Stone Vows (A Stone Brothers Novel)

by Samantha Christy

  Chapter Fifty-one

  I fall to my knees in the dirt, heartbroken to see the remnants of my flower garden scattered all over the backyard. Roots have been pulled out of the ground. Stems bent or snapped in two. Buds and bulbs plucked from their stems and scattered about. It’s been completely destroyed.

  Who would do such a thing?

  My first instinct is to call the police. But then I remember my husband is the police, so I guess I’ll just tell him when he gets home. Maybe he can file a vandalism report. I’m not supposed to bother him at work. Not unless it’s an emergency. And he wouldn’t consider this one of those. My flower garden meant nothing to him. In fact, I think he hated it. In some way, I think he was even jealous of it.

  Oh, God.

  I quickly make my way to the gate in our privacy fence. The one that is always locked. Padlocked. I find it secure. Either someone scaled the six-foot fence, or . . .

  I look around the yard for clues. There are none. I go back into the house and make my way to the garage. What could he have used? I look at my gardening tools. The hedge clippers. The trowels. None of them would have produced the destructive results that litter what was once my pride and joy of a backyard. It’s one of the only things that was truly mine and not his. It’s how I found peace. Solace. And now it’s gone. Beaten down and ripped to shreds—just like I am.

  Defeated, I turn to head back into the house, but then I catch a glimpse of something and stop in my tracks. It’s his golf bag. The very thing that allows him peace and solace every Saturday morning while I sit at home by myself. I pick up the largest club and pull it out of the bag, examining the clumps of dirt on the club face. Then I look on the ground next to the golf bag and see a mangled petal of my favorite flower.

  He didn’t even have the decency to cover up his crime.

  I race inside the house, wanting nothing more than retaliation. I go into his study—the room I’m not allowed in. I eye his boxing trophies on the shelf above his desk. The ones that are his pride and joy. I pull the biggest one down and throw it on the floor, gaining instant satisfaction from hearing it crack and shatter.

  My satisfaction doesn’t last long, however, when I realize what I’ve done.

  For the second time today, I fall to my knees. This time to pick up the pieces of his prized trophy. One he likes to show off almost as much as he likes to show off me. That’s what I feel like when he parades me around in front of everyone—his trophy.

  I sit on the floor with my back to the wall, holding his broken relic in my hands. What have I done?

  I look at the clock. He’ll be home in an hour. I don’t have time to try and replace it. I don’t even have time to go to the store to get anything to fix it.

  I rifle through his desk drawers, hoping to find superglue. The drawers I’m forbidden to go through, in the desk I’m not supposed to sit at, in the office I’m never allowed to enter. I’m violating so many rules today that my face starts to ache just thinking about what he might do to it.

  I do find some superglue. But not before I find a bunch of other things I wasn’t supposed to see. Small baggies of what I can only assume are drugs. Rolled-up bills secured by a rubber band. There must be hundreds of dollars here—maybe thousands.

  I contemplate taking one or two bills to add to my collection in the lining of my purse. But then I think better of it. He could have it here to test me. To see if I’m snooping. To see if I’d steal from him. To give himself more reason to ‘remind me of the rules.’ I put the money back exactly the way I found it.

  Then I find something you’d think would be the most disturbing of it all, but, oddly, it’s not. I find letters written to him from a woman. Love letters. With pictures inside. Naked pictures. Of her. Of them.

  My heart races. Not in fear or worry, but in pure unadulterated relief. He’s with another woman. He’ll want to leave me for her. I close my eyes and say a prayer of thanks. But then I notice the date on one of the letters. It was written over a year ago. I page through all of them, looking at more dates. They range from a few years back to as recently as two weeks ago. I drop the letters onto the desk as if they have burned me.

  He’s not going to leave me.

  I put the letters back, careful to arrange them as they were. Then I take the superglue and the trophy into the kitchen and get to work.

  Thirty minutes later, having done a meticulous job to get it back to original condition, there are still some tiny cracks that one could see if they closely examined it. But it’s up on a shelf. How often does he really sit and stare at the thing?

  I just get it back on the shelf when I hear the door to the garage open. My heart beating wildly, I quickly put the superglue back in the drawer where I found it and take one last look around the office to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

  I make it out to the hallway, just as he’s rounding the corner.

  “What are you doing, Alexa?” he asks, looking at me suspiciously.

  “I was just coming from our bedroom,” I answer, hoping my lie is convincing. “I was reading in bed and had fallen asleep. Time got away from me, I guess. I’m going to go out back and clean up the yard before dinner.”

  Neither of us bother to mention the condition of said yard. He knows I know he did it. I know he knows there is nothing I can do about it. Same dance, different day. He takes something I love and destroys it. He doesn’t want me to have anything that I love more than him.

  But what he doesn’t know is that I love everything more than him. Sometimes I think I’d even love death more than I love him. But every time I consider it, I think of my little brother. I swore to myself that one day I’d make my way back to him. I can’t make him bury his sister—his only living relative whom he cares about.

  Grant watches me as I pass by him and walk through the kitchen to the garage where I get a rake and some trash bags. He’s still standing in the hallway when I come back through. I look at him and paste on a smile as I pass. “Would you mind ordering pizza for us tonight? This might take me while.”

  He reaches a hand up to cradle my chin, leaning down to place a kiss on my lips. Lips that want to spit at him; spew words of hate at him. Lips that want to tell him I’m walking out that door and never coming back. But I hold down the bile rising in my throat and let him kiss me. Just like I always do. And later, I’ll lie underneath him and let him have his way with me. Just like I always do. Because I know what happens if I don’t follow the rules.

  “Sure, I can do that. I’ll even get it with pepperoni,” he says. “I know it’s your favorite.”

  I smile at him before I walk out the back door.

  I despise pepperoni and he knows it.

  Thirty minutes later, I’m being flung across the yard onto my back with a thud that I know will have my body aching for a week.

  He’s hovering over me holding his prized trophy. “What the fuck did you do?” he yells at me.

  “I just—”

  “Shut up!” he yells, grabbing me by one of my arms and dragging me back into the house.

  He’s dragging me into the house so the neighbors won’t hear. That means he’s about to yell at me some more. He’s about to hurt me. And he’s not about to let the neighbors think he’s anything less than an upstanding police officer. One who they can always count on. One whose wife is the perfect little housewife.

  He slams the door behind us and he shoves me into the corner of the kitchen. “What the fuck were you doing in my office? Did you really think I wouldn’t know? I’m a fucking cop, Alexa. A damn good one. I know you moved my trophy.”

  “I w-was upset about the g-garden,” I stutter through my tears. “My f-first instinct was to go after something you love, too. I’m sorry.” I try to shrink into the corner.

  “And you thought that gave you the right to go in my office?” he yells, pacing the floor. “A place you are forbidden from going? Because of your stupid flower garden?”

  “It’s not stupid to me, Gran
t. It means something to me.”

  “It’s a fucking flower garden!” he shouts, waving his trophy around.

  Then, I watch in horror as a piece of the trophy comes apart right where I had glued it. His eyes bulge and the vein in his temple pulsates in anger as he runs his finger across the break, obviously feeling or seeing the glue. He examines it further and pulls on it, causing it to separate in all the places I’d fixed it.

  He throws it across the room, shattering what remained of it against the wall next to my head. “You broke my goddamn trophy? You selfish little bitch!”

  He walks over to the broken pieces, picking one up before he attacks me with it. I cover my face with my hands, shielding it from him, hoping against all hope that he will hit me once and then leave me alone.

  I feel the sharp blow to my upper chest and immediately feel the sting. The burn of tearing flesh. The warmth of blood trickling down onto my shirt.

  Strong arms come around me as I lash out, trying to save myself. “Lexi, wake up! Wake up!”

  Chapter Fifty-two

  “It’s okay,” he says, holding me down so I don’t hurt him. “It’s, okay, Lexi. It’s Kyle. I’m not him. You’re safe. You and Ellie are safe here.”

  He wraps his arms around me, holding me tightly until I calm down. “Shhhhh,” he whispers into my ear, his hot breath rolling across my neck.

  “Kyle?” I ask, trying to shake the dream away.

  “Yes. I’m here. It’s okay.”

  I stop fighting back and he relaxes his hold on me. But he doesn’t entirely let me go. He’s behind me in my bed, kind of spooning me, but without any of his lower body touching any of mine. His reassuring hand rests on my upper arm.

  I crane my head back to see him in the dim light coming from the hallway. “Sorry,” I say with a big sigh.

  “Bad dream, huh?”

  I nod and put my head back down on the pillow. “You could say that. More like a nightmare,” I tell him. “One I actually lived through.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.

  I shrug noncommittally.

  “I did a rotation in Psych, you know,” he says, squeezing my arm. “And if I learned anything, I learned it’s always best to talk about things that bother you. If you don’t, they will grow like cancer, slowly eating away at you.”

  I turn away, so he can’t see the shame on my face. “Grant destroyed my flower garden.”

  “Why would he want to do that?” he asks.

  “Because I loved it.”

  Those four words tell Kyle more about my relationship with Grant than I could ever tell him in an entire conversation. I can feel him shaking his head behind me. He doesn’t know what to say.

  “When I took the pregnancy test and found out I was going to have a baby, my first thought was of my flower garden. I planted it right after we moved into the house. It was shortly after we married. He told me it was a great idea. That he would love to have fresh flowers around the house. He even helped me till the earth and haul in fresh planting dirt. He was always nice and helpful back then—early on.

  “Then about a month into our marriage, when things had begun to change, he started complaining that I spent more time with my flower garden than with him. And he was right, I did spend a lot of time there. But only because he wouldn’t let me get a job. It was the only thing I had that was truly mine.

  “Months later, I’d find freshly cut flowers, that I had put in vases around the house, thrown into the trash. He told me they were a reminder of how he wasn’t enough for me. He actually thought my entire world should be centered around him. So when the pregnancy test turned positive, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I needed to leave.

  “If he destroyed a flower garden because he thought I loved it more than him, I wasn’t about to stick around to see what he would do to a child. Because I knew, despite who its father was, that I would love it more than anything in the entire world. And he wouldn’t be able to handle that.”

  “Jesus, Lex.” His hand comes around my body to pull me against him, but he quickly realizes what he’s done and he removes it, sitting up on the bed to look down at me. “It makes me sick to think there are men like that walking around.”

  “Do you remember when I showed you my scars that one time we played ‘Never have I ever’?” I roll onto my back and look up at him.

  “Yeah.”

  “The night he destroyed my flower garden. That’s the night I got this.” I run my finger across the scar on my collarbone.

  He stares down at the scar. His hand twitches as if he wants to touch it, but he doesn’t. He just stares at it, his jaw hardening, his eyes burning with hatred.

  “I broke one of his boxing trophies,” I tell him. “I did it out of anger when I saw what he’d done to my garden. I tried to glue it back together before he saw it, but I didn’t fool him. He stabbed me with a broken metal shard from one of the pieces.”

  He scrubs his hands across his face. “If I ever see that bastard,” he says, shaking his head.

  “The plan is to never see him again, Kyle. Now you know why I can’t ever contact him. He would destroy everything that I love just to hurt me. I love Ellie. I can’t risk it.”

  He nods his head, looking from Ellie’s crib back to me. He nods it as if he finally understands what I’ve been telling him for weeks. “I know,” he says. “I know.”

  “He was having an affair,” I admit. “As far as I could tell, for the whole time we were married he was also with someone else.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. “You deserve so much more.”

  I think I can see regret in his eyes. Regret over what? Grant hurting me? Or him not wanting to be with me?

  “She deserves more,” I say, glancing over at Ellie.

  “You both do,” he says. “Are you okay now?”

  I nod. “Yeah, thanks.”

  He stands up and checks on a sleeping Ellie. “I’ll bet they don’t list that as one of the benefits of having a deaf child,” he says.

  I look at him strangely. “Benefits?”

  “Yeah, you know, that you can have nightmares and you won’t wake her up. Or you can fight with your . . . whoever, and she won’t even know.”

  My gaze goes past him, beyond the door where I can almost see the place we made love. “Or have loud animal sex,” I say.

  His eyes meet mine and I swear he’s remembering every second of that night.

  Just like I am.

  “Yeah, that, too.” He pulls a blanket up over Ellie.

  “Thanks, Kyle.”

  “Anytime.” He turns to leave, but stops in the doorway. “I’m off at seven. Think you can wait for me to celebrate?”

  “Celebrate what?”

  He nods to Ellie. “It’s her seven-month birthday tomorrow.”

  I smile. I know it is. Of course I know it is. But I didn’t know he did. “I think she wants Sal’s,” I say.

  He laughs. “Does she now?”

  “Definitely.”

  “See you at seven-thirty, Lexi.”

  Then he pulls the door closed, leaving me a fidgety mess. Because for a second, it almost sounded like we just made a date.

  ~ ~ ~

  “I had a deaf patient today,” Kyle says, handing me my chopsticks. “He was in his mid-twenties. Broken leg. Interesting guy.”

  “How so?” I ask.

  “I was trying to pick up pieces of the conversation he was having with his friends. I saw them doing a sign I wasn’t familiar with. His friends would sign the letter ‘R’ while simulating the motion of strumming a guitar. I asked them what sign it was and they told me it was his name sign. His name was Ridge and he plays guitar for their band, and they explained to me that deaf people can have name signs which are like shorthand for their names.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty common.”

  “Does nothing about what I told you seem unusual?” he asks.

  I cock my head to the side, shrugging an ignoran
t shoulder.

  “Lexi, the guy is in a band. He plays guitar. And he’s profoundly deaf.”

  My eyes snap up to his when I realize what he’s telling me. “Oh, wow. Really?”

  He nods proudly. “He’s good. Really good. After I told him about Ellie, he played his guitar for me.” He looks over at Ellie who is playing on a blanket on the floor across the room. “There truly are no limitations to what she can do.”

  “You told him about Ellie?” My mind races wondering just how that conversation went. Did he tell him he has a friend with a deaf daughter? A roommate? I’m dying to know how he refers to Ellie, to me, with a stranger.

  “Yes. Well, technically, his friends told him. I’m not very good at signing much more than asking Mommy for more milk.”

  I laugh when he does the signs for those three words. “How can he play guitar?” I ask.

  “It was pretty amazing. He holds it tightly against his chest and he feels the vibrations of the different chords. I’m telling you, there is no way you’d know he’s deaf when listening to him play.”

  “Oh, my gosh. That’s incredible, Kyle.”

  “It is. I wish Ellie were older. I’d take her to see his band.” He shrugs. “Maybe someday.”

  I smile thinking that he would do that for her. I smile knowing that he’s thinking about a ‘someday.’

  “It got me to thinking,” he says. “Do you have a name sign for Ellie?”

  I shake my head. “I can’t give her one.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “In deaf culture, only another deaf person can give someone a name sign. It’s like a rite of passage into the deaf community. It might happen when they start going to school. Or when they pick their profession. Maybe it’s a physical trait, such as long hair, or a dimple, that gets used to make their sign. With that guy, Ridge, he’s probably played guitar his whole life and people came to associate him with it.”

  “So, they take the first letter of their name and then do a sign that describes them?”