Page 28 of A Lesson In Beginning

“See? If you can’t understand it after two years, how am I supposed to figure it out?” I put my head in my hands for a moment, sighing with exasperation. “Beyond that, I need to build up my work history, so that I might find another position later that is more suited to me.”

“Do you have any idea what you might want to do?”

“No… not really.” My fingers tugged at my braid, playing with the end nervously.

“Something tells me you aren’t being entirely honest, either with me or with yourself.” Her brow quirked up with a teasing smirk. She could see right through me.

“It’s silly, really —” I attempted to push past her gentle prodding, but she immediately gave me a look that told me it would not be so easy. Rolling my eyes, I took a deep breath and answered her truthfully. “I guess, if it were a different time, and I were a different person, maybe I would want to open up a bakery.”

My fingers fiddled with the ends of my plaited hair, noting the way the tips were starting to split — honestly, just distracting myself from the fact that I had just admitted such a ridiculous notion aloud.

“A bakery!? Adah, that’s an amazing idea! Why on Earth would you be embarrassed to admit that?” Her eyes lit up with a delighted excitement I had not been expecting.

“Because it is ridiculous. I cannot open a bakery.” My derisive scoff did little to cover my discomfort or the slight humiliation I inflicted on myself.

“It’s not ridiculous. There is no reason you couldn’t do it. Plus, the boys have been absolutely raving about your goodies at The Temple. In fact, Enzo hasn’t shut up about them!” She playfully smacked my arm and I blushed under the unsolicited praise.

“Enzo? Who is Enzo?” I asked, attempting to change the subject away from myself.

“Oh, he’s a friend of Zeke and I’s. He’s a hoot, let me tell you.”

“What’s it like?”

“What’s what like?” She asked, her brow furrowed in confusion.

“Making new friends. You all seem to do it so easily, and I feel… I don’t know, disconnected. It’s not simple for me.”

“I don’t know about that. From what I’ve been hearing, you seem to have made yourself quite the friend in the good doctor in the kitchen lately.” Her eyebrows waggled suggestively, and I felt the heated blush rush over my cheeks, much to my chagrin.

“Oh, no. Joel is my boss — er, well, not my boss. A coworker, I suppose? Nothing more.” I quickly rejected her observations, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. Her eyes narrowed, and she grinned mischievously, seeing right through my false dispute.

“Yeah, sure — coworkers.” She winked at me, and I hung my head in my hands with a mortified groan of disapproval.

“Talia, I promise you, Joel is my coworker, and nothing more. There has been nothing untoward between us. I’m a married woman!” I whispered the last statement, slightly horrified she would think me capable of such a thing.

“But you aren’t, Adah.”

Her words hit me with brute force, nearly knocking the wind out of me with the severity of her proclamation.

“But I am, Talia.”

She reached across the sofa, tugging my arm away from my hair, where I was fiddling with the ends with an erratic, nervous energy.

“Adah, you are not married. You signed the divorce papers, and they were immediately approved. You are no longer married.” She said it kindly, but that did little to soften the harrowing sting of pain her words caused.

“In the eyes of the law, I suppose you are right; I am no longer legally married. But in the eyes of God, am I not still the wife of Josiah Price?” Tears pricked painfully just behind my eyelids, threatening to spring forth and flow down my cheeks at any moment. Blinking rapidly, I forbade them from spilling out, unwilling to allow myself such a moment of weakness in front of her.

Her hand moved over my own, threading her fingers between mine until she was grasping my hand in a comforting grip that only worsened the threat of tears from falling.

“Adah, do you truly feel that way? That in the eyes of God, you are forever bound to a man who treated you with such cruelty?” Her brow creased with concern and a tinge of pity that I immediately despised and spurned, but I could not escape the reality of her question.

“My marriage was ordained by God. Who am I to cut it down and cast it aside?”

“Your marriage was arranged by a group of mad, power-hungry men using the name of God in the worst form of vanity that exists. They used religion to justify their wickedness, committing crimes in His name. Do you believe their crimes, their kidnapping of children, was justified in the eyes of God?” Her pointed question caught me off guard, and before I could think about it for more than a mere second, I answered.

“Of course not!” The very idea was absurd, that trafficking children could ever be seen as the work of God… it was preposterous; blasphemous!

She tugged my hand closer to her, our fingers still intertwined as she spoke passionately. “Then what makes you think your marriage, contrived by the same evil men in the same evil world they had created, had anything to do with God’s work?”

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