Lorenzo, as though it was the right thing to do all along, despite how wrong it felt in those immediate days after, once the adrenaline had left her.
"I will write to my father tomorrow," she promises, although whether she is making the promise to herself or to her husband she knows not.
All she knows is that by the end of the week she may have a father, and her father may have a daughter, found.