TL *Humaning the Best She Can*’s Reviews > The Pursuit Of... > Status Update

“What are friends for, if not to urge you on in the commission of crimes required by all men of moral character?”

Hopefully they are all okay. John's family :(

I have a guess or two what the terrible smelling and tasting cheese 🧀 may be.

Haha, nice job Henry 👏 I could feel Nohn rolling his eyes as that chapter ended.
Wonder if he'll continue the lie be used to save John afterwards 😂.
Join in John please lol.

Wouldn't mind having Henry and John as friends.
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Not much reading time yesterday, hopefully get more today, crossing fingers!

It was frigid outside the barn. The stables and the two wings of the inn made a little open-sided courtyard. The moon was a slim, silver crescent overhead, providing just enough light for him to make out a stone well in the center of that space. There were stars overhead, twinkling with a faint, mocking light.

Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. Stretching for ideals like those, well… They just made him forget that at the end of the day, he didn’t know where his sister was. If she was well. If she was alive. There was no room for ideals in his life. There was no room for anything except fighting. Surviving.

Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. God, what he would have given for his family to have been born with the recognized right to just one of those. It hurt, having this pretty man—this treacherous liar—mouth sentiments that he’d yearned for before in the darkness of night. He wanted to reach out and lay hold of the man, to claim those lies for the truth he yearned for.

It had never bothered John that he liked looking at pretty men, no matter what churchgoers said. If he’d let the world around him decide what he ought to think of himself, he’d still be enslaved in South Carolina. Lizzie, the sister he’d raised, would be twenty-three and beautiful alongside him in slavery—if he were lucky—and sold somewhere else if he were not.

They’d crept through the ditch and were approaching the final defenses of Redoubt Ten—a wall of sharp stakes, somewhat battered. A group of fools ahead of him was negotiating how best to storm the parapet. John held back. Apparently, the idiot in command of this maneuver wanted to lead the charge. Sutton, one of the other black men assigned to storm the redoubt, was hoisting him up.

In the end, all battles were smoke and shit and death, and John’s only goal was to see the other side of this war without being forcibly acquainted with the Grim Reaper. Fight. Survive. Go home to his family. The most basic of needs.