He Said Losing My Emotions Was Better, Then He Begged Me to Feel Again novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Luncheon

Miranda tells the founding families Orson lied; Odile calls it a mercy; the keeper says only a true choice at the next full moon can undo it.

The founding families eat lunch at the Draper house every Sunday after the Choosing, and I walked in at noon without knocking.

The dining room has a table long enough for twenty.

Twelve people sat at it, in good clothes, with their napkins in their laps.

They all stopped talking at once.

Orson came in behind me with his shirt still damp from the porch.

Odile Draper sat at the head in a grey dress and her gloves.

She looked at me and smiled, and the smile was kind.

"Miranda, dear," she said. "Sit. There's a place for you. I told them you'd come."

"You told them?"

"Of course. You'll want something hot to eat. It will taste perfectly good, you know. I haven't had a bad meal in thirty years."

I stayed on my feet.

"Is that what happened to you?" I said. "The same thing?"

The room went still.

"I was chosen at the Stone, as you were," Odile said. "My husband did what was needed for the house, and I was spared. I have never had a bad day since. I call it a mercy."

She said it without pride and without any trouble.

Her fork lay beside her plate, clean.

She had not eaten a bite of what she'd been served.

"A mercy," a woman near the middle echoed, and nodded.

"Better numb than a scene," said another, a thin woman in green. "We've all seen girls make scenes at that Stone, Miranda. Better this."

"Better for who?" I said.

"For everybody."

I looked down the table.

Most of them were looking at their plates.

"Orson chose me last night in front of all of you," I said. "Some of you stood close enough to hear what he said after."

Nobody answered.

"He told me he doesn't love me. He told me it was a seat and a signature. He said I'd lost nothing worth having."

"Miranda," Orson said behind me, very low.

"That's what the Moon heard, and that's why it took what it took."

I turned my head toward Orson.

"He was right about one thing. I'm not even angry. I'd like to be. I'd like to throw this table out the window."

"Then perhaps it's better," said the woman in green, "that you can't."

"I can't," I agreed. "And I'm going to say what I'd never have dared to say with a feeling in my body."

I looked at the thin woman.

"You've smiled at this table for thirty years. Not one of you has asked why Odile's face never changes when she laughs."

The woman's mouth closed.

Odile folded her hands.

"That's an unkind thing to say, dear," she said.

"It's true."

"Which doesn't make it kind."

I did not look away.

At the end of the table, somebody set down a glass too hard.

Orson made a sound.

I turned, and he had a hand on the back of a chair, folded forward over it.

He was crying again, in front of all of them.

It was not loud.

It was the soundless kind that shakes the shoulders, and I knew exactly what it was.

I had said something true and cold in front of twelve people.

The shaking I should have felt, saying it, had arrived in him instead.

"Orson," Odile said. "Go and wash your face."

"No."

He said it hoarsely.

It was the first time I'd heard anyone tell her that.

She looked at him for a moment, and nothing moved in her face.

Then she picked up her water glass.

"We'll finish this another time," she said, to the table.

I left.

I went down the front steps and across the gravel with my hands in my coat pockets.

A voice stopped me at the gate.

"Miss Clendenin."

The keeper of the Stone hall stood at the fence in a brown coat.

He is an old man who has kept the Choosing ledger since before I was born.

He had walked out of the hall to meet me, and he was out of breath.

"You can undo it," he said. "That's what I came to tell you. I should have said it last night, and I wasn't brave enough."

"Undo it how?"

"The Moon gives back what it holds when a choice is true. At the Stone. On a full moon night."

"Then he'll just choose me again."

"He can try."

The old man looked back at the house.

"One try per moon. And if the choice rings false a second time, Miss Clendenin, the Moon keeps what it took. For good."

"When is the next full moon?"

"Twenty-nine days."

Orson had come out onto the steps.

He stood there with his arms hanging and his face wet, looking down at me.

I did not feel afraid.

I did not feel hopeful.

I looked at the man who had lied to me and who now carried all of what I should have felt about it.

"Twenty-nine days," I said. "Then he'd better learn to tell the truth."

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